Three days in the merde

(A review by guest writer David Siddall)

Stephen Clarke’s A Year in the Merde tracks the adventures of twenty-something English (anti) hero Paul West as he spends a chaotic year in the French capital.

Monsieur West has successfully marketed French cafés to the English but now finds himself recruited with the sterner task of marketing English tea rooms to the French. Armed with the least productive team in Paris and a boss possessing the cataclysmic combination of a relentless political will and a distinct lack of morals, it becomes clear that the project’s chances of success are limited. Paul finds a further challenge in coming to grips with the Parisienne way of life as he learns how he must stop wanting to be liked and start being rude to get his way, a tactic epitomized in his embrace of the French ‘shrug’.

Whilst the title of this book is somewhat uncouth and the story comes complete with the typical clichés of snails, suppositories, steak hachés and strikes, Clarke somehow manages to breathe new life into them in a most hilarious manner thanks to the lucidity and simplicity of his prose. Through the ambitious and somewhat arrogant character of Paul West we quickly learn how to manipulate the French system in our favour, bed an array of Parisienne beauties (editor: and Parisiens also, by analogy?), and get our piece of the good life with a French house in the countryside.

Clarke presents an addictive insight into French life that is hard to put down. Being an Englishmen who has had the pleasure of a recent trip to France as well as living with a French couple for the past year in Melbourne, I can see just how accurate Clarke’s musings really are. And even if the soothsaying is thin on the ground in parts, you can forgive Clarke’s poetic license in heightening the comedic effect.

A Year in the Merde has been read by everyone in our house in the space of about three weeks and loved in equal measures by French and English alike. My ‘three Days in the Merde’ was an exhilarating experience which should be shared by those who love anything French or those just just love a well spun yarn.