Charles the Bold.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Beauchemin’s Le Matou (1981) was a huge bestseller in Quebec, becoming the all-time bestselling novel in Quebec literature. Translated as The Alley Cat, it brought the writer to the attention of English-speaking Canadians and an international audience. With his Charles the Bold trilogy (Charles le Temeraire in the original), Beauchemin only enhances his reputation. The first of the series, Charles the Bold: The Dog Years (2004), follows the life of young Charles Thibodeau from his birth in 1966 to high school. The second novel, The Years of Fire (Un saut dans le vide, 2007) picks up where the first leaves off: Charles’s experiences in secondary school, his awakening sexuality, his friendships, and his sense of responsibility.

The plots of the two novels are straightforward enough: a mother dying during a boy’s early childhood; a drunken, violent father; and a special sensibility developed in spite of (perhaps because of) these unhappy factors. Friendships forged, battles fought—the plot turns are not in themselves noteworthy. But there is an allegorical undercurrent at work as well, and Beauchemin himself has said, in an interview in Quill & Quire, that he sees Charles’s story as that of Quebec from 1966 to the end of the 20th century. There are critics who claim that French-Canadian fiction is, at its heart, political. There are certainly political elements in both novels—elements both stated and unstated—starting early in the first novel when the October Crisis coincides exactly with the date of the funeral of Charles’s mother. Charles is then five years old. “Montreal had been besieged by the Canadian Army,” Beauchemin writes, in Wayne Grady’s fine translation. “Charles, on his knees in his seat, turned his head in every direction, his eyes wide as saucers. ‘What are all these soldiers doing, Papa?’ ‘They’re looking for criminals,’ Charles’s father replies. ‘You’re too young to understand.’”

Whether one sees the novels chiefly as Bildungsroman or as socio-political fiction, Beauchemin has succeeded in creating a wonderful portrait of the coming-of-age of a bright and talented young boy in a Montreal and a Quebec that are vibrant and alive.