‘Lie With Me’ by Philippe Besson, 2017

Yesterday I watched the film version of this book of the same name which I read a few weeks ago. Described in one review as the French ‘Brokeback Mountain’ with ‘impeccable manners’, it certainly moved me as much as its American roughneck older cousin did the first time I watched it. Both film and novel tell the story of an intense but short-lived teenage love affair between the main character/ narrator and another boy at his school. In middle age, and now a successful writer, the protagonist learns what has happened to his first love in the intervening years through a chance meeting with his former lover’s adult son.

While the film stays close to the story of the book, its denouement is more obviously cathartic and tender; its novel antecedent provides closure through the same plot device but not enough to wash away the taste of tragedy which suffuses both versions. The celluloid version eventually does give you an emotional embrace which it has been frustratingly keeping at arm’s-length until almost the closing credits. The novel on the other hand leaves you desperate for some kind of tactile equivalence but having to accept that any reaching out for closure can only exist over an unbridgeable expanse of time, and through words and photographs, created in the past, but present in a stark version of the truth that has had to wait to be heard until the final page.

The English title given to the novel has come under fire for not being a direct translation of the original and thereby carrying a different meaning. The original French title is Arrête avec tes mensonges – ‘stop with your lies’. This is very different to the multi-meaning of ‘lie with me’. But both titles work and Besson has clearly approved the English version.

The book is dedicated to Thomas Andrieu, the name, we eventually learn, of the narrator’s teenage lover. The narrator himself is called Philippe. The same as the author. Truth and lies, fact and fiction, fantasy and reality are key themes of the book. The fictional Philippe remembers that his mother always told him to stop with his lies, a reference to his habit of making up stories about the people he observed in real life. The information merely throws the viewer/ reader further off guard and questioning just how much of what is in front of them is fabrication and how much is literary autobiography; how much fabulation, how much autofiction.

One of the triumphs of Besson’s creation is that deciding is not the point, nor a necessity, but that thinking about it is. Like the discrepancy between the meaning of the respective French and English titles, much of the intellectual and emotional strength in the story stem from its ambiguity. Something I will bear in mind when it come to my own writing. Indeed, as I did when giving this post its title.