Let's Read: Les Fourmis - A Dive Into Yet More Weird French Genre Fiction

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Omicron

Omicron

"I already have dragons, I do not want men."
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Location
Brittany, France
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He/Him
Let's Read Les Fourmis
Bernard Werber: Origins Of Smugness

​


Welcome back, you fools.

Did you think we were done with Bernard Werber? No, the Great Genius of French speculative fiction has more in store for us. But today we do not tackle the sequel to Thanatonauts, nor his peculiar take on the origins of humanity. No, today we go back to the source, the original, the book that launched his career: Les Fourmis, published in English under the title Empire of the Ants.


"Surely this time Omicron will have to admit that I am a genius equal to Shakespeare."​


Empire of the Ants is a two-sided tale, one following a human family dealing with the mysterious house bequeathed to them by their strange uncle, the other the story of an ant-hive in the throes of a sinister conspiracy.

Empire is to date Werber's most successful novel. Published in 1991, translated in thirty languages and the only one of its books to be translated in English, it is inexplicably wildly popular in South Korea. It sold millions of copies and won several literary awards. It received a comic adaptation as well as an RTS video game adaptation that sees you trying to build your own ant-hive Age of Empires style.

In fact, Bernard Werber claims that his book was the inspiration behind Dreamworks' Antz. You know, the one with Woody Allen. I can find no other source for this claim other than Werber himself, but he seems like a trustworthy guy, and really who would ever willingly associate themselves with Antz if given the opportunity to do otherwise? He tells us that he has somewhere a letter he received from Steven Spielberg in which the great director himself tells him "uh, I didn't know there was a French version of this story, damn."

Last time we did this, I gave you an overview of what kind of author Werber is and what he represents for French genre literature. I don't want to reiterate myself here, but I do want to give you further insight into the man; so before we dig into the plot, I want to tell you how he describes his process of writing.

According to Werber, he started this novel at the age of 16, writing for four hours every day, he started over eighteen times and produced over a hundred different drafts until, twelve years later, the book was finally accepted by a publisher. And the book… is a cathedral.



This one, specifically. I am being entirely serious.​


Let me unpack this for a second.


Werber 101: The Shape of Stories.

Among the many ways of conceptualizing the construction of a narrative is the "map" or geometric representation of the plot.

A linear story goes directly from Point A to Point B to Point C. Paul is out of milk, goes to the store, buys some milk, goes back home and has breakfast. Simple.

A circular story is linear but takes us back to where we started. A bunch of idiots murder Keanu Reeves's dog, so Keanu Reeves tracks them down and kills them all one by one, then adopts a new dog and goes back home.

A more complex story might have the shape of a tree. Our group of heroes is tasked with overseeing the journey of a dangerous artifact. They first travel all together, facing dangers along the way, but eventually the group splits apart. We follow the individual plotlines of each character, and as they encounter new people, as some of them die, as new characters are introduced with their own plotlines, the story follows several branches all moving in parallel without being directly connected, until each individual plotline is resolved, producing the branching pattern of a tree.

According to Bernard Werber, his book is faaar more than all this: it is patterned after the Cathedral of Amiens. How the hell does that make any sense, you ask? Luckily, one of Werber's later books features a blatant self-insert in the form of a young aspiring author who decides to write a book about rats and to pattern its plot after the Cathedral of Chartres, so let's quote him directly:

Article:
I purchase a book on cathedrals and find out that their shapes correspond to the patterns of stars in the sky. Perfect. I am going to write my novel like a cathedral. I choose as model the cathedral of Chartres, a true jewel of the thirteenth century, full of symbols and hidden messages.

I carefully transcribe the map of the cathedral on a sheet of drawing paper and make it so the unfoldings of my narrative follow its thousand-years old shapes. The interconnections within my story will correspond to the crossings of the naves, my setpiece moments to the keystones. With this method, I have fun developing more and more parallel plotlines. My writing becomes more fluid, my character arcs are naturally inscribed in this perfect structure.

