There are bedroom novelists and writers from “the great outdoors”, as Michel Le Bris said. Jean-Christophe Rufin belongs to this second category: he never started a manuscript before going to see the place he wanted to talk about. Last year, having planned Of gold and jungle, he therefore went to the Sultanate of Brunei. Upon receiving him, the ambassador recommended two reference texts: Brunei, by Marie-Sybille de Vienne, a university study published by the very serious CNRS editions, and Scam in Brunei, fiction that we imagine to be more prankish, since it is a SAS signed Gérard de Villiers. A year later, Rufin welcomes us to his Parisian apartment, not far from the French Academy, where he occupies chair no. 28 (which was that of Sainte-Beuve, more of a homebody than him). The evocation of the author of SAS relaxes the atmosphere: “Scam in Brunei, It holds up! The book dates from 1989, things have changed since then, but honestly Gérard de Villiers had seen things… Well, please don’t compare me to him!”
Gold and jungle features not Prince Malko Linge but a certain Marvin Glowic, the creator of the Golhoo search engine. Any resemblance to Larry Page, co-founder of Google, is not absolutely coincidental: “My character is inspired by him. I had the opportunity to discuss his essay with Giuliano da Empoli The Chaos Engineers. He pointed out a fascinating phenomenon: the dissociation among these people between hypercompetence in a specific field (in this case, digital) and an abysmal naivety, a total ignorance in political, historical and geographical matters. They are big teenagers mobilized by simple and enormous ideas – the difference between teenagers and them is that they have considerable means.” Marvin Glowic is a libertarian, with the delusions of grandeur that goes with it: “I I’m not here to judge, nothing worries me in itself, but it is clear that libertarianism exists. This current is much more powerful than we can imagine. And, taken to the extreme, it is a form of totalitarianism: if we want to have absolute freedom, we cannot tolerate any state, any control, any limitation – and the thirst for independence can lead to a quest for everything. power. Currently, California is restricting Gafam. I will perhaps give them ideas, but it seems to me that, for their research on transhumanism more than for tax reasons, they will one day have to find spaces allowing them to abstract themselves from all the norms that constrain them. …”
This is where the temptation for a new kind of putsch comes into play. When he was ambassador to Senegal, between 2007 and 2010, Rufin had heard about the concept of a “turnkey coup d’état” from the president at the time, Abdoulaye Wade. Wade had confided to him that he had been approached by a secret agency when he was in opposition. His interlocutors offered him to take care of everything to put him in power, it was up to him to then pay them. Wade had refused. In Of gold and jungle, Marvin Glowic pulls the strings, after having chosen Brunei to establish his sovereignty: “To embark on a novel, several elements must come together. This story of the turnkey coup d’état has been running through my head for about fifteen years. And I had wanted to write about Brunei for a long time. Finally, I have always been interested in private security companies, in their role, in all this vague nebula of mercenarism which had its moment of glory at a certain moment , notably with Bob Denard, and which has been transformed in recent years, to the point of forming quite sophisticated forces, both for intelligence and for action.”
Water has flowed under the bridges since Tintin and the Picaros and in Of gold and jungle, THE fake news replace grenades and machine guns: “Digital technologies give considerable weight to issues that were formerly military: for example, the control of information. Previously, three biffins armed with a weapon took over the radio and television station and a proclamation. Today, we can subvert information, and a new era has opened, as we have seen with the real or supposed attempts at Russian influence during the American elections or with the way in which, With the help of digital technology, China is trying to take control of Pacific states to isolate Taiwan.”
“I never built myself around a utopia”
However, in these changing times, certain classics remain relevant. One of the characters of Of gold and jungle, Delachaux, the theoretician of the fine team of mercenaries, quotes as follows: Coup d’état technique, by Malaparte, a book dear to Rufin: “It has fascinated me for a long time. Released in 1931, it had a real impact on the life of Malaparte, who had to go into exile – Mussolini was mad at him to death. It is a essay, but with a rare power of evocation. It remains entirely readable. Malaparte sometimes takes obsolete examples, such as Primo de Rivera, which we make fun of nowadays, but the pages on Mussolini remain fascinating. I also mention in the novel Edward Luttwak, of which Coup d’état, instructions for use was an event in 1968. The book continues to play the role of a vade mecum for any apprentice golfer. Luttwak explains where to place the tanks. It is convenient !”
At the end of the novel, we noted these astonishing sentences: “He is an idealist. The species of man that I consider to be the most dangerous.” Was Rufin never an idealist? Even in 1976, when, as a young 24-year-old doctor, he participated in his first humanitarian mission in Eritrea? “My generation paid a heavy price for idealism and ideologies. I was raised by a grandfather who had spent two years in Buchenwald. My first wife’s family had been sent to the gulag. I did not never built around a utopia, I am a centrist, the opposite of radicalism. This is why I could not have had a political career: I am incapable of insulting someone, I interested in what he says.”
After a quarter of a century spent with Gallimard, who accompanied him in the honorary course literary (Goncourt prize in 2001, for Brazil Red, election to the Academy in 2008), Rufin joined his great friend Pierre Lemaitre at Calmann-Lévy. Turning his back on snobbish snubbers like Eric Reinhardt, he is not ashamed to say: “The dimension of entertainment and pleasure must remain at the heart of romantic literature.” General public writer (the first edition of Gold and jungle is 80,000 copies), he claims two models: Alexandre Dumas, for his historical frescoes, and John le Carré, for his contemporary books. This captivating adventure novel that is Gold and junglehe wrote it in five weeks flat, without a plan, as he explains to us: “For personal comfort, I like to be involved in a form of grace where you are fully into your book and where you write it almost at the speed at which the reader will read it. The spirit of seriousness does a lot of damage. For my part, I don’t worry about it. I’ve been surviving in the literary world for twenty-five years, with a somewhat marginal position… I like to have fun when I’m in front of a page. We’re not here to make people suffer: I’m a doctor by training, not a dentist!”
Of gold and jungle, by Jean-Christophe Rufin. Calmann-Lévy, 443 p., €22.50.
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