Eat Him If You Like by Jean Teule: book review

Eat Him If You Like (2009) is set in rural France in the Dordogne region on 16 August 1870. It is based on a real event in history during the Franco-Prussian war.

Nobleman Alain de Moneys is almost 30 years old, but still living with his parents on their estate. On this hot August day he wants to go to the fair, three days before he will fight in the war, even though the medical board exempted him from battle due to his limp leg and weak constitution.

He travels on horse for the two miles to the village Saint-Roch (population 45) near Hautefaye, where there is a bustling crowd of 600 to 700 people.

A mis-heard conversation is exaggerated, blown out of all proportion, and travelling fast. It stemmed from an argument about the war, when the phrase ‘Down with France!’ incites anger. There is a traitor, a Prussian, an enemy in their midst. A one-hundred person mob goes berserk. Friends become enemies, and strangers support strangers, in an irrational scene of mayhem in a community of farmers, traders, and noblemen.

The intensity of the anger only wanes during brief diversions – one by Father Saint-Pasteur who shouts that his home-made wine is free in order to dispel the crowd. And another by 23-year-old Anna Mondout, one of the few people in the village who wanted to learn to read.

The result is barbaric. The police arrive, but there are only 21 detention cells in Perigueux jail. But who were the main perpetrators? The verdict is announced on 13 December, three months after Napoleon III surrendered and France was declared a republic. The local government wants more than a verdict and a sentence – it wants to forget the whole incident. And it has an idea how to erase the brutality of the day from the history books forever.

The 112-page novella manages to detail the senseless savagery and its aftermath. Quite astoundingly written, and accompanied by a small simple map at the start of each chapter to show the extent of the murderous melee. Each sentence cuts deep into the psyche of herd mentality to depict the marauding mob, where a few good people are not enough to mitigate the carnage.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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