August Books 4) Mourir à Creys-Malville, by Santi-Bucquoy
This is the second in the Chroniques de fin de siècle, written in 1985 but set in 1993 shortly after the breakup of Belgium and the subsequent invasion of Wallonia by the French; I read the first, Autonomes, a couple of months ago. There's not a lot about Belgium here, in fact, apart from the first few pages where Prince Laurent, installed as puppet king of Wallonia (wartime fascist collaborator Leon Degrelle having been recalled as geriatric prime minister) by the French, gets frisky with his German wife. (In reality Prince Laurent married an Englishwoman some years after this is set, and is in disgrace with the rest of the royal family at present.) The main plot is about Bernard Duval, a randy champion motorcyclist, recruited by the friends of Gérard Mordant, the hero of the first book, to go and find him in the devastation of the nuclear disaster at Creys-Malville in Burgundy. Despite the fact that Duval skips most of the mission briefing due to having a quick shag with one of his fellow activists, he manages to track down Mordant in the contaminated wastelands, and just by coincidence Mordant has hooked up with an Irish terrorist ex-girlfriend of Duval's in the meantime. The artwork is rather good but the plot and the politics, particularly the sexual politics, rather tiresome. (And although we are obviously supposed to think that the nuclear disaster is a black op by the Chirac/Le Pen regime, we don't really get the payoff here.)