Back Up 

Paul Colize, translated by Louise Rogers Lalaure

Bloomsbury

Otago Daily Times, July 7th 2018

Paul Colize is a Belgian crime writer and his intricately plotted Back Up is the first of his 10 novels to be translated into English.

The story begins in Berlin in March 1967 when the lead singer of British rock band Pearl Harbour drowns in a hotel pool.  Within a week every member of the band is dead. Although the police find no evidence of foul play, the unlikely coincidence and the fact that four had come into a substantial amount of money just before their demise is enough to arouse the interest of Irish reporter Michael Stern, for whom the mystery becomes a personal crusade.  

A second strand of the story, set in Brussels in 2010, relates to an unidentified elderly man who has been run over near the Gare Du Midi  and now lies in a hospital bed in a minimally conscious state. As he regains awareness, X Midi (as he is known) steadfastly refuses to divulge his secrets to the outside world despite the determination of his physiotherapist, Dominique, to find out more about his mysterious patient.  

Details of the accidents and subsequent investigations in both timelines alternate and are presented in an impartial third person, with a formality of language and attention to detail that you might find in a police file or a newspaper report. Punctuating them are italicised chapters in which we hear X Midi’s inner voice reconstructing his life. First person, confessional and with a temporal logic of their own, these sections dictate the pace of the novel and add depth and detail to the facts unearthed by Martin and Dominique.  

First, we learn of his love of rock and his years spent living and working in in the music scene in Paris, London and Berlin. Then he moves on to the evening he played as a replacement drummer for one one-off recording session by (you guessed it) Pearl Harbour and the pitch changes. Dark hints of dropped earlier in the story are expanded upon, and the three plots converge as the reverberations of that night engulf X Midi and all who come into contact with him.

Although I have limited patience for literary game playing, I found Back Up a surprisingly entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed the picture X Midi paints of the cultural life of the 60s and 70s. I was less convinced by the big ‘reveal’ of the second half (the bad guys are a cheap and easy stereotype, more as a hook to hang the thriller side of the story on rather important in their own right), but Colize’s deft handling of the plot left me guessing right up to – and including – the author’s acknowedgements. The secrets X Midi stumbles over straddle the line between conspiracy theory and tin-foil hat paranoia, and their melodramatic nature fits well with the overall tone of the novel. If this is an example of what Belgi-noir has to offer, I think Colize is likely to find English readers as appreciative an audience as their French counterparts.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/intricate-plot-deftly-handled-time-hopping-belgi-no