Review: Querelle Of Roberval by Kevin Lambert (translated by Donald Winkler)

Deep winter on the shore of a frozen lake in backwater Quebec. It’s 30-below, Ski-doos are the mode of transport. A small group of workers gather before the entrance of a sawmill, the Chemin Saint-Hubert, one of the last bastions of local, independent ownership. The workers are striking. Their log of claims is broad: wages, overtime, discontent with nebulous plans to sell to a large corporation fluent in ESG, DEI and green-wash.

The ends matter less than the means. The boss arranges for the strikers’ coffee to be poisoned with bleach; one of the workers is blacklisted. Two of the workers spike the local beach with broken glass in protest against the yuppies buying up waterfront properties and privatising access. The violence, initially, is stark but sporadic. When Querelle spectacularly goes off the deep end and Lambert summons an orgy of mythological violence it sweeps everyone up in its path.

Orgy is the right word. Before we meet the strikers as a collective we are introduced to their youngest member, 27-year-old Querelle, a refugee from Montreal where his high-school friends have moved on into careers and families. No matter if he’s a bit of a dropkick, he’s got a big dick and a six pack, and is worshipped by the hordes of local boys he finds on Grindr, including a trio of demon twinks who might be actual demons. And boy do they worship: they are sent into raptures and ecstasies in “the bed of their imagined assassin, their glorious executioner”. Querelle may be a bit of a dumb brute, but “in the blows from his pelvis there flickers a different kind of genius”. Like thirsty tweeters lusting after celebrities, these boys desperately need Querelle to step on them, destroy their b******, literally murder them.

Like David Owen Kelly’s recent Host City, Lambert wields a fusion of lore from proletariat revolution to classical myth. Lambert’s Querelle evokes the spectre of that other one, Genet’s ur-being that slinks through his foggy French seaport. That Querelle found perverse freedom under the surveillance and coercion of the police state. What is our 21st Century hero railing against? Lambert offers some important updates: the Great Coming Out, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and a feminist twist that is also a kind of passing of the torch (I’d love to know what Querelle of Brest would make of same-sex marriage). But power remains largely intact: colonial, capitalist, extractive. Is Querelle Of Roberval a call to unionisation smuggled into erotica (“People usually have the impression that union meetings are dull; but in fact that’s where you can get it on”) or vice versa? Is fucking/getting fucked by the system the same as fucking/getting fucked by a man?

Many of the Roberval strikers are dubious about the methods of industrial action; their arguments for and against dominate the first part of this novel, which is structured as a Greek tragedy. As with Gareth Greenwell’s Cleanness, this is in part a meditation on the power of the masses, for good and for evil. Your wavering support for a good cause might be propped up by leaning against another’s; equally, you might be encouraged to commit atrocity in the name of going along with a crowd out for blood. A late admission by the narrator calls into question the nature of the novel’s gory climax: is this all a scary bedtime story for managers, or is it corporate propaganda, a horny fantasy of rabid unions slavering at the door? Nevertheless, its less heightened moments land some pointed blows on the misogyny, racism, homophobia and grift of the labour movement.

Lambert’s lush and lascivious prose is equally adept at tracing the supply chains of dispossession and extraction in Canada’s northern forests as it is at conjuring fervid violence or lingering over the male form. In one extraordinary passage Lambert dispatches the patriarch with furious grace:

The fathers resentful of Querelle are very much attuned to their sons’ sexual potential. In silence they lust after this hallowed zone, where the pitch of two buttocks forms a haunch in whose heart all of Roberval dreams of lodging itself … It is in their sensing the sexual passivity of their offspring, in imagining him being mounted by the worker — while instantly erasing this image from their minds … that summons these signs and instils this desire.

Perhaps this then is Querelle’s greatest power (past and present), the bogeyman of “another male looming behind their children that fills the fathers with dread.” Lambert gleefully preys on these fears.

Gay rating: 5/5 for graphic sex, queer characters, and themes.