The Crimson Rivers

Rating:
Summary: terrific novel
Review: Absolutely facinating, scary, original, and really keeps you HIGHLY interested until the last page. for all those reasons, we can forgive the cliches, and the complexity of the story that could make it not very credible at all when you think about it. One last piece of advice, read it in French if you can.

Rating:
Summary: Great untill the very end..
Review: The book is great. I read it in 2 days and it kept me awake: both for reading and fearing. I liked the plot and the characters although they are a bit too-stereotypical. It kept me up until the end, but I think the end, the 'wrap-up' is a bit far from truth. It could have been a simpler ending, it is just too many coincidences.. But overall, I liked the book and I plan to buy the other books by Jean-Christophe Grange.

Rating:
Summary: Dark, textured, and disturbing.
Review: There's been a long tradition in French cinema of emulating the darker shadings of American film. Even the term "film noir" is French, indicating how well grim and morally ambiguous American storytelling compliments French attitudes. THE CRIMSON RIVERS, a novel by journalist Jean-Christophe Grangé, and originally published as LES RIVIÉRIES POURPRES, is the written equivalent of these gritty cinema tales, a tersely-written police procedural with the darkest of hearts.

Made into a smashing film in 2000, starring Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel, THE CRIMSON RIVERS is an unusual, heavily layered novel. Translated with only a few hiccups by Ian Monk, it's the tale of two separate police investigations begun hundreds of miles apart, but inexorably linked: in a university town, a horribly tortured murder victim has been discovered, while on the same night a tomb was desecrated in a tiny farming village. Following veteran cop Inspector Niémans (on the murder) and rookie Karim Abdouf (investigating the desecration), Grangé takes the reader step-by-step, clue by clue, to the novel's shocking conclusion. No detail is overlooked, and despite that the plot rockets along.

While THE CRIMSON RIVERS is compulsively readable, it doesn't lack challenge. Grangé's story is heavy with thematic significance, symbolism, and his main characters are not the stuff of ordinary detective thrillers. Inspector Niémans could easily have been written as a cliché "burnout cop," but he is instead a far more demanding character, a man with uncontrollable violent urges, and a brilliant psyche running right up against the edge of madness. On the other side of the tale, rookie investigator Karim Abdouf is a man out of place culturally, intellectually and psychologically. His violent and crime-ridden background informs his every move, and though he's unquestionably brilliant, the reader is always left questioning whether Karim is truly a heroic figure.

Grangé wants to talk about obsession, history, fascism, eugenics, intellectualism, and many other topics. While THE CRIMSON RIVERS manages to encompass all of these things, the book's structure sometimes creaks under its own weight. The novel is a deep well, and some readers might become lost in the flurry of thematic details as they attempt to follow the plot. Grangé never lets up on the throttle once his story has been set in motion, and with events piling up at breakneck speed, readers should skim at their peril. Potentially juicy details are dangled for just a moment, only to be snatched away in favor of something new. Since that something new is usually just as fascinating, this is not really a problem, but by the time the final page is turned, one is left wishing the novel had been twice its length just to accommodate all the great ideas the author obviously had.

THE CRIMSON RIVERS is not an ordinary police procedural. Though it's very much of an American style (cops pursue a maniacal killer), its French roots run deep. Coupled with Grangé's clear desire to address topics generally left untouched by the genre, this results in a novel that reads like the darkest fever dream of post-war Europe and, like a nightmare, the novel's scenes of violence, its disturbing interludes, and its unusual, fractured characters, will linger well after its conclusion.

Rating:
Summary: Dark, textured, and disturbing.
Review: There's been a long tradition in French cinema of emulating the darker shadings of American film. Even the term "film noir" is French, indicating how well grim and morally ambiguous American storytelling compliments French attitudes. THE CRIMSON RIVERS, a novel by journalist Jean-Christophe Grangé, and originally published as LES RIVIÉRIES POURPRES, is the written equivalent of these gritty cinema tales, a tersely-written police procedural with the darkest of hearts.

Made into a smashing film in 2000, starring Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel, THE CRIMSON RIVERS is an unusual, heavily layered novel. Translated with only a few hiccups by Ian Monk, it's the tale of two separate police investigations begun hundreds of miles apart, but inexorably linked: in a university town, a horribly tortured murder victim has been discovered, while on the same night a tomb was desecrated in a tiny farming village. Following veteran cop Inspector Niémans (on the murder) and rookie Karim Abdouf (investigating the desecration), Grangé takes the reader step-by-step, clue by clue, to the novel's shocking conclusion. No detail is overlooked, and despite that the plot rockets along.

While THE CRIMSON RIVERS is compulsively readable, it doesn't lack challenge. Grangé's story is heavy with thematic significance, symbolism, and his main characters are not the stuff of ordinary detective thrillers. Inspector Niémans could easily have been written as a cliché "burnout cop," but he is instead a far more demanding character, a man with uncontrollable violent urges, and a brilliant psyche running right up against the edge of madness. On the other side of the tale, rookie investigator Karim Abdouf is a man out of place culturally, intellectually and psychologically. His violent and crime-ridden background informs his every move, and though he's unquestionably brilliant, the reader is always left questioning whether Karim is truly a heroic figure.

Grangé wants to talk about obsession, history, fascism, eugenics, intellectualism, and many other topics. While THE CRIMSON RIVERS manages to encompass all of these things, the book's structure sometimes creaks under its own weight. The novel is a deep well, and some readers might become lost in the flurry of thematic details as they attempt to follow the plot. Grangé never lets up on the throttle once his story has been set in motion, and with events piling up at breakneck speed, readers should skim at their peril. Potentially juicy details are dangled for just a moment, only to be snatched away in favor of something new. Since that something new is usually just as fascinating, this is not really a problem, but by the time the final page is turned, one is left wishing the novel had been twice its length just to accommodate all the great ideas the author obviously had.

THE CRIMSON RIVERS is not an ordinary police procedural. Though it's very much of an American style (cops pursue a maniacal killer), its French roots run deep. Coupled with Grangé's clear desire to address topics generally left untouched by the genre, this results in a novel that reads like the darkest fever dream of post-war Europe and, like a nightmare, the novel's scenes of violence, its disturbing interludes, and its unusual, fractured characters, will linger well after its conclusion.

Rating:
Summary: The film is much better
Review: This book is a page-turner, though very unrealistic, but if you haven't seen the film based on the book, I would recommend the film instead. The film is faithful to the book in everything that actually matters (there are differences), down to having a completely ridiculous ending, while at the same time improving on many sequences in the book. For example, the scene where the young cop confronts a group of skinheads in their clubhouse is probably the best scene of the whole film, while in the book it is embarrassingly badly-written and trite. This book is of course a translation from the French, so it may be difficult to judge the original French version, but the English translation is terrible: it reads as if it has been translated literally. Not a single character speaks in a realistic way. A typical example: "Here is the number of my mobile" -- nobody speaks like that in English!