We readers of Mathias Énard’s The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild know something that the novel’s protagonist could not: No one, at least in this corner of France, ever really dies. Or rather, people die, often terribly, but then their souls, tossed back into “the Wheel,” are reborn to suffer again. While the novel at times adheres to the chronology of a diary, at other times it shuttles us between the past and future lives of its many minor characters. At the beginning of the novel’s second section, for example, the local priest is reincarnated as a wild boar; he has also lived as “a resplendent crow, a highwayman, a monk, a peasant, an indomitable oak, a pebble collected by a pilgrim and, once, even a storm”; he will later live again, as “a woodsman, a Moorish warrior, a mud-blackened serf, a sheepdog, a ravening fox, a weeping willow, a lawyer, a wealthy merchant.” Sometimes there’s a punitive logic to these reincarnations—the strange red worms infesting the protagonist’s bathroom were once murderers and executioners—but there isn’t always a chronological one: The Wheel sends you backward as often as it sends you forward. One villager will, in the future, be a hedgehog; when this hedgehog is flattened by a van, he will be reborn “two centuries earlier, in 1815,” as a bedbug feeding on the leg of Napoleon. Time eddies, as we bounce from one period—and it is always a period of devastation—to another. It comes to seem as though the Thirty Years’ War, World Wars I and II, and the Roman conquest of Gaul are ongoing in the present; after all, any minor character might be transported there tomorrow.
As grim as the past is, the future is grimmer. Occasionally, in the novel, the Wheel offers a glimpse of the devastation to come. One wild sow “returned to the Bardo at the moment of death, then passed through the Bright Light before being reincarnated, some hours later and many years in the future, at the end of this Dharma, in the mid-twenty-first century of the Great Extinction, as a badger; a badger who, with the last of his fellow creatures, burned to death in the great conflagration.” Many years in the future, some hours later: This conflagration might as well be happening now, in the novel’s bizarre simultaneous present.
There’s an unsettling sense of inexorability to the novel’s prophecy, as though the Great Extinction were a foregone conclusion. Perhaps there’s not much to be done about this looming conflagration. Questions of agency and responsibility pervade the genre that is sometimes called “climate fiction.” And these are not thematic questions only: Amitav Ghosh, in his 2016 book The Great Derangement, argued that novels (and novelists) themselves were on the hook, complicit in a collective “derangement” that denies or simply fails to acknowledge the reality of the climate crisis:
When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable—for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats.
And yet, no one could accuse Énard’s The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild of evading the threat of climate change. One might accuse it of fatalism, but this is a fatalism with a moral edge: You can still feel guilty about things for which you bear no responsibility.
Énard’s novel is set in La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a small rural village in marshy western France, and opens with the diary—or rather, the “field notes”—of the youngish David Mazon, a Parisian anthropology student nominally at work on his dissertation about “what it means to live in the country nowadays.” As Mazon conducts his interviews and attempts to make inroads with the locals, we meet a cross-section of this village: Gary, an avid hunter, and his wife, Mathilde, David’s landlords and the owners of a small farm; Martial, the mayor and also village undertaker; Thomas, owner of Café-Pêche, the village’s only remaining business and the site of much pastis drinking; Max, another Parisian transplant and an artist busy photographing his bowel movements; and Lucie, an organic vegetable farmer and caretaker to her ailing grandfather and developmentally disabled adult cousin, Arnaud. Many of these villagers seem skeptical about the realities of climate change, but they are all attuned to the realities of French agricultural policy: their livelihoods are uniformly threatened by the interests of big agribusiness.
Lucie is something like the village agitator, the novel’s voice for environmental activism. In his diary, Mazon writes that “Lucie is a deeply political animal … she’s concerned about the environmental disasters that are routinely covered up to serve the vested interests of Big Agri-Tech.” She’s attentive to the ways the landscape has changed: “In particularly wet years, her cabbages, lettuces and chard would be submerged under twenty inches of water … but this is increasingly rare, as recent years have been quite dry.” She’s also mysteriously away from home the night of a meltdown at the substation, a local disaster the villagers attribute to environmental activist-saboteurs: “Antiglobalization activists. Tree huggers. Terrorists,” according to the news reports.
