5 - From Family Romance to the Detective Novel

Summary

The Family Romance as Thriller

THE NINTH LIFE OF LOUIS DRAX, Jensen's second murder mystery, is similar to War Crimes for the Home, in that the family romance is once more the very meat of the plot, and the intimately domestic is reconciled with the thriller form. Jensen's fifth novel concerns ten-year-old Louis's discovery of his origins. Living in Lyon with his mother, Natalie, and nominally with the often-absent Pierre, whom he believes to be his father, Louis becomes gradually aware that something is being kept from him regarding the circumstances of his birth. Once again, the truth about how a child came into being provides the crux of the plot, the revelation that is key to the working out of the thriller form, and Louis's mission— of which he is only patchily conscious—is to make sense of his back story. This is the sine qua non for continuing to live, since Louis, who at the age of ten has already been through a series of brushes with death, has great difficulty ensuring his own survival in the face of his mother's desire to harm him, a well-concealed impulse that will prove an important motor to the thriller plot. The Munchausen's theme, so dominant in The Paper Eater, in which it is elevated almost to an archetype of human behavior, once again comes to the fore.

Louis himself is the narrator of the events leading up to his accident, while his hospital consultant, Dr. Dannachet, takes over from that time on, although parts of Louis's narratives are retrospective, so that the two voices alternate. Nonetheless, Dr. Dannachet narrates the greater part of the novel. Like Louis, he narrates in the first person, his measured, educated tone contrasting with Louis's childish, breathless, and sparingly punctuated febrility. It is the sensible and educated Dr. Dannachet who lays the groundwork for the central part of the plot involving telepathy, in which Louis, using the doctor as his medium, manages to communicate from the depths of his vegetative state.