I wouldn’t be surprised if Fred Vargas casts her eyes out of her window(not literally but there may be time in another novel) over porridge and lets her mind plant the most random image on her front lawn. Strangeness seems her dwelling place and the two novels I have read so far manage to get under my skin in ways that other thrillers have not.
Fred Vargas seems to specialize in visual hand grenades!
For both novels I have read seem to find the most eccentric sighting for the reader to collide with early on . It feels like a form of visual, psychological imprinting, so that whatever follows in terms of plot, is always filtered through this ‘window’ image.I suppose a little like a stained glass window of perception and haunts our reading experience even in spite of the convolutions of the the rest of the plot.
So in The Three Evangelistas a character looks out of the window and sees a new tree in the front garden. This is extraordinary as trees cannot grow overnight, yet the husband is far more interested in his paper than the fresh tree! It haunts his wife though and seems both random and comically macabre to us. Is she mad or is someone sending a message to her to make her feel mad or lost? At any rate the familiar has suddenly lost its comfortable visual coordinates and what follows unsettles as the world has lost its bearings because of the tree!
In Fred Vargas’ novel An Uncertain Place, her intuitive Detective Commissaire Adamberg comes across a row of shoes outside London’s famous High gate Cemetery all pointing inside and all containing dismembered feet! Even more extraordinarily these feet belong to people who have been dead for many years, yet their decomposition is uneven and curiously ill fitting with their age!
This encounter with the ‘lost feet’ casts a riddle which the Detective finds understandably compelling. And even when I found the tale a little unravelling somehow, the original riddle of the mutilated feet kept me reading, because the puzzle demanded to be truly explained.
And for anyone writing for examinations or otherwise, this trick of Vargas seems resonant and affecting. Take an ordinary setting and put something there that is out of place-literally, psychologically, spiritually- whatever is suggested as you write!
Incongruity is all!