A change of tone for Enard, a writer who wears his influences on his sleeve. The Annual Banquet shifts away from the Mediterranean and the Orient into the deep French heartland, the Norman countryside near the Atlantic, the land of Rabelais and Villon. An anthropologist goes to study the locals and finds himself gradually seduced by their down-to-earth ways. The anthropologist, David Macon, starts and ends as narrator, but in between becomes a marginal figure as Enard uses both the landscape and the Buddhist notion of resurrection to probe the history of the region, from the time of the English invasions to the revolutionary era to the Second World War, with a brief cameo from Bonaparte himself. If this is a typically erudite approach to the art of writing a novel, then the generally gentle affectionate tone is not nearly so customary. The novel is like going for a four seasons walk through this countryside, where some days are sun-dappled, others icy, others morose, but beyond the restless presence of death itself, or ‘the great wheel’ as the novel puts it, there is always the prospect of a heart-warming vegetable soup to be had at the end of the day. The Buddhist framework is an elegant device, and the gravediggers at the heart of the book are suitably Rabelaisian. If anything the novel leaves the reader, accustomed to Enard’s more hard-edged work, with the sensation that the writer might be slipping into a mellifluous late middle age, which he is entitled to, but I can’t help suspecting this is a detour on the Enard road, rather than an endpoint.
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