By ANNE CHUDOBIAK | The Gazette
QUEBECK, CANADA – The more willing you are to suspend disbelief, the more you will enjoy the improbable, but funny situation laid out in Operation Rimbaud, the latest novel by Jacques Godbout to appear in English translation.
The Quebec literary giant takes us to Ethiopia, a country he once briefly called home. It’s the late 1960s, and the emperor, HaileSelassie, turns to the Church of Rome for help transporting a holy relic: the Ten Commandments as engraved on stone by Moses.
This premise doesn’t seem entirely plausible: Even if one can buy the idea that such a secret treasure might exist, it’s difficult to imagine the Orthodox king assigning its care to a rival church. But how important is plausibility in an adventure story, especially a satire? If we accept that Godbout’s main goal is to poke fun at the religious establishment, then we can deem this book successful.
The man charged with saving the stones is Michel Larochelle, a young Jesuit from Montreal. Not long after arriving in the Ethiopian capital, he is roped by a superior into taking confession from his brothers at the local college. He later shows his lack of compassion and reverence by secretly nicknaming one of the men “the masturbator.” Never one to respect his vows, Michel’s mission to preserve “the Tablets of the Law that govern Occidental morality” finds him breaking more than one commandment.
It has been suggested that in addition to this kind of irony, there is another, more private humour to Operation Rimbaud, that it might be Godbout’s sweet revenge on the Jesuits who taught him in his youth here in Montreal.
I’d call this a tongue-in-cheek Da Vinci Code, but that wouldn’t be fair to Quebecer Godbout. Operation Rimbaud came out in its French original in 1999, a good four years before that other religious thriller.
Operation Rimbaud
By Jacques Godbout
Translated by Patricia Claxton
Cormorant Books, 161 pages, $21
Jacques Godbout will be at the Salon du livre in Place Bonaventure to sign his newly published book in French, Autos biographie, at Stand 482, Friday from 5 to 6 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 22, from 1:30 to 3 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 23, from 4 to 5 p.m.