The Tourmente, the terrible winter storm that sometimes sweeps over the Causse, could have been Évelyne Ducasse’s undoing. But why should the industrialist wife have dared to venture out onto the limestone plateau in the French Massif Central in this weather? Their disappearance is a mystery – even to the local police, but French author Colin Niel is only marginally concerned with them in his crime thriller “Nur die Tiere”.
Niel tells his story in five chapters, from five different perspectives. Three locals – two farmers and a social worker -, plus a young city dweller who ended up in this unfortunate province, and an African who goes about his illegal business in the Ivory Coast, each report in retrospect about the part of the Events that you have experienced yourself. Each of these five people at some point crosses the course of events that led to Évelyne Ducasse’s disappearance.
Ducasse is an independent woman, although she is treated like a trophy by her husband, who is from the area and makes people feel what he has achieved. None of the narrators can see how things belong together. And so, as a reader, it is only at the end that you learn how the incidents interlock. The social worker Alice, who, together with four other women, is responsible for around 4,000 farmers, will kick off. “We drive through the courtyards in the area and meet with those that hardly anyone visits,” is how she explains her job. The first time she goes to see Joseph Bonneville, a sheep farmer on the Causse, he opens his door with a hunting rifle in his hands.
Colin Niel: Just the animals. Translated from the French by Anne Thomas. Lenos Verlag, Basel 2021. 286 pages, 16 euros.
The farmers are lonely and suspicious, they cannot find women who want to share the barren, poor country life with them. In their solitude, at some point they forgot to engage with others. “Joseph was a man who was ruined by loneliness,” says Alice. He’s not the only one. And it’s not just the farmers who, year in and year out, vegetate alone with their sheep and their dogs. It is the same for many residents in this remote region of the Massif Central. Even Alice, even though she’s married and it’s her job to work against it exactly.
Loneliness is the big theme of this novel and people’s inability to encounter one another as social beings – curious, open, empathic. On the other hand, there is an immense need, yes, a greed for closeness. Alice and Joseph start an affair at some point, but the hours with her do not make up for the emptiness that will fill him when she leaves. The situation is so perfidious: People don’t even dare to hope anymore for fear of another, possibly final, disappointment.
Alice’s husband, on the other hand, gets involved in an online flirt that costs him a lot of money. Even when Michel realized that he was the victim of an African Internet fraudster, he cannot break away from the pretended embrace – the confirmation he sees in it and the satisfaction that these flatteries bring him against his better judgment is too great: in the end he fell in love with the photo of a porn actress. He, too, is a farmer, continues his father-in-law’s farm, and doesn’t come up with a leafy branch, although he tries very hard.
They have time to think, but their thoughts revolve around their own cosmos
There are characters in this story who take advantage of the vulnerability of others. For financial reasons or for the desire to have power over others. Évelyne Ducasse is one of them, whom the young city dweller Maribé considered herself a lover for a while. When they meet, when they have sex, that is up to you alone.
In the end, a few silly coincidences lead to a fatal escalation. Which could have been prevented if a fatal mixture of hurt and dazzling had not gained the upper hand. At this point Colin Niel has already completely taken over for his characters and their milieus. The art of this author is not to let the confessions of his five narrator characters stand in contradiction to their lack of words, to their eccentricity, to their ignorance of what is going on outside their own narrow field of vision. You are not stupid, you have enough time to think about it. But their thoughts revolve around in their own cosmos. Entering this is the really exciting thing about this thriller.