“Delayed”: Franck Thilliez, not a bad boy

We've never had much sympathy for the tapeworm (aka tapeworm) or for toxoplasmosis (parasitic disease). Things aren't going to get any better with A retardement , the 25th novel by Franck Thilliez . That said, Bacopa monnieri , a succulent plant that is supposedly virtuous, particularly for regulating brain activity, doesn't really appeal to us either, in the configuration imagined by the discreet leader of the French thriller – ten million copies sold.

This is the fuel of the genre: nothing is ever completely reassuring in Thilliez's work. Especially not humans and their brains, which are often tortured or damaged. Mental illness is at the heart of A retardement . One of the main characters is a psychiatrist, Eléonore Hourdel, who works in a Unit for Difficult Patients (UMD). In the second chapter, a man commits suicide before her eyes. In the fourth, she is told of the arrival in her department of a delusional individual who is trying to open his stomach with his fingers and who hears voices. A few pages later, Commander Franck Sharko, Thilliez's favorite character, finds himself facing the corpse of a very thin man with his mouth open over a funnel – he was clearly forced to ingest soda before being stabbed about forty times, focusing on the stomach, which implies a particularly keen desire to harm. However, the victim is identified as the psychiatrist's father... information she will invalidate. A puzzle unfolds that interweaves psychotic episodes, paranoia, parasitology, gruesome murders, professional rivalry, romantic disappointment, and even eternal revenge.

Franck Thilliez averages one book a year, and it's almost always a hit. Such a yield requires a well-oiled machine, rock-solid efficiency. This notably involves a fairly classic repetition of thriller codes: a very fast-paced roller-coaster ride, cliffhangers galore, chapters that end with a threat— "someone had entered her home," "her scream tore through the night," "he wasn't done with the horror" —heroes who all brush with death, a grandiloquent modus operandi like suffocating a woman alive in a giant cocoon.

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In any case, Thilliez, 51, always takes care of his business and writes knowing what he is talking about. This time, he indicates in the postface that he has completed an immersion in UMD (that of the Centre hospitalier du Rouvray, in Normandy). He had to "realize for himself whether the fantasy of this kind of place, whether what the sensationalist reports show us - a place of screams, punishment and pure violence - corresponds to reality or not." In return, he led writing workshops with patients. At a time when mental health and its treatment are recognized as a social issue , and while criminal irresponsibility is still a matter of debate, his novel, which hits hard elsewhere (crime scenes, autopsy scenes), maintains a sensitive and subtle point of view, which restores the diversity of mental illness and recognizes both the suffering of patients and the difficulty in alleviating it.