Lucie might represent one possibility for the novel in the age of climate change: Diagnose a problem, propose a solution, and work to realize it. After all, she does manage to convince Mazon: By the novel’s end, once again in the form of a diary, Mazon and Lucie are not only in love, but on the verge of starting their own organic farm. In the novel’s final pages, with all the necessary paperwork “more or less in order,” they take leave of Mazon’s landlords, pack their cats in the van, and drive off to their idyllic future: “I started the engine, put the car into first gear and we set off to save the planet,” reads the novel’s concluding sentence.
This is a happy ending, but the novel itself sees things differently. We know that Mazon is hopelessly naive, and his newfound passion for environmental activism hollow: “I think it would be a good idea for me to be committed to the environment,” he writes in the novel’s first section. He’s not even a particularly observant anthropologist, despite all his invocations of Levi-Strauss and Malinowski. Ultimately, we’re primed to agree with one of his more clear-eyed musings: Perhaps even their sustainably managed organic vegetable farm is only “a few hectares of the planet” that will end up merely as “a straw in the wheel of the Apocalypse.” So much for the hopeful, solution-oriented activist novel.
If Mazon’s conversion to environmental consciousness seems empty, even opportunistic, his conversion to epicureanism is more convincing. When he first arrives in the village, Mazon is isolated from the locals not only by his academic pretensions but especially by his narrow palate. He balks at the rabbit offered by his landlord and won’t eat the blood fricassee served by the mayor’s wife. He doesn’t buy any vegetables at Lucie’s stand because he doesn’t know how to make soup; he lives mostly on frozen pizza and Heinz beans on bread. But by the novel’s end, his “cooking is improving by the day.” His literary tastes are developing, too; when he first arrived in the province, he found that “Rabelais is pretty unintelligible,” but by the end he’s an avid Rabelais reader.
There’s a lot of rich food in this novel. For three days every year, the Wheel stops turning: No one dies, and finally the undertakers, embalmers, headstone-carvers, and gravediggers are free to convene, to gorge themselves on meat and wine, to regale one another with speeches and stories at the titular banquet of the gravediggers’ guild. The novel’s central section is entirely given over to this banquet: pates and terrines followed by eels and crab legs, followed by rabbit and veal and suckling pig, followed by cheese and pastry, with wine pairings (and not many vegetables). Periodically one feaster, “Pizzlebeer,” rehearses “the litany of everything he had consumed so far”: It comes to over 20 courses.
“The Banquet” leaves us with the feeling that everyone’s hands are tied: that any happy ending is its own sort of derangement.
It’s a bit nauseating, even a little disgusting, not unlike a Rabelaisian carnival. In case you miss the allusion, Énard makes it explicit: the first banquet storyteller recounts “How Ludivine de la Mothe Relieved Gargantua of Heartsickness.” Things are bleak, but you can always go out drunk on Chinon and hope to come back as a burgher. But a banquet isn’t only a respite from work. It symbolizes, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous reading of Rabelais, “the triumph of life over death” and contains all the “potentialities of the new beginning”: “No meal can be sad. Sadness and food are incompatible (while death and food are perfectly compatible).”
Énard’s novel is a little like this banquet: Lushly polyphonic, often baroque, it is, as the translator’s acknowledgments note, “an ode to language.” And like this banquet, the novel does not offer us a solution for climate change. For example, one of the speakers, warning against the “Great Extermination,” urges the guild to adopt green burials, ditching the fermol and the lacquered oak caskets. Without much fanfare or enthusiasm, the guild members vote in favor and get back to feasting. You get the feeling a pine casket is one more straw in the wheel.
What the novel offers, instead, is what all novels offer—a respite from work—with a slightly sickening twist, an excess that belies a kind of desperation. Eat as much as you can: The Wheel turns again in three days.
Énard has dealt with apocalypse before. In Zone, Énard’s first novel translated into English, Francis Servain Mirković is boarding a train to “the end of the world.” He’s hoping to get out of the Wheel:
I light a last cigarette mechanically I have to get ready for the journey, for moving like all the people pacing up and down the platform in Milano Centrale in search of a love, a gaze, an event that will tear them from the endless circling, from the Wheel, a meeting, anything to escape yourself, or vital business, or the memory of emotions and crimes.
