A Double Life

by Frederic Raphael

The life of Guy de Roumegouse is one of imposture, of playing roles, and of being constantly untrue to himself. In retirement in the south of France, he begins to write his memoirs, and in doing so confronts the betrayals and dislocations that have shaped and warped his life. At the heart of Guy’s duplicity is the repression of his homosexuality during a time when the Vichy government controlled all in war-torn France. At an age when this young man was supposed to experience a sexual awakening, he instead went into hiding both physically and emotionally. This fictional memoir is elegantly crafted and told in a prose as cold and paradoxical as its narrator.

374 pages, Hardcover

Published May 1, 2000

About the author

Writer, critic and broadcaster, Frederic Raphael was educated at Charterhouse School and at St John's College, Cambridge. He has written several screenplays and fifteen novels. His The Glittering Prizes was one of the major British and American television successes of the 1970s.

Reviews

[Peter Burton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hate to write this but I only got a third of the way through before I gave up.It is very well written and intelligent,but too intelligent for me.I struggled with the detailed style and had to concentrate on every sentence to make sure I fully understood the aphorisms etc.and I felt that at my age life was too short to spend so much time on it when I had so much more to read.If I live long enough I may come back to it.I checked out other reviews on line and did not feel compelled to finish,although they did give me the gist of the story.

[Robert Wechsler]

I was lucky enough to have been able to publish this, Frederic Raphael's 18th and most ambitious and successful novel. It is the fictional memoir of a French diplomat who has been constantly untrue to himself. At the heart of Guy de Roumegouse's duplicity is his inability to desire what he desires, to be what he is. And therefore his is a life of imposture, a life steeped in paradox.

Guy's duplicity is echoed in the actions of the French under the Vichy government during the Second World War. An adolescent then, Guy was caught up in the Resistance, but it is what happened — and what did not happen — before and during his period of hiding that truly set the tone for the rest of his life.

This novel seeks to excavate the contemporary French psyche via Guy's memories of the betrayals, most of them self-inflicted, that warped his life. This remarkable dramatic monologue is delivered in prose as cold and paradoxical as its narrator, but elegantly crafted and wittily epigrammatic. Guy's rational, French voice allows him to hide his true feelings from himself while disclosing them to readers and providing a powerful, moving narrative.

Here are a couple of quotes from the unfortunately few American reviews of the novel:

"[A] riveting, repulsive, and exceptionally rewarding novel." —Boston Sunday Globe

"Repressed histories, sexual and political, drive this brilliant and wrenching story of a man whose emotional response mechanism has been terminally misdirected. … [Raphael] has created a novel to remember out of a dispassionate vacuum. … alternately chilling and magnificently tragic." —Publishers Weekly

[Mike Finn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. Beautiful thoughtful language from beginning to end. The history of a disappointed articulate but dull and undynamic diplomat