Total Chaos (Marseilles Trilogy, #1) in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 30, 2010 Steve rated it really liked it

Shelves: crime-mystery-noir, fiction

It's chaos allright. So much so, that I had some trouble following what was going on in the last half of the book. But with noir, I often look for atmosphere and attitude rather than clear plots (see Chandler on this), and Izzo delivers both of those in spades. He's also very good when it comes to music and food. (Actually, he may overdo it with the food, since there are several times when he's on the case, and some mouth watering French dish gets in the way.) But for all the back stabbing and k ...more

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Dec 31, 2018 Tony added it

Shelves: novels, own-loanable, crime, setting-france

This first in Izzo's popular Marseille Trilogy (followed by "Chourmo" and "Solea", which are both scheduled to appear in translation in 2007) is an unflinching portrait of France's southern port, dressed up in the trappings of a crime story. Make no mistake, it is a crime story, but despite the gritty local color and bloody action, the story is suffused with a sense of ennui, isolation, and loss -- not unlike the films of Jean-Pierre Melville. The protagonist is Fabio Montale, a disillusioned po This first in Izzo's popular Marseille Trilogy (followed by "Chourmo" and "Solea", which are both scheduled to appear in translation in 2007) is an unflinching portrait of France's southern port, dressed up in the trappings of a crime story. Make no mistake, it is a crime story, but despite the gritty local color and bloody action, the story is suffused with a sense of ennui, isolation, and loss -- not unlike the films of Jean-Pierre Melville. The protagonist is Fabio Montale, a disillusioned policeman whose two oldest friends, Manu and Ugo, are killed within days of each other. Twenty years earlier they were growing up together in a rough neighborhood, thick as thieves, chasing girls, and headed for a steady life of crime. But Montale didn't see in a future in it and opted out, first serving overseas in the Army, and then joining the police force.

Now, he's left to pick up the pieces after Manu is killed by one of the various mafias vying for control of the city's vice, and Ugo returns from Paris only to be killed by the police in what looks to be a set-up. A subplot of almost equal importance involves the disappearance of Leila, a beautiful, bright young Arab that Montale has a chaste love for. She's only one of the many, many beautiful women that seem to hover around Montale in various forms (friend, lover, mother, hooker). In this regard, the story is a cliche, the tough loner cop who can never allow himself to truly love. In any event, the two various story strands intertwine, but the plot is so totally convoluted as to defy explanation. This is something I've found with a good deal of crime novels from outside the U.S. and U.K., they tend to either very stripped down and simple, or totally tangled and labyrinthine. However, in this case, the actual plot is of much less importance than the tone and the setting.

Like his protagonist, the author was born and raised in the seedy city of Marseille, and watched it turn from a Southern European melting pot to a post-colonial melting pot of 1.5 million people. Like his protagonist, he had a front-row seat (as a journalist, not a cop) to the major social and economic shifts of the last several decades, and the xenophobia they have engendered. Here, he takes the reader deep into the world of Italian and Sicilian mafia, Arab ghettos, corrupt cops, pimps and prostitutes of all persuasions, and a very Gallic sense of disenchantment and fatalism. It's a complicated portrait, loving and nostalgic, yet sad and angry. In that sense, the book works much better as a social portrait of a city than it does as a crime story. I'd really recommend it much more to those with an interest in Southern France or who might be visiting Marseille, than I would to crime buffs. It would also, along with the film Hate, be useful for those seeking to understand the recent Paris riots.

Note: The novel was made into a film in France under its original title, "Total Kheops", but it is not available in the U.S. There was also an Italian television miniseries called "Fabio Montale" based on the trilogy. A recent Hollywood film that shows some of the seedy side of modern multi-ethnic Marseille is The Good Thief, which is a loose remake of Melville's Bob le Flambeur.
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