Syndrome E (Sharko & Hennebelle #5)
There’s a lot I can say about Franck Thilliez’s epically twisted thriller Syndrome E. Was it one of the best contemporary suspense novels I’ve read in the past five years? Oh yes! Was it wickedly original, the plot masterfully crafted down to the last stunning little detail? You bet. But there’s one very important thing I can and must say about this novel. It is not an easy read. It plumbs the depths of humankind’s cruelty to one another, and baby, them depths are pitch black.
This is what unfolds in Syndrome E. It’s a mind-bending tale of brainwashing, mutilation, globe-trotting insanity, all linking back to a frightening little film from the 1950’s showing odd and nauseating symbolism. It’s a novel first and foremost about the power authority figures have over the most vulnerable members of society…and with that, come heinous abuses of that power, the wreckage of human minds and maybe even spirits.
It starts with a middle-aged Belgian film buff called Ludovic Senechal who, after the purchase of a mysterious old film reel from the son of a deceased collector, unexpectedly goes blind only moments after watching part of the footage.
At first, this is something that may seem to the reader a tragedy extending from the most surreal corner of the supernatural realm, but hold on! Everything in this book is rooted in the most cold-hearted and devious of human actions.
The film is basically handed from one person to another and the main people surrounding this piece of footage, like poor Ludovic’s ex-girlfriend, Lucie, a police detective, and Inspector Franck Sharko, who’s got one hell of a mental battle he’s facing already, run head-first into this hidden monster of a crime within the movie. The film plays around these bizarre layers of imagery, the surface being a woman who gets her eye slashed open and a little girl acting like she’s in a drug-induced haze, squaring off against a bull who stops in mid-attack. This is all, like I mentioned, on this surface layer of film that the director carefully constructed to hide a much deeper and freaking terrifying meaning. What can be even scarier than what I just mentioned? Yeah…you’ll find out soon enough. And the backdrop to this fifty+ year conspiracy is in the current day, being violently protected by barbaric murderers who at some point, literally rip the guts out of a person close to discovery of their sickening secrets.
There’s a parallel investigation going on with the enigmatic character of Inspector Franck Sharko, a diagnosed schizophrenic grieving intensely over the death of his wife and daughter. He is enmired in a hellish world of unearthed corpses, their skulls sawed off, the mutilated state of their bodies surely pointing to the calculating methods of a serial killer. How this links up to the case Detective Lucie Henebelle is involved in is ingenious, as moment by moment, the clues connecting two seemingly incongruous situations loop together in a series of events that point to a mind-blowing (literally!) scientific explanation.
The killer/s are and have been engineering BOTH sets of crimes, all to cover up a massive atrocity which took place with orphans in the 1950’s, which goes back to the dazed and glassy eyed little girl and the bull in the creepy footage, causing the poor Belgian’s blindness. And the thing about the blindness is that…strangely enough, you think it’s going to be the prominent storyline, the big mystery that is the focal point of the entire plot, but what it amounts to is a clever entry into a wider, darker, and infinitely frightening universe where one horror leads to a bigger horror, culminating in the ultimate horror.
What I liked about this thriller is the supreme attention to detail. This is one of the best reads in the genre that never doubts the readers’ intelligence, but also doesn’t sink into overly-plotted, convoluted writing.
You keep hurtling down the tracks at a near-frenetic pace but it never becomes overwhelming. Whether Sharko is fighting off a paid agent in the Egyptian desert who has dragged him there to torture information out of him or whether Lucie is ducking an orchestrated attempted murder of herself and an informer in hiding in the Canadian woods–every moment of action feels real, totally authentic. The relationship between the characters of Lucie and Sharko is also beautifully written. I really liked how there was a gradual build-up to this burgeoning romance between them, but one that didn’t feel like it was awkwardly, randomly inserted. We see these two working together as friends and allies on this bewildering and disgusting case, both put in horrible danger and both dealing with emotional baggage, one much greater than the other, but both trying their hardest to move forward into a somewhat uncertain future.
Lucie is a vibrantly written female character. Props to Franck Thilliez for writing a woman who is third-dimensional and confident in her abilities! She is a mother who can go from tenderly caring for her sick child to shooting her way out of a burning house (a GREAT scene). She’s extremely perceptive and dedicated to her work, seeking love, but not making it the center of her existence. She leapt off the page, I could pretty much see the film rolling in my head as I read her dialogue and actions. The same with Sharko who is such a miserably haunted man, in contrast to Lucie’s relative normalcy. He battles with visions of a little girl called Eugenie, who is a mental amalgamation of his worst shame and regret. Eugenie pops up during his most stressed-out moments and is actually a crucial little character in the book, often playing out as a voice of warning. It was fascinating! Never dipped into the ridiculous or satire, which could’ve been the case in the hands of lesser authors. Both Lucie and Sharko are fully-realized characters who are struggling to understand a widespread, organized criminal act that cannot be quickly resolved. The layers to this are peeled away, one by one, to reveal an infected center.
During their investigation, and the murders which occur–one man is disemboweled, another man and his girlfriend are stabbed by what looks like a maniacal butcher–the film footage from the 1950’s links up to a mysterious hospital in Canada and an old yet official plan to render the existences of orphaned children as nothing more than slaves and captives. How this intersects with the blank-eyed child star of the old footage, whose name is later uncovered to be Alice Tonquin, is the key that unlocks everything.
And Christ, does it. The levels that human beings will sink over money and control never ceases to amaze me. The book takes it to the heights and in the process, very few people were able to walk away from what happened in 1950’s Montreal, with their hearts, minds and souls clean. In fact, certain individuals would go on to further filthy themselves by perpetrating generational monstrosities.
This book was an excellent example of top-level thriller/suspense writing. I am dying to read the sequel, Bred To Kill, and continue following the kick-ass crime solving skills of Lucie Henebelle and Franck Sharko.
A big thumbs up to Thilliez for creating a work of crime fiction that was never boring, not even for a minute, and never cliche. A strong 5 stars.
