‘Anger Under the Skin’: A Novel of Brutality, Treachery and Injustice | Babelia

As I continued reading The anger under the skin (Seix Barral, 2025; The angry one, French edition of 2023), barely assimilating the