Jean Cocteau- Les Enfants Terribles

Les Enfants Terribles

Jean Cocteau

1929

“At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.”

Oh boy, here we go; a new attempt to review a book that, honestly, I don't quite know what to make of. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed through the quitegoodreads box, hidden somewhere down the right-hand side of this page, that on Goodreads (that ironic bastion of *cough* quality book ratings) I hastily rated Les Enfants Terribles three out of five stars, which is technically above average (if we assume that average should be two-and-a-half stars); but that was almost entirely due to the quality of Jean Cocteau's translated prose. That, by itself, is very, very high in quality, written in the intellectual, vocabular style of prose masters such Joseph Conrad or W. Somerset Maugham- essentially the type of outstanding sentence-structure and word choices that I desperately wish I could emulate, requiring a naturally genius mind that I doubt can ever be taught. A lot of credit must go to translator Rosamond Lehmann for conveying Cocteau's wordy style in a very fluid, natural-sounding manner.

So then, if I respected and enjoyed Cocteau's authorship so much, what's wrong with this book? To be honest, I'm still not quite sure, other than to say that the plot establishment, development and conclusion to this book seemed so very odd to me that it left my critical faculties in turmoil. It didn't help me that, before I started reading and researching, I had no idea whom Jean Cocteau was, nor what this book was about. I bought my copy on a whim (at the same time I purchased Less Than Zero) because it was cheap, published as a Vintage Classic, and undoubtedly French and strange. This latter part was the key, since I've partially explored and enjoyed works by Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, and the admittedly-not-French but very Euro-similar Milan Kundera in the past. I'm by no means an expert in philosophy (barely a novice, in fact), but I do enjoy the vague sensations of existentialism and was hoping for more of that sort of thing.

Cocteau is cool.

What I got with Les Enfants Terribles (which was apparently first released in the US as The Holy Terrors for some reason) was something rather different; essentially a very strange psychological character-based thriller, starring a very small group of characters. The lead characters, and terrible children of the title, are Paul and Elisabeth, a brother and sister with no father, a bed-ridden mother, and exorbitant wealth. The key to the story as it develops is something that Paul and Elisabeth call 'The Game', which is essentially a concentrated mutual effort to annoy and upset each other through any mental games necessary, usually involving innocent, unwitting foil such as their friends Gerard and Agatha. The winner of the game is the sibling able to frustrate the other the most by getting in the last word and presenting themselves as superior, inevitably leading to the tragic ending to the novel (which I won't spoil, but which readers should be able to see coming fairly easily).

Paul and Elisabeth's game becomes more intensely psychological as the book goes on, callously playing with the lives of their friends without much thought. As a result, both of the characters came across as villainous to me, leaving me caring very little about their ultimate fate. To be fair, I think Cocteau's ultimate goal was to leave the lasting impression that all of the children in this story are essentially victims of circumstance, where, despite being granted all of the material wealth they could ever need, the lack of parental love and moral guidance eventually warps them both into irredeemable psychopaths with no understanding of the consequences of their actions. It occurs to me now that it perhaps wasn't coincidence that I found Les Enfants Terribles and Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero on the same shelf.

As I often do when reviewing work by an author whom I'm experiencing for the first time, I feel somewhat inadequate in attempting to properly analyse what Cocteau, an early 20th century renaissance man, was fully trying to achieve. In Cocteau's case that's perhaps going to remain a problem, since Enfants is really his only piece of prose fiction with enough of a reputation to be widely available in English; and I'm not enough of a poetry, theatre, or French cinema fan to search out his other work. In essence, though, Enfants did leave a notable impression on me due to the power of its ideas and quality of its prose, but I can't say I enjoyed it in the way I would've like to. I suppose that might have been the effect Cocteau was looking for with this book; not to be loved as a favourite by anyone, but instead to be remembered for its oddness by everyone, with its key ideas slowly permeating the mind of the reader over time to leave a lasting impression forever.