Maxime Raymond Bock, Morel. QC Fiction, 2024. Translated from the French by Melissa Bull
Work projects have dominated the last few weeks, hence another period of silence here at T. Days.
I did read the next section of stories in the collected Everyman edition of Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories (those published in the 1930s), but I didn’t find them sufficiently inspiring to write about.
Morel was sent to me (my thanks to them) by QC Fiction, an imprint of Baraka Books based in Québec City (hence the name), specialists in translations into English of Québecois fiction.
It’s a gritty story of a working-class Montreal family – the Morels of the title. Jean-Claude is a hard-working, hard-drinking labourer on the grand modernising construction projects in that city in a period that seems to be the 50s – 90s: motorways, tunnels, buildings.
It’s tough, dangerous work, and Morel suffers physically and mentally as a consequence: labour laws are ineffective, and there’s little consideration by the developers of health and safety. His father lost an arm in a needless accident in the factory where he worked, while his workmates are often maimed, hospitalised or even killed as a result of poor safety conditions. Men like Morel don’t benefit much from the urban renewal projects they expend their health and wellbeing on constructing. They live in squalor.
There are suggestions of corporate corruption, and gross inequality is the norm. Many of these workers are immigrants, paid a pittance, while the speculating property developers and city representatives get rich.
As we see Morel age over the decades he’s racked by aches and pains from old injuries and repetitive stress. He marries, has kids, undergoes various hardships and tragedies, the consequence mostly of his relative poverty, exacerbated by his tendency to drink too much, pay too little heed to the emotional needs of his family (or himself), and his failure to curb his temper.
It’s a fairly difficult, fragmented narrative structure to follow. Flashbacks to Morel’s childhood and adolescence are dropped in the middle of scenes from his adult life. I found myself when I’d finished starting to re-read, and things made much more sense second time round. It’s worth doing this, because I appreciated the author’s skill and technique that way, when after the first reading I was pretty unsure I’d enjoyed the experience.
For instance, it’s important that the story begins and ends with Morel in old age being visited by one of his adult granddaughters. She wants to get to know him – he’s alienated himself, become a recluse, and is estranged from his extended family; she’s anxious to find out why. So there’s a glimmer of hope and possible redemption there to lighten what’s often quite a dark, sombre narrative.
It also enabled me to see beyond Morel’s outwardly grumpy, buttoned up nature – he’s also a bit of a slob. Viewed through the perspective of this second reading I could empathise with him more; he’s been ground down by a system that’s stacked against him. It saps from him the spirit and energy to resist its pernicious effects.
In some ways it’s a novel that reminds me of some of Zola’s representations of working people in similar circumstances, without the weird insistence on inherited traits. It occurs to me that the surname might suggest some influence by another great novel about a man struggling to survive a working-class upbringing: Paul Morel in Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers.