Martin Walker is the
Senior Director of the Global Business Policy Council, a private
think-tank for
CEOs founded by the A T Kearney business consultancy. He is also a syndicated
columnist and
Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of United Press International.
Previously, in his 25 years as a
journalist with The Guardian newspaper, he served as bureau chief in Moscow and the United States, as well as European editor and assistant
editor. A regular broadcaster on the BBC, National Public Radio and
CNN, and
panelist on Inside Washington and The McLaughlin Show, he is also a
senior
scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in
Washington
DC, a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute at the New School for
Social
Research in New York, and a contributing editor of the Los Angeles
Times's
Opinion section and of Europe magazine.
After
some hairy nights in the
burning suburbs outside Paris,
covering the riots for an
international news agency, I went down to my house in the Vezere valley
to rest
and to write. So on the night that President Jacques Chirac was to
address the
nation and its discontents on TV, my friend and tennis partner, the
chief of
police of my town, invited me to his home for dinner. I was just me,
his family
and his excellent cooking, and Chirac’s baffled and pompous
speech about the
emergence of a France
he no longer understood.
My policeman
friend was also getting
worried. In Bordeaux,
the big city just 90 minutes away, cars
had been burned in front of the Prefecture. In the market, people
talked in
hushed voices about a local woman living in Paris
who had been gang-raped by a
gang of young Arabs. And just down the road from my home, the women of
one of
the immigrant families who had moved into the area had started to dress
in
headscarves and black chadors. Along our country lanes, the road signs
began to
be daubed with graffiti for the Front National, the anti-immigrant
right-wing
party whose leader Jean-Marie Le Pen had beaten the incumbent Socialist
Prime
Minister to take second place in the Presidential election. There were
fights
in the school playground between white and Muslim kids, who stopped
coming to
the tennis and rugby lessons that my policeman friend had run for all
the
schoolchildren.The
national mood was
worried and becoming ugly and the ripples of this were invading our own
placid
corner of La France
profonde.
This was the
backdrop for my novel, Bruno;
Chief of Police, the sharpening contrast between a rural France
that felt its charms and
traditions to be timeless, and a growing, insistent reality of social,
cultural
and economic change. It is also about the way that decent people, like
my hero,
get caught up in these tumults and find themselves having to make
serious
personal and moral choices that entail profound consequences. Intruding
into
all this comes the secret history of France,
the enduring impact of those
four brief years of German occupation in World War II and the lasting
divisions
it forged between those who resisted and those who collaborated.
But all of this happens in a corner of France
that firmly believes itself
to be one of the most agreeable spots on earth. History confirms that
belief;
the cave paintings of Lascaux,
the burials and the archaeological
sites demonstrate that the valley of the River Vezere is the one place
on the
planet to have known constant human occupation for the last 40,000
years. Its
fertility and its climate, its rivers and gentle hills explain the
attractions
of the past, while the foie gras and truffles and fish and game that
make it
the gastronomic heartland of France
bespeak its enduring allure.
The train from Bordeaux
to our village also serves the small
towns of St Emilion and Pomerol. Our local café serves the
finest croissants I
have ever tasted. Our neighbours make their own pate and rillettes and
sausages, serve tete de veau and brandade de morue for the daily lunch,
and
have even been known to tread their own grapes. I love the place, and
am
devoted to many of the local people who have helped inspire various
characters
of my novel.
