The Holy Innocents

Paris in the spring of 1968. The city is beginning to emerge from hibernation and an obscure spirit of social and political renewal is in the air. Yet Theo, his twin sister Isabelle and Matthew, an American student they have befriended, think only of immersing themselves in another, addictive form of hibernation: moviegoing at the Cinematheque Francaise. Night after night, they take their place beside their fellow cinephiles in the very front row of the stalls and feast insatiably off the images that flicker across the vast white screen.

Denied their nightly 'fix' when the French government suddenly orders the Cinematheque's closure, Theo, Isabelle and Matthew gradually withdraw into a hermetically sealed universe of their own creation, an airless universe of obsessive private games, ordeals, humiliations and sexual jousting which finds them shedding their clothes and their inhibitions with equal abandon. A vertiginous free fall interrupted only, and tragically, when the real world outside their shuttered apartment succeeds at last in encroaching on their delirium.

The study of a three-sided relationship whose perverse eroticism contrives nevertheless to conserve its own bruised purity, Gilbert Adair's first novel resembles no other work in recent English fiction. Belonging rather to the romantic French tradition of Les Enfants Terribles and Le Grand Meaulnes, brilliant in its narrative invention and startling in its imagery, The Holy Innocents represents a radical new departure for this uniquely versatile writer.

The title characters of this rich, furiously concentrated first novel, set in Paris during the student uprisings of 1968, are 17-year-old twins Guillaume and Danielle and their friend Matthew, a 19-year-old American film student studying at the Cinematheque Francaise. Living in a huge apartment and virtually unnoticed by their father and his new wife, bored sophisticates Guillaume and Danielle pursue an obsessive incestuous relationship that becomes even more complicated when sexually confused Matthew moves in; in the author's deft phrasing, he is in love "with the single person Guillaume and Danielle would have been had they not been born twins." On their own, the three explore avenues of homosexuality, rape, incest and sadism that pull them away from the outside world and into starved, frightened squalor. When they finally reemerge, the Paris they see is almost unrecognizable. Adair depicts this scorching sexual triangle and the games that lead into it with knife-point psychological precision and gorgeously spun prose, but he also portrays the teenagers with a compassion that keeps the title (a reference to Cocteau's The Holy Terrors , which parallels and clearly inspires this work) from being wholly ironic.
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