At a birthday party. The room is filled to the brim with cranky toddlers. One of them is crying because the choice of cake is not to a flavour of his liking. The cake in question is a store-bought sponge with bland vanilla frosting.
A clown barges in. He is tonight’s entertainment. Another kid starts crying. He has a phobia of clowns. The clown tries to console the kid. His smile. That spine-chilling smile with a smirk smeared with red that looks dangerously close to blood. The wailing continues, the clown gives up.
The person typing this has a phobia of clowns as well. But, he wonders, is he too old to cry? He can just walk out, right? But, the door is bolted. The rancid odour of the stale cake engulfs the room. He spots something. The clown has a gun.
It doesn’t take too long for the clown to pull out the gun and make the child stare down its barrel. The clown feels insulted. The clown looks at the person typing this and immediately rushes to him. Gun to the forehead, the clown threatens “you fucking rat!”
The host is trying to open the door. The bolted door. This is a house without any windows. This is a house situated in the remotest part of a rural settlement. The wailing and shouting barely permeate the walls and what’s audible is nothing more than a hum.
The person tries to continue typing. The clown snatches his phone and looks at what is written. He starts laughing and exclaims, “You’re trying to cash in on us? As typical as a writer can get?”. The clown throws the phone against a wall and it shatters to pieces.
The host hears a thud. She walks up to a neighbor. Nobody’s home. The host walks back to her door.
The clown tells everyone to lie on the floor. The person who just lost his phone spots that the gun is not loaded. He sneaks up to the clown and steals the cartridge from his pocket. The clown fishes in his pocket for the cartridge and that’s when the person says, “Looking for this?”.
The person and the clown get into a fistfight and the person manages to disarm the clown. He then loads the gun and points it at the clown. He uses the landline in the house to call the cops.
As soon as he hears the sirens wailing, he opens the door, gun in his hand, he leads the clown to the cops. The host stands stunned! The cops arrest the clown who turns out to be a fugitive on the run.
Nobody is in the mood for stale cake. The host asks “I have a couple of beers in the fridge, let’s have those instead?”. The person who is wondering about which phone should he get next answers, “But what about the kids?”. The host replies, “Who else will gorge on that cake?”. The person replies “Is it fit for human consumption?”. The host replies, “You have not lost your sense of humor even after being at the receiving end of a 9mm barrel!”.
I haven’t figured out what happens next. After watching a hostage drama on television a few years back, I wanted to write a novel that spans a single, drawn-out day where it is more about the atmospheric claustrophobia that a situation like this entails than merely a protagonist-antagonist thriller. I wanted to write something closer to what I would call domestic noir. Mauvignier’s novel reminded me of the book I wanted to write.
The Birthday Party is a hostage drama where, for a change, it is the drama that takes center stage. It’s as much about the characters as flesh and blood people as it is about the peril they are in. Laurent Mauvignier writes in long, serpent-like sentences that coil around the reader’s mind and gradually, through increasing tension, squeeze it to a pulp. As each sentence goes on, the claustrophobia builds to an almost unbearable crescendo and before long, there is barely room for even a sigh.
A sigh is the closest one could manage to a gasp of air, especially when the book is intent on drowning its reader in a sea of claustrophobia.
At a whopping 500+ page length, it could have ended up being a bloated affair, but the book is anything but that. On the contrary, in spite of spanning a single claustrophobically atmospheric day, this is a read that flies by, in spite of its deliberately slow pacing, giving the reader time and space to soak in each and every detail. Or maybe it flew by for me because I love slow pacing.