Lorraine Connection

A Disturbingly Authentic Tale of Corporate Corruption

Lorraine Connection by Dominique Manotti won the 2008 CWA International Dagger.

Manotti’s tale is a thinly veiled reportage of a real corporate scandal in eastern France, which she recounts with almost journalistic prose.

Synopsis

In an affluent Parisian suburb, executives from the French company Alcatel converge. They are mounting a bid for the state-owned Thomson group, France’s leading defence electronics company. However, the government awarded the deal to their Korean rival, Daewoo, to the executives’ surprise and dismay.

In an impoverished steel town in Lorraine, EU subsidies pour into an electronics factory set up by the Korean conglomerate, but things aren’t what they should be in the factory. Quality is poor, throughput is low, and workplace health and safety is dreadful. When a girl is electrocuted on the factory floor, events escalate. Before the Korean managers know it, there is an all-out strike, and the workers occupy the factory.

The strikers start to ransack the Daewoo offices. To oust them from the factory, somebody sets fire to a warehouse. Though not before the protesting workers have stumbled across a list of names, bank accounts and surprisingly large payments.

Sensing foul play, a corporate investigator from Alcatel starts raking through the ashes of the factory fire. He is looking for a way he can stop the Daewoo deal. Suddenly the lives of the cheap industrial labourers become ever so much cheaper.

Review

The cover page of Dominique Manotti’s Lorraine Connection makes an enigmatic start. “Warning: This is a novel. Everything is true, and everything is false”.

What follows is a short thriller written in a sparse, almost journalistic style, as if column inches matter. Manotti has packed it with murders, mercenaries, drug dealers, sexual blackmail, revenge, and extortion. This thriller has it all in very short order. More importantly, it is packed full of corruption.

Manotti based her novel upon the collapse of Daewoo’s factories in eastern France in the 1990s. Whilst Manotti bends the scandal to create her tale, she doesn’t break it. It is surprising how close to the wind she sails to expose the truth. Consequently, Manotti’s novel is an intelligent essay against greed and exploitation and an uncompromising thriller.

Manotti won the CWA International Dagger and the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for this short but terse text. It is a powerful read if you’d like to have your social and political preconceptions challenged. Just remember, it is only a novel. “Everything is true, and everything is false.”

Excerpt

The two men jog down overgrown, downhill paths through the woods as if training, taking turns to carry Étienne’s limp body. Halfway down the incline, one of them points to a gap on the right, and the other follows him. They come to a halt on a concrete slab overhanging a scree-covered slope dotted with rocks. Étienne is deposited face-down on the slab. The taller of the two men presses his foot on the back of his neck and unwinds his long white silk scarf which he slips under Étienne’s chin and around his forehead with precise movements. He leans forward, tests his foothold, and yanks hard with both hands. The cervical vertebrae snap cleanly making a dry crackling sound like a dead branch. One man takes the arms, the other the feet, hup-two, and they toss the body over the edge. It bounces on the scree then lands headfirst in a bush, dislocated. The killer winds the long white scarf around his neck again, zips his jacket up to the chin, and starts to walk away.

‘Aren’t we going to hide it with branches?’

‘No. The more visible the body is, the easier it will be for the officials to treat it as an accident. And besides, this is the sealed-up entrance to a former iron mine shaft, the locals don’t like coming here, old memories, probably, except in spring to hunt for morels. By then …’

Lorraine Connection by Dominique Manotti