Yesterday I read The Venice Train by Georges Simenon. I have read many of his Maigret mysteries but this novel was something different — and simply chilling in its psychological insights. The plot revolves around a man returning to Paris after vacationing in Venice who agrees to help out a stranger by picking up a package for him at a Swiss train station. When the stranger disappears and the woman to whom the package is to be delivered is murdered, Justin Calmar finds himself suddenly burdened with a lot of money and just as much guilt; even worse, and more life-transforming for him, the sudden windfall opens his eyes, for the first time, to how restrained and ordered and controlled his life is — and how little freedom he has.
Calmar is a middle-aged man who has spent a life on the fringes, always just a bit of a scapegoat and the butt of jokes, never quite reaching the heights of success that he wanted, marrying a woman whom he loves but if not her, he knows he would have married another and been just as happy (or as middling happy). He is a decent man, he doesn’t ask for much, and his life has chugged along, all forward movement caused by demands of job and family. The slight resentment he has always felt — for lost potential — blossoms into a fuller resentment when he finds himself suddenly rich but unable to flaunt his wealth (too many questions) or hide the money easily (no hiding places in his apartment or office). Even the slightest deviations from his normal routine of work and home are noticed, magnified, and discussed by everyone, or at least so it appears to Calmar, growing more paranoid as the weeks pass.
Simenon has created an everyman who is also an individual. Calmar is achingly real, sad and unassuming, introspective and melancholy. Traveling back from his miserable vacation “he knew that in a few weeks….the days at the Lido would seem to be among the most luminous and pleasant of his life….this happened every year. It was always the previous year that was marvelous….Was this incapacity to be happy other than in retrospect particular to him or was it true of most men? He didn’t know and didn’t dare ask anybody….“ The money can help him, but to do what? His own dreams have faded away, he’d never really defined what he wanted, just followed the lead of others. The prospect of how to use the money, both in terms of explaining the extra cash to others and of what to use it for, exposes to Calmar many truths about his life, none of them easy to bear.
Calmar has always been honest with himself and his honesty only sharpens in the aftermath of the fateful train ride. The terror of possibility and the realization of impossibility: life’s options collide for Calmar and all pretense falls away, excuses collapse, dreams evaporate for good: “the full absurdity of the situation appeared to him in its true light, the absurdity of all that had happened ever since the Venice train, the absurdity of his own life, and perhaps of everyone else’s.”
As frustrated as we feel for Calmar, we know he is right, individual choice is an absurd notion. The meeting on the train was not a chance for Calmar to finally change things but only one more nail in his coffin of mediocrity. There is no path he could have taken once he took the step of helping the stranger on the train that could have brought him to happiness or contentment, money or no money. This is not a novel about making one’s own destiny: the message is that destiny is set from birth, and all rebellion is futile. The crisis that penetrates Calmar’s soul is not a question of changing his life but of accepting it.
