ABSTRACT
Delvaux’s masterpiece of 1941, La Ville inquiete (‘The Anxious Town’), projects an image of melancholy, disquiet and bafflement that is close to the atmosphere of Robbe-Grillet’s early fiction. This dense composition features bare-breasted, middle-aged women looking startled as a hesitant, bespectacled old man, dressed like a 1920s solicitor in dark suit, wing collar and bowler hat, gropes his way through a scene of confusion in a landscape of naked people and classical temples. A catastrophe seems to be impending, but these people are too paralysed by anxiety and doubt to do much about it. Le Carre has made something of a speciality of enigmatic stories in which the systematic assemblage of the plot is more important than the subject-matter. The Voyeur is a deeply disturbing book about real anxiety and obsessive, guilty fascination with evil. The Voyeur is Robbe-Grillet’s finest work, a satisfying and moving piece of fiction in which the technique of narration is exactly appropriate to the subject.
