Going up in Smoke

I don’t smoke. I’ve never smoked, beyond the occasional dutiful cigar on New Year’s Eve, and I don’t really understand why people do: it may, if you let your imagination run loose, make you look like a film star; it also turns you into a smelly, yellow-fingered phlegm factory with lots of lovely diseases to look forward to in later life and a hole in your wallet bigger than the one in the ozone layer. Yet despite all this, I cannot have been the only non-smoker to feel a twinge of regret when the ban on smoking in public places in Britain was passed. I felt as if a little bit of power to make my own decisions had been taken away from me and consequently experienced a strange and unprecedented urge to light up.

The dogmatic persecution of those whose unhealthy lifestyle falls below the high standards of the lawmakers is vividly and terrifyingly dramatized in Benoît Duteurtre’s novel The Little Girl and the Cigarette. The French writer sets his action in the near future – without saying exactly when – and in a familiarly Western democratic country – without saying exactly which. The story, or rather one of the two stories we follow through the book, opens with a distinctly modern dilemma. A prisoner on death row, a black man named Désiré Johnson, is to be granted a final request before his execution and expresses a desire to smoke one last cigarette before being stubbed out for good. A particularly simple and humble wish, you might think. Not in this world: as in all other public places, smoking in the prison is strictly forbidden. The authorities are thrown into disarray; he is legally entitled to his cigarette, but they are not legally allowed to give him one. Wouldn’t he like a nice cold beer instead? Think of the harm he’s doing both to himself and to the prison employees forced to inhale a thimbleful of his nasty second-hand smoke. As witheringly spot-on archetypes of the spineless modern functionary, the jail administrators are morally unequipped to resolve the issue and it is soon taken before the courts – and, more crucially, before the courts of public opinion, as the mass media get their teeth into this irresistible piece of controversy. A controversy, we should remind ourselves, which fundamentally isn’t very controversial: the man just wants a cigarette, for crying out loud. The story rapidly takes a surprising twist, producing a delicious send-up of the cycle of manipulation in the twenty-first century world. Justice is manipulated by public opinion, public opinion is manipulated by the media, and the media is manipulated by the canny and the rich – and we all give a cheer for ‘democracy’. While cigarettes cause the execution process to grind to a halt for the wily Désiré Johnson, they are to prove devastating in the life of the second protagonist of this novel, whose name remains undisclosed. As deeply as it abhors tobacco, Duteurtre’s society worships children, to the point where criticism of a child’s behaviour is unconscionable and a child’s word is sacrosanct. Anyone old-fashioned enough to believe children should be seen and not heard will feel hugely uncomfortable in this world, where they are even welcomed into the workplace and licensed to make as much noise and mess as they want. From the outset it is pretty clear that our protagonist, an unapologetic nicotine addict and self-confessed ‘paedophobe’, is heading for trouble, and trouble takes the unlikely form of a bespectacled 5-year-old girl named Amandine. The hero (as anyone of a libertarian bent will probably wish to think of him) works for the Mayor, in a large government building in ‘Capital City’, where in order to circumvent the strict anti-smoking policy and enjoy a blast of nicotine, he is forced to undergo a Byzantine ritual with a screwdriver and a specially unsealed window in a fourth-floor toilet cubicle. It is in the middle of this heroically bloody-minded process that he is disturbed by Amandine, who wanders into his carelessly unlocked stall and catches him in fagrante, as it were. She delivers a pious little lecture, before he does what most right-thinking adults would do and tells her to clear off. It should, of course, end there – only Amandine doesn’t let it. It’s not long before he is summoned to the police station and accused of ‘crimes against children’ – the new name for paedophilia (rebranding gets everywhere it seems) and the one thing more execrated than smoking. Naturally, the accused’s protestations of innocence are given short shrift when to do otherwise would mean calling into question the honesty of a child. He hires a hotshot lawyer – the attorney who represented Désiré Johnson, in fact – only to discover that her recent high-profile success is just a blip in her extraordinarily mediocre career: her fame owed entirely to the cunning of her previous client, and achieved in spite of her stunning ineptitude. To say that at this point things go from bad to worse is not so much a horrible cliché as a horrible understatement. Duteurtre’s satire on modern attitudes to smoking is clever – his portrayal of the ‘General Tobacco Company’ as being as manipulative and inhumane as the rest of this society is evidence that he is no pro-smoking nut. But his attack on the modern paranoia that sees paedophiles everywhere is more than just clever satire – it is courageous and powerful. The author shows, quite plausibly, what happens to decent people when the hysterics take charge, in a novel which is thoroughly modern in its subject matter, yet classical in its form: the dystopian vision. The Little Girl and the Cigarette recalls Orwell, Kafka and Huxley without apeing them, and the horror and tragedy of the story are well balanced by Duteurtre’s eye for the quirky comic detail – the terrorist reality TV show Martyr Idol is a sick but irresistible example. It certainly raised a chuckle from me – but as in all the best satire, that was quickly followed by a shudder.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 17 © Simon Heafield 2008