A catastrophic novel by Joël Dicker
In his eighth novel, the multi-award-winning Swiss writer Joël Dicker sought to reinvent his writing, trying to move away from the style that made him a bestseller, in order to create a book, as he himself explains in the afterword, “that could be read and shared by all readers, from 7 to 120 years old”.
A Catastrophic Visit to the Zoo is a novel in which Dicker strives to create a parody of the detective style for which he has become known, in order to tell the small tragedy that befell Joséphine — the protagonist and narrator of the story — and her five classmates from the only class at the Green Ridge School, which until then was run by the friendly Mademoiselle Jennings. Right at the beginning, we are informed that the students at this special school (“we call a school where children who do not go to other schools are placed a special school”) have names (Yoshi, Otto, Thomas, Artie, Joséphine and Giovanni) with very different origins, thus underlining, from the first page, the supposed universality of the story, which also aims to correspond to the universality of its target audience.
Now, before I start, I must highlight a limitation of mine: this was the first book by Dicker that I read, so I may not be in a position to understand some of its subtleties, since by creating a parody of detective stories it is likely that Dicker is also parodying his work, which raises a perhaps interesting reading path, but one that I am not able to follow.
In any case, at various points the narrative becomes entangled in a series of confusions that impair the intelligibility of the book. Let us see. In the second sentence, we are informed that until the moment when Joséphine, now an adult, decides to write the book, “no one knew what really happened” on the day of the catastrophic visit to the zoo.
This idea is reinforced in the following chapter, when we learn that on the night of the tragedy, Joséphine was not allowed dessert because her parents had punished her: “You can eat the cake if you tell us what happened at the zoo today.” Joséphine adds: “This is called ‘blackmail,’ but I refrained from making any comment. I took the spoon and divided the slice of cake into eight little pieces.” Now, from this point on, the reader has no doubt that Joséphine refused to tell her parents what had happened, and therefore did not eat the slice of carrot cake, her favorite. However, the declamatory structure of the book from this point on follows the story that Joséphine tells her parents that same night, in which she describes in detail every detail that would lead to the fateful visit. Even more peculiar, this story is punctuated by the astonished comments of Joséphine's parents, and at various moments the protagonist describes situations that her parents witnessed and know perfectly well, without them showing any impatience at hearing episodes that it would be impossible for them not to pay attention to. Meanwhile, Joséphine takes the opportunity to casually “eat another slice of cake”, while swallowing any trace of coherence.
The issue of whether these are students with special educational needs also seems structurally problematic, since, although we never know what these needs are, at the beginning of the story we are told that Joséphine's mother once told her that her daughter would probably never go to a normal school, but that she was loved just the way she was. Absolutely right. However, the suggestion of such profound limitations does not prevent, for example, the police and perpetrators from taking the investigations of the children very seriously, or that, at the end of it all, we are told that Joséphine would become a famous writer, having attended non-special schools and universities, without anyone telling us what had changed in the meantime to make this possible.
Still regarding the structure of the book, the criminal mystery that surrounds the plot also seems to be constructed in three steps, since even the reader who is least competent in predicting the outcome of stories of this type — such as myself — can understand exactly what happened after just a few pages, meaning that the detectives are not the ones responsible for uncovering what actually happened, but rather the last ones to cross the finish line, at a slow and weary pace. This could be of some interest, as it deconstructs the model of books of this genre, but at no point do we sense that this is, after all, the author's intention.
Finally, there is another considerable problem. In trying to create a book for all ages, Joël Dicker ends up halfway to nowhere. The idea was promising: to write a novel from the point of view of an extraordinarily innocent and delicate child. The problem is that many have tried it (starting, for example, with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) and almost all of them, with very few and brilliant exceptions (Lewis Carroll, Bill Watterson, Kurt Vonnegut), have failed catastrophically.
Dicker tries to look at the world (and democracy) through the eyes of a child, but the result is only jokes with a tiresomely repetitive structure and unoriginal ideas, such as those we find summarized in an afterword. Take, for example, the perennial idea that “we have all become so fascinated by social networks and their diabolical algorithms that we have forgotten that they act on our minds like casino machines”, or that “people are increasingly glued to their mobile phone screens”, screens that “have made us give up the gesture of looking around us”, which, of course, contributes to us living in “an increasingly polarized and divided world” because, as it happens, “of our inability to lift our heads from our mobile phones”. Perhaps all this justifies the wise statement of the headmaster of the non-special school, who explains to us that people do not like different ideas “because it makes them nervous. They do not realise how lucky it is that we can all be so different, together. Because that is the beauty of democracy.” Which leads Mademoiselle Jennings to exclaim, ecstatic as we are only when faced with great truths: “What you have just said is extraordinary.” I am not sure it is.
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