The Godmother

Ça, C’est du Bon Shit…

The Godmother by Hannelore Carye won the  Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, the Deutscher Krimi Preis and the International Dagger; almost a clean sweep of the European crime fiction awards.

A middle-aged woman exacts her revenge on French society.

Synopsis

Patience Portefeux is a middle-aged woman without prospects. Born a criminal heiress, her mother spent all her ill-gotten inheritance, forcing Patience into the under-paid, under-appreciated middle classes. By day she is an Arabic translator for the French Police Force, intercepting the calls of Algerian drug dealers and petty crooks and translating them for the police and the courts.

By night she is a widowed mother of two, paying for her mother to stay in an exorbitantly expensive nursing home, where she refuses to die.

To add more misery to Mme. Portefeux’s financial problems, the French judicial system pays its translators “off the books”. She doesn’t even qualify for a civil servant’s pension.

As chance would have it, the nurse caring for Mme. Portefeux’s mother is also the mother of a drug trafficker whose calls she has been busy translating. In a moment of criminal genius, Mme. Portefeux concocts a plan that makes her the proud owner of a substantial shipment of cannabis.

Imagine what that does for her pension.

Review

At about 200 pages long, The Godmother is more a novella than a novel. Despite its slim profile, Carye has packed it to the brim with wisecracks, twists and jeers at the French legal system. Hannelore Cayre’s day job as a criminal lawyer introduced her to the world of the interpreter (who were until recently paid “off the books”). So the central premise of a disillusioned middle-aged woman who understands the ways of the Parisian drug dealer is far more credible than you’d think.

Cayre writes a complex caper as a fifty-something woman negotiates the world of smugglers, pushers and police officers to captain a drug dealing operation. She conceals her corrupt behaviour with deft translations of her own phone calls for the police. This is all done with a withering sense of humour.

I’m not sure what to do with a belief in God except see it as some form of mental disorder…

The book’s only failure is that you never really grasp the characters or places, as you are too busy trying to keep pace with the plot. It is a firecracker of a book as first one, then another idea, goes bang in your hand.

As well as the ferociously fast central caper, the book turns a scathing eye on the French government’s fruitless “war on drugs” and failing social systems. Hannelore Carye’s The Godmother mocks modern France’s racism, inequity, and prejudices.

“Sardonic” est le mot juste.

Excerpt

My father was the General Manager of a trucking company that traded under the name ‘Mondiale’, with the slogan ‘Everything. Everywhere’. You don’t hear the job description ‘General Manager’ anymore (as in What does your dad do? He’s a General Manager…) but in the ’70s, it was a thing. It went with duck à l’orange, yellow polyester roll-neck jumpers over mini-culottes, and braid-trimmed telephone covers. 

He made his fortune sending his trucks to the so-called ‘shit-hole’ countries of the world, with names ending in –an, like Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Iran, etc. To get a job with Mondiale you had to have first done time, because according to my father, only somebody who’d been locked up for at least 15 years could cope with being stuck in a cabin for thousands of miles, and would defend his cargo with his life.

The Godmother by Hannelore Carye