Yesterday I read Jef Geeraerts’ The Public Prosecutor. I wasn’t looking for nihilistic noir, I just wanted to read a book set in Antwerp, a favorite city of mine, and I was excited to read a contemporary Flemish author. It is hard to find English translations of Flemish writers but thanks to Bitter Lemon Press, I found The Public Prosecutor.
The Public Prosecutor is a rigorously crafted novel that welds together nasty characters, fervid sex, cunning greed, snaking corruption, disintegrating morality, and Machiavellian machinations to create a high-impact story of one man’s sure and certain demise. Albert Savelkoul is a creep of the highest order but he became my creep as I read on in the novel; Geeraerts’ genius is in provoking my protective feelings for a greedy, corrupt, pompous man by having him share intimate, revealing, horrific details of his life, and surrounding him with characters just as foul as he is but less-revealed to me. All the other characters are either out to get Albert or out to get whatever they can from him before he is gotten, gored, and gutted by someone else. I found myself hoping he might get away and run off with the only slightly likable character in the book. Geeraerts kept me guessing, hoping, and turning this way and that, looking for a way out for the increasingly entangled Albert. Up until the very end, I wasn’t sure if the bad guys would win, which bad guys would win, and whether Albert wasn’t, after all, the very baddest of them all.
The Public Prosecutor is not a tourist guide to Belgium, other than a meal of mussels outside the fancy coastal town of Knokke and a passing reference to the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (across the street from a hotel where a hot tryst takes place — all trysts in this book are either hot or rendered un-hot by impotence). It is, however, a sharp picture of certain societal and political issues in Belgium, including the divide between the Flemish and the French, corruption and impotence in the government, and the presence and power of Opus Dei. It is also a great crime novel and a fascinating read but a painful one, at least for me: it is a book about really contemptuous people living vacant, indulgent, corrupt lives and, for the most part, getting away with it all.
