The avuncular Georges Simenon was one of the most popular writers of the 20th century, as well as one of the most prolific and wealthy, author of over two hundred novels and sundry shorter pieces of one kind or another. His most popular works were his detective novels dealing with the pipe-smoking Commissaire Maigret—the books the put him and kept him on easy street—but it is his more sophisticated, murky, sordid, and just-plain-existential romans dur, of which 1948’s Dirty Snow is probably the perennial fan favourite, onto which more discerning readers of crime fiction can be expected to habitually glom. It is also widely known that between fans, amenable strangers, and sex workers—he’d spend entire days kicking back in the brothel—Simenon engaged in sex relations with more women than anybody this side of screen legend Charlie Chaplin. (I sometimes joke that the real reason Charlie Chaplin was kicked out of the U.S. in 1952 was because he’d done the deed with the wives of everybody in the U.S. and Soviet upper brass.) Because of its unique historical perspective and wholesale idiosyncrasy, 1961’s The Train, about love during wartime and exigencies of transportation, is for me a definite standout from among Simenon’s more serious outings…and I’ve had a go at a good number of them. It is one of the most informed and unique novels I have ever read about the Second World War. Beginning on the morning of May 10th, 1940, the day the Nazis invaded Holland and Belgium, The Train follows a man named Marcel Féron as he gathers his scant courage and makes the decision the flee his town in Northern France, near the Belgian border, leaving by train with his pregnant wife and young daughter, from both of whom he is to become separated in the chaos of mass exodus and collective panic. Once on his own and uncertain if there is any future at all or of what godforsaken calamity awaits next, Marcel forges a brief but intense romantic connection with a young half-Jewish Czech woman named Anna, who has until recently been imprisoned in Belgium. Marcel is aware of this romance's status as transitory idyll—not a serious relationship with actual legs under it—but he’s nonetheless sort of transformed by the encounter a little. His brief time with Anna is tantamount to a glancing encounter with Fate, perhaps the sole deviation in his life's set course subsequent to a somewhat troubled youth which was impacted both by the First World War and four years spent suffering from tuberculosis in a sanitarium between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. In the case of Marcel, this is an encounter with Fate that is necessarily predicated on a yearning for the collapse of routine. It isn’t like he was out among the blocked and rerouted trains of France scouting for a hookup. He just wanted his life upended. His encounter with Fate also involves an affirmation of his own otherness; an otherness mirrored in Anna. The nature of the sexual relationship between Marcel and Anna is fascinating. It has a desperate and almost quietly gruesome quality to it, hardly the stuff of love story consolation and heavenly bells a-ringing. It may even be partially transactional. This is one factor among many that serves to suggest a scrupulously maintained strategy of demystification. We are left with a very stark measure both of the human cost and the callous banality of the adventurer and of the warmakers. Perhaps the inner life of any given person is inherently criminal and this is at the core of literature's appeal. Our private narratives are secret and cosseted. There are all manner of different kind of cop in our lives. Our daily security—in our work, our families, society at large—requires that we give only so much away of our secret self and that we have thugs to keep people in order. The disclosures of great literature are a benediction about which the cops of the world can for the time being mostly do sweet fuck all, Orwell’s worst visions not having exactly panned out. (Huxley was much closer to the mark.) Simenon spent most of the war years in the Vendée region, the key congruity between The Train and his life. Though his conduct during the war years would become a source of controversy because he continued to hustle, publish, and make money during the occupation, the city of La Rochelle, location of the refugee camp where Marcel and Anna spend much of the novel, named a quay after him in 1989.
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