The House by the Canal
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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La Maison du canal (1933) is a 'roman dur' by Georges Simenon. It was translated as 'The House by the Canal by Geoffrey Sainsbury.
The book tells the story of a young woman whose parents die and who moves in with her parents in Flanders where she discovers here sexual powers.
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Genesis of the novel
In earlier novels such as Les Fiançailles de monsieur Hire and Le Coup de lune), Simenon wanted to go beyond the strictly detective novel and abandoned the fictional universe of the Maigret series, in order to go towards what he called the 'roman dur'. He thus takes backwards the usual composition of the detective novel (the discovery of a murder followed by the search for the culprit). Here, the murders take place first, the culprits are known, the investigation is only an epilogue of what happened before. It is only an epilogue, because while the whole novel is centered on Edmée's point of view, only the last chapter takes the neutral view of a police report.
Summary
After the death of her father, a doctor in Brussels, Edmée moves in with her cousins in Neroeteren. They have a vast property criss-crossed by canals.
The day Edmée arrives, the father dies and Fred, the eldest of the cousins, becomes head of the family, which includes the mother and six children. Misfortune seems to have befallen the house: it is discovered that the father had mortgaged the land and that there is not much money left.
Edmée is a strange girl, accustomed to being obeyed; she soon begins to command Fred and Jef (described as a water head), for whom she feels both attraction and disgust. Acerbic and egotistical, she judges everything with a harsh eye, feeling superior to these Flemish peasants because of her beauty and native distinction.
The financial troubles only worsen and the atmosphere is made even heavier by an interminable and rainy winter. Jef, underneath his gruff exterior, is full of delicacy and Fred now feels a strong attraction for Edmée. One day when he wants to hug her, they are surprised by a young boy who threatens to reveal the story. In a fit of anger, Fred lifts up the boy, throws him on the ground and kills him. With Jef's help, they bury him at the bottom of a canal.
Following this event, Edmée falls ill. Nothing goes right, the crops fail, a family quarrel breaks out, Fred spends a lot of money. One day, he proposes to Edmée to marry him: he will sell the property and they will move to Antwerp. She accepts.
A few months later, Edmée is found strangled. It was Jef who killed her, after having raped her. Imprisoned, he commits suicide a few days later.
Themes
The theme of the family whose fortune and standards decline is found elsewhere, as in L'Affaire Saint-Fiacre or The Widow Couderc, here aggravated by the presence of syphilis, which the father passed on to his descendants and of which the most striking testimony is the waterhead of Jef. The theme of the canal, of the canals of the flat country with its particular world of the boatman was already present in Le Charretier de la Providence. Another theme that was also present in this last novel, that of the part of animality present in some of the characters, here Jef, there Darchambaux, with for both of them their incredible physical strength and their capacity of resistance in front of death.
The flat country is an autobiographical memory of the author and more precisely of his maternal family, the picture drawn is not free of clichés, we also find memories of Brueghel and his paintings of skaters on frozen lakes.
The omnipresence, even the omnipotence of women (The Burgomaster of Furnes, The Widow Couderc) is illustrated here by a heroine who is here the witness and the catalyst of the decline of the Van Elst family.
Details
Space and time
- Neeroeteren, village in Limburg, next to Maaseik.
- Contemporary period
Characters
- Edmée van Elst, a Belgian of Brussels origin, orphan, 16 years old at the beginning of the novel
- Fred (21) and Jef (19) Van Elst, her cousins, farmers in Neroeteren
Special aspects of the novel
The novel unfolds from two different points of view. In the first part (chapters I-XI) the story follows the events in chronological succession, up to Fred's marriage proposal. A second part, contained in chapter XII, the last one, retraces the last events (Edmée's death) through the investigation led by the investigating judge Coosemans.
Television adaptations
- 1988 : La Maison du canal, episode 10 of the French L'Heure Simenon], directed by Josef Rusnak
- 2003 : La Maison du canal, téléfilm by Alain Berliner, with Isild Le Besco, Corentin Lobet, Nicolas Buysse and Jean-Pierre Cassel
See also