I listen to the music of Bach. Jean-Sébastien Bach also composed pieces in the style of a cathedral. Sometimes, two lines of music interweave to create the illusion of a third one that is not played by any instrument. I try to reproduce that effect with my writing using two plotlines which overlap in such a way as to create the idea of a third plotline, which does not actually exist.


If I wrote a pretentious French writers telling you that his story about ants going to war is actually the literary equivalent of a cathedral, you would think I was being a bit on the nose. But you underestimate the genius of Werber.

Now, you might be thinking, with such a lofty narrative design and so many years in the writing, surely this will be a doorstopper epic and we will be here all year. So how long is Empire of the Ants?

Well, in its pocket format which I have here, it's just over 300 pages. Thanatonauts was longer, so I have good hope we'll be done within a month. From past interviews I am pretty sure there was a 1000-page draft of the story at some point until the editors put a stop to that nonsense.

When I was a teenager, the elusive doorstopper version of Empire of the Ants was an elusive Grail that I would do anything to have instead of this tiny glimpse at something greater.

Because let me be clear, dear readers.

Teenage me unreservedly, unabashedly, dare I even say proselytizingly fucking loved Empire of the Ants.


I even tried to play the video game. One glance at this UI should tell you how well that went.​

So let's dig in.
 
And watched.

I read Empire of the Ants as a teen. It had novelty appeal I suppose before I noticed how Werber copied himself from book to book and how his ideas are generally overbearing crap.
 
Part 1 - What Is It With French Authors And Lame Middle-Aged Dudes
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    • Part 1 - What Is It With French Authors And Lame Middle-Aged Dudes


    Our story opens on a neat factoid:

    Article:
    During the few seconds it will take you to read these four lines:
    -40 humans and 700 million ants will be born on Earth.
    -30 humans and 500 million ants will die on Earth.

    Human: Mammal whose size varies between 1 and 2 meters. Weight: between 30 and 100 kg. Gestation period: 9 months. Diet: Omnivorous. Estimated population: Over 5 billion individuals.

    Ant: Insect whose size varies between 0,01 and 3 centimeters. Weight: Between 1 and 150 milligrams. Eggs laid: Arbitrary numbers depending on sperm stocks. Diet: Omnivorous. Likely population: Over a billion billion individuals.

    -Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge.​



    And not a drop to drink.​

    I quote this bit in full because it's an interesting first look at this book's approach to trivia and important information. It's less interested in direct scientific accuracy or relevance than it is in using loose data to convey a feeling. Here, the idea is that ants, while much smaller than humans, are far more numerous, but more importantly in laying these factoids side by side it is drawing a direct equivalency between the two. What this passage is telling us is not anything about humans or ants as such, rather it is telling us that on some level ants and humans are similar and comparable beings who can be compared on equal terms.

    It also names drop Edmond Wells and his loftily-titled book, both of which will come up again and again. If you're wondering what the hell "relative and absolute knowledge" might be, we'll, uh, get to that.

    But without further ado, let's dig into the actual story.

    The first line of the book is "You'll see, this isn't at all what you're expecting," so from the get-go I want to smack the author for unwarranted cheekiness. Don't get meta on me right off the gate, you haven't earned it yet.

    The line is spoken, in-character, by a real estate agent who is introducing a building to its new owner. Said new owner, named Jonathan Wells, has just inherited an apartment owned by his late uncle Edmond Wells (didn't take long for him to crop up again). The place is dusty and painted grey all over, but it's also a large, historical building dating back to the Renaissance, so he is quite happy with his new acquisition, especially considering that he is currently unemployed, having been fired by the locksmith company he previously worked for. Jonathan moves in with his wife Lucie, their son Nicolas and their dog Ouarzazate, a dwarf poodle.

    Article:
    "Did you know him well, that prodigal uncle?" asked Lucie.
    "Uncle Edmond? Actually, all I remember of him is that he would play airplane with me when I was little. One time I got so afraid, I pissed on him."
    They both laughed.
    "Already a scaredy cat, uh?" Lucie teased him.
    Jonathan pretended not to hear anything.
    "He didn't hold a grudge. He just told my mother, 'well, we know who's not going to turn into a pilot…' Afterwards, Mom told me he was following my life attentively, but I never saw him again."
    "What was his job?"
    "He was a scientist. A biologist, I think."
    Jonathan remained thoughtful. In the end, he didn't know much about his benefactor.


