Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly and the Suspended Step of the World

Through his characters, Hervé Le Tellier explores the question of duplication from a personal, social, and philosophical perspective.

The AnomalyBy the end of 2020, it had almost become a cliché to joke about there being a glitch in the matrix. It was a way to convey our utter inability to process the bizarre events of 2020 and the fact that the year somehow seemed to last longer than rationally possible. When Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly was released in French last year it might have been understandable to ask how to classify a novel about a weather phenomenon that spews out a duplicate Air France plane full of passengers three months after the original plane landed with the same individuals onboard. Is it speculative fiction, a thriller, literary, or fantasy?

Flash-forward a year and the Prix Goncourt-winning The Anomaly has been released in English, and now it’s clear that however it’s categorized, it’s a quintessential novel of 2020. Its characters—including everyone from a contract killer and the fictional author of the eponymous book-within-a-book to Xi Jinping, Stephen Colbert, and an all-but-named Donald Trump—eventually conclude that we are living in a simulation.

What if a bizarre twist of events like that described in the book had actually occurred? It might have simply been filed somewhere among a global pandemic, murder hornets, Pentagon-released UFO videos, a siege on the U.S. Capitol, two impeachments, mysterious desert monoliths appearing and disappearing, World War III rumblings, and a vanishing star. Taken together, it all seems simultaneously surreal and routine. With barely a question, the characters conclude that the duplication must be a “test” by the simulators. Are we living in a simulation? Probably not, but what event would be strange enough after 2020 to convince us that we were? The Anomaly contemplates that question at exactly the right moment.

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In fact, details outside of Le Tellier’s control ultimately add an extra layer of incongruity to the story that makes the simulation question even more substantial. The majority of The Anomaly is set in June 2021, just far enough in the future from the novel’s original publication date to allow Le Tellier to imagine a world in which Trump remains president in 2021 and the coronavirus pandemic is referred to in the past tense. Now, when the “long lockdown” to beat “last year’s crisis” is offered as an example of collective thoughtfulness and patience as scientists worked to understand the situation, it leaves us with an even more unsettled sense that something is off. After all, we can hardly be said to have beaten the pandemic yet. If the anomaly is a test by the fictional simulators, what does it say about the likelihood of the real world passing such a test when we’re still struggling with “last year’s crisis?”

Through the numerous passengers, Le Tellier explores the question of duplication from a personal, social, and philosophical perspective. By virtue of relying on so many characters, each one is largely inchoate and archetypal—profiles meant to explore the bigger questions at The Anomaly’s heart through different lenses. Victor Miesel, duplicate of the author who wrote the book-within-the-book, asks himself at one point: “Three characters, seven, twenty? How many simultaneous stories would a reader consent to follow?”

Le Tellier writes with a self-conscious eye toward adaptation, as the book is intentionally evocative of blockbusters and polished streaming originals. One character is continuously referred to as a knock-off version of generic white male actors. But perhaps that’s only part of the larger twisting and turning of what Le Tellier has himself called a literary scoubidou? There’s nothing more literally two-dimensional and simulated than a television program, after all. Are we all living our lives situated too self-consciously toward the proverbial camera?

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Despite alluding to the obvious religious and philosophical implications of the phenomenon, the book largely fails to explore them in the broadest sense. Any answers it offers come in the more personal, internal deliberations of its characters as they wrestle with what the duplications mean for them. At a societal level, the only clear answer we get is that when faced with a test like this we’re likely to fail it—whatever that means exactly. But would we trust mankind to pass such a test, having been through what we have over the past few years?

In the one-on-one character confrontations, Le Tellier does force the reader to reflect on some truly unnerving questions. How would it feel to look at someone in the face who knows you from the inside out? To be confronted by someone that can see straight through the presentations we put on for others and knows our most shameful feelings? It’s in these reactions that Le Tellier’s societal cynicism makes way for a more personal optimism.

While at a societal or global level we may fail to come to terms with the philosophical threat that this test poses, when confronted by the question of whether the duplicate or original is the “real” deal, or even what real means, The Anomaly’s characters are largely able to make space for their doppelgängers. And, in fact, most seem to find a sort of reprieve in doing so. Perhaps it’s a testament to our times or Le Tellier’s instincts that the characters’ subdued reactions to meeting their twins don’t seem so unrealistic. It’s an anti-solipsism that feels relieving for a time of increased isolation and image-curation.

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The Anomaly is now available from Other Press.

Matthew Snider

Matthew Snider reviews books for PopMatters, and writes on culture, literature, and politics from Maryland.

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