The Voice of Aliette Nouvelle

In Chapter 10 of The Voice of Aliette Nouvelle by John Brooke (Nuage Editions), police inspector Aliette Nouvelle sits on the toilet and meditates “the way people do, on the nature of things inside myself.” She is contemplating the slippery mucus that tells her she is fertile today and she is feeling lonely. She feels she is working at cross purposes with herself: she is committed to her career but her body is operating “just as it was meant to.” The Voice of Aliette Nouvelleis not just another detective story, and you don’t have to wait until Chapter 10 to figure this out. When the story opens Aliette is already a mythical figure in the police force: her voice is “delicate but absolute, as if your maman were calling you for supper”; it can make hardened criminals feel weak and stupid. She looks like a young schoolteacher but she’s a hotshot police detective and her boss’s favourite. He assigns her the job of finding France’s “former Public Enemy Number One,” Jacques Normand, who hasn’t been seen or heard from for ten years. Aliette is given a temporary assistant, Claude Néon, whose sexual fantasies sometimes include Aliette but who would like nothing better than to get back to working with the boys. The two of them sometimes work with each other and sometimes work against each other. The plot unfolds quickly and takes big leaps—the reader must pay attention—and although the book was written in English the sentence structure and rhythm give it the feel of a translation from French, so that as both Aliette and her quarry confront the myths that have been created around them, we feel as if we are right there, in France, “in a city on the Rhine.”