    OMINOUS.

    Also very dull. I am not interested in these people. This is actually something I distinctly remember reading the book as a teenager: even as I considered it one of my favorite book, I would only skim the human-centric chapters to get a vague idea of what was happening but didn't care to read them in-full. In part because these characters were boring and in part because I thought it would get too spooky for reasons that will become very apparent later. My younger self was deathly afraid of anything that looked like it might possibly be vaguely spooky (we're talking "Goosebumbs is too much for me to handle" here), which is amusing considering horror is now my favorite genre.


    This was more than I could handle. Now I love Hereditary.
    ​

    In fact we've only been two pages with Jonathan when we suddenly do a JUMP CUT. To where?

    Article:
    6 km away:

    BEL-O-KAN,

    1 meter high.
    50 stories underground.
    50 stories above-ground.
    The largest city in the region.
    Estimated population: 18 million inhabitants.

    Annual production:
    50 litres of aphid honeydew.
    10 litres of scale insect honeydew.
    4 kg of common mushrooms.
    Gravel displaced: 1 ton.
    Navigable corridors: 120 kilometres.
    Ground surface: 2 m².​

    A beam has passed. A leg just moved. The first motion since the beginning of hibernation three months ago. Another leg advances slowly, terminating in two claws that spread little by little. A third leg stretches out. Then a thorax. Then a being. Then twelve beings.

    They shiver to help translucent blood circulate through the networks of their arteries. It goes from thick, dough-like, to a syrup-like state and finally to liquid. Slowly the cardiac pump resumes its work. It sends out the vital fluid to the extremities of their limbs. Biomechanical components warm up. Hypercomplex articulations swivel. Everywhere, plate-armored kneecaps play at finding their utmost tension point.

    They rise. Their bodies take breath. Their movements are deconstructed. Slow-motion dancing. They shake lightly. Their front legs joined before their mouths as if in a prayer, but no, they are wetting their claws to polish their antennae.


    Oh yeah baby. Now we're cooking!

    This is our first look at the ant-hive of Bel-O-Kan, waking from its wintry slumber. We follow a group of twelve ants, the first ones to have awoken, as they make their way to the outside of the hive to warm in the sun, then clean themselves methodically. The ants are described as exhausted, in pain, wanting to go back to sleep, but motivating themselves with an "old red wood ant song," our first bits of characterization and humanity given to the ants.

    One of the twelve is a drone, a fertile male, smaller than the others; we are informed that his lifespan is measured in months, but that he is in some ways privileged, being gifted with additional, thermosensitive eyes and functional wings. Having warmed himself, the nameless drone goes back into the hive to share his body heat with sleeping workers to help them wake up...

    And we cut off right there. In as much of a hurry to get to the ants as he is to leave them, Werber switches right back to like ten pages of family drama. Because why not.


    The mighty hive of Bel-O-Kan, a central location of our story.​

    We are back with the Wellses.

    This is a good point for me to pause and mention that this book's organization makes me want to pull my hair out. It is not divided into numbered chapters; it is instead divided into four sections. Within each section, ant-focused passages and human-focused passages succeed each other every couple pages. This makes for a very disjointed narrative and is very annoying for a Let's Read.

    So, Jonathan is visiting his grandmother Augusta, who lives in solitude after the death of her two children, uncle Edmond and Jonathan's nameless parent. They talk, giving us some clumsy exposition about how Jonathan was fired because he refused to be on call 24/7 and that he had previously attempted to take part in New Age communes that failed because 'parasites' would latch onto them and because Lucie was tired of doing all the cooking and cleaning all the dishes, which tells me they suck at communes (granted, so do a lot of people).