But Francis’s case is so exceptional that the Wheel seems more like a delusional manifestation of personal guilt than the cosmological force it appears to be in The Banquet. Francis has all manner of crimes to atone for: his youthful flirtation with fascism, the Bosnian Muslims he killed as a foreign volunteer for the Croatian Defense Council, the torturing and assassinations he indirectly facilitated as an agent of the French Intelligence Services. In addition, he is weighed down by the countless crimes of others (including his father), dug up in archives and now collected in a final dossier he plans to deliver to a representative of the Vatican before retiring (one last job). Francis’s pessimism borders on nihilism, but he has his reasons—reasons most of us will not share.
But in The Banquet, no one—no matter how innocent—escapes the Wheel. Sure, executioners come back as worms, but is it much better to come back as a pebble? If Zone’s Wheel is invariably an instrument of horror, The Banquet’s can often seem like an instrument of banality. As it tosses you around, you brush against history in the most fruitless ways (that bedbug on the leg of Napoleon). In Zone, to be implicated in history is to bear responsibility and therefore guilt. But in The Banquet, to be implicated in history is often to be helplessly caught in its currents.
What looks like decisive action could be only an accident. One day the boar that was once the village priest stumbles on a wild sow, “with whom he had the hope of starting a herd.” The sow is spooked by some gendarmes who pull off on the side of the road, runs for cover in the building housing the substation, is spooked again by the crackling of electricity, and runs onto the lines, “where the mass of burning flesh caused the short circuit, causing the tank to overheat and explode, and the resulting fireball and the shock wave to vaporize what remained of her body.” The meltdown was not, after all, the work of ecoterrorists—just a brush with history, for which no one is responsible.
So, what to make of that happy ending? As heavily ironized as it is, it’s sure to grate any reader who would like a sincere declaration. Or who might, like Ghosh, hope that novels could meaningfully address the climate crisis. Instead, The Banquet leaves us with the feeling that everyone’s hands are tied: that anything we might do is a straw in the wheel, sufficient only to temporarily assuage our guilt, that every act of resistance is only a sad joke, and that any happy ending is its own sort of derangement.
It’s almost too easy to point out that a novel is not an environmental policy proposal. Even Mazon seems to know this, when he says of Max’s art installation (the photos of shit I mentioned earlier) that it “might eventually lead to a fresh awareness of the relationship between man and nature” and is immediately “astounded by my own pedantry.” If only things were so simple; if only you could save the planet by making art. When Mazon regrets that “unfortunately, there is no Gargantua to save the planet,” I think we’re meant to understand that this was never Gargantua’s job in the first place—that the triumph of life over death at a banquet (or in a book) is only a passing triumph, lasting not much longer than three days.
Énard insists on the limits of what fiction can do; indeed, as one reviewer ruefully put it, he insists that “the return of suffering compels the return of style.” And yet, the novel does not let us rest easy in style’s safe remove from this world of suffering. If there’s something vaguely illicit—gratuitous, hedonistic—about the gravediggers’ banquet, there’s something illicit about the novel that resembles it, too. Especially in the marshes of France, where a Catholic monument watches over nearly every crossing, every pleasure—drinking, eating, reading—is a guilty pleasure. (Perhaps there’s nothing to be done, but shouldn’t you be trying?)
The novel never alludes to Mazon’s past or future incarnations, and perhaps it’s this historical innocence that makes his happy ending possible. Mazon possesses “that powerful zeal for reform that inhabits a man or woman from the capital when he or she ends up in the provinces,” and the novel is most successful when, like Énard’s Compass, it probes the naive, misguided, or simply thwarted “desire to produce an ethnographic document.”
Still, those fleeting images of extinction stick in your craw: an unsettling reminder of a crisis that fiction, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot prevent. It might be the case that there is nothing you can do, and you might as well be at a banquet or reading this book. But this will not absolve you, and The Banquet’s frantic excess will not let you forget. 
Featured image: From The Employment of Women in Britain, 1914-1918 by Horace Nicholls. A gravedigger carries on her husband’s business in Aley Green Cemetery, Luton.