    The book off-handedly informs us that Augusta was alive for "the turn of the Millenium," meaning we're somewhere in the 2030s judging by Jonathan's age. Augusta then has this amazing complaint:

    Article:
    "Oh! You know, what really strikes me is how nothing has changed. When I was young, we thought with the passing of the millenium there would be extraordinary things, and you see, nothing's evolved. There's still lonely old people, still jobless people, still smoke-spewing scars. Even ideas haven't changed. Last year they rediscovered surrealism, the year before it was rock'n roll, and newspapers are already predicting the big return of the miniskirt this summer. If this keeps up we'll be digging up the old ideas of the turn of the previous century: communism, psychoanalysis, relativity…"



    "Wait, I'm sorry, back up. Communism, psychoanalysis and what?"​


    I love how apparently in this universe relativity was… disproven? Einstein doesn't real? What? I have no fucking clue. Bernard Werber did predict the rise of Twitter Communists, though, so props to him for that. There's a mention of global warming getting worse all the time, and Augusta complains that she's going to die of old age instead of in a nuclear fireball like she thought she would in the 80s, which would have been way cooler.

    I like Augusta.

    Anyway, she tells Jonathan about Edmond, because as will quickly become apparent Jonathan isn't just boring and lame: he actively doesn't matter. Jonathan exists primarily as a vessel through which to learn about Edmond Wells, the Coolest Man Who Ever Lived in the author's eyes. So who is Edmond Wells?

    As a child, Edmond had two obsessions: taking things like clocks and toys apart to see how they worked, and building "nests," from pillow forts to tree-houses, where he found some refuge from the world. When his father snapped at him over one too many lair and beat him, Edmond became sullen and distant. He attempted suicide at the age of seven after a teacher criticized him, then attempted murder on another teacher with a pair of scissors. He was an A-student in any discipline he was interested in and an F-student in any he wasn't, with no in-between. While he was a problem child to say the least, Augusta talks about him with fondness for what she saw as his great intellect and mysterious mind.

    Which is demonstrated, of course, when she brings up the very first of what will be a long, long recurring theme in Werber's work: riddles.

    How, Edmond asked his mother, can you build four equilateral triangles with only six matches? Jonathan thinks this is an easy problem, tries to do it, fails repeatedly then asks Augusta for the solution, which she admits she never figured out. "You have to think differently," her son told her.

    Napkin riddles imbued with alleged greater meaning come up in every Werber book. I am pretty sure he has a whole register of them he just browses through when writing a book to decide which bullshit riddle he'll be throwing at us next.

    Anyway, Edmond grew distant from his family after starting college, was only sporadically in touch, spent some time in Africa, came back to France, and eventually his mother learned that he'd died in an, uh, rather unlikely fashion.

    He was stung to death by wasps.


    One day, when I was a kid walking by the roadside, I saw a wasp floating next to me. Then another one. Then another. I caught my breath and stood very still, as I had always been told they reacted aggressively to movement.
    What I failed to realize at the time was that my foot was sitting firmly on top of their nest.    ​


    Now I know what you're thinking - that happens all the time. But the thing he didn't die of an allergic reaction. He died of wasp venom poisoning. He was stung by so many wasps that his autopsy revealed he had 0.3 grams of wasp venom per litre of blood.

    I don't even know if that's possible. Did he just farm wasps, milk their venom and then chug it like cheap beer? Is that what happened? Or did he coat himself in honey and bear-tackle a wasp nest while shouting "YOU'RE JUST LAMER HORNETS"?

    He was, at his own request, buried in an unmarked grave in the middle of the woods. After looking thoughtfully at a picture of Edmond and his mother (ah, there we go, his mother was Suzy Wells), Jonathan receives a letter which Edmond bequeathed to Augusta, to be given to his nephew after he claimed the apartment.

    Jonathan opens it, and finds the letter to contain this single sentence:

    Article:
    "DO NOT EVER GO INTO THE BASEMENT!"



    It's actually really difficult to find one of these without a poorly-photoshopped-in monster at the bottom of the staircase. ​



    It will surprise no one to learn that going into the basement is a major component of the human side of the book's plot.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Omicron said:
    It also names drop Edmond Wells and his loftily-titled book, both of which will come up again and again. If you're wondering what the hell "relative and absolute knowledge" might be, we'll, uh, get to that.
    Click to expand...
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    Ah the Encyclopedia aka the reason most people think this book is good (that and the Ants fact). I'm serious by the way. Around me most people who like Werber talk about how they learned things by reading the novels.
     
    Another Omicron let's read?
    I am here for this!

    And yeah, my favorite part of this book as a child was also the Encyclopedia. It was like "random page" on Wikipedia, but weirder!
    I even had friends who tried to overinterpret it like it was some master-crafted puzzle, or deep philosphy or whatever. :facepalm:
    The ants were often interesting, but I never met anyone who was really into the human characters.
     
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    Omicron said:
    How, Edmond asked his mother, can you build four equilateral triangles with only six matches? Jonathan thinks this is an easy problem, tries to do it, fails repeatedly then asks Augusta for the solution, which she admits she never figured out. "You have to think differently," her son told her.
    Click to expand...
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    Make a prism, in case anyone's wondering.
     
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    I must say I really appreciate the... Strength of y'all's reactions. It makes me feel really appreciated for bringing you the wonders of The Man Werber.
     
    21stCentury said:
    wait....
    I thought it was make a square the put the remaining two matches in an X pattern...
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    Wait, are you telling me the solution isn't to burn down a toy store to salvage the plastic learning triangles within?

    Omi, I thank you for your continued sacrifice. I'll be holding two zoom memorials for you childhood and sanity respectively, do you have any patron, saint, god, game developer, political pundit, or eldritch abomination you'd like me to include in the ceremonies?

    Be warned, my R'lyehian is a bit rusty.
     
    Renu said:
    Make a prism, in case anyone's wondering.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    A triangular prism would require nine matches and would not create four triangles. The real solution is the friends we made along the way.

    Omicron said:
    I don't even know if that's possible.
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    It isn't. Wasps inject something in the single digit micrograms per sting. Exact calculations vary with wasp species and with Edmond's size, but this saturation would require the total venom of 100-300k wasps and millions or tens of millions of stings.
     
    Ah yes, Bernard Werber, the man who apparently spent half his writing time copying bogus pop-sci facts from the municipal library.

    Like, even his writing style is written like it was copy-pasted from a NatGeo article. That would be kind of impressive, if it also wasn't boring as shit.
     
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    Omicron said:
    Anyway, she tells Jonathan about Edmond, because as will quickly become apparent Jonathan isn't just boring and lame: he actively doesn't matter. Jonathan exists primarily as a vessel through which to learn about Edmond Wells, the Coolest Man Who Ever Lived in the author's eyes. So who is Edmond Wells?

    As a child, Edmond had two obsessions: taking things like clocks and toys apart to see how they worked, and building "nests," from pillow forts to tree-houses, where he found some refuge from the world. When his father snapped at him over one too many lair and beat him, Edmond became sullen and distant. He attempted suicide at the age of seven after a teacher criticized him, then attempted murder on another teacher with a pair of scissors. He was an A-student in any discipline he was interested in and an F-student in any he wasn't, with no in-between. While he was a problem child to say the least, Augusta talks about him with fondness for what she saw as his great intellect and mysterious mind.
    Click to expand...
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    .... so Mr. Razorback reincarnated after all.
     
    I don't know, I'm kind of digging it so far.

    Of course, I'm a complete slut for "the strange weirdly specific instruction/warning about the place you just moved into" and "strange dude who died in an equally strange way" horror tropes so it might just be the author jamming his fingers right in my terror-joy buttons.
     
    MagicMan333 said:
    I don't know, I'm kind of digging it so far.

    Of course, I'm a complete slut for "the strange weirdly specific instruction/warning about the place you just moved into" and "strange dude who died in an equally strange way" horror tropes so it might just be the author jamming his fingers right in my terror-joy buttons.
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    Yeah after Thanatonautes I'm assuming it'll get crazy, but this beginning hasn't been too bad.
     
    The last book you read for us was a pretty good example of "self-righteous asshat gets high on own farts and solves universe for God," so I'm deffo putting a bag of popcorn in the microwave for this one.
     
    You should dive into French Decadent literature next.

    ....And no, I barely read the thread at all.

    Zhang Jiao OUT!

    *Flies away*

    :tongue:
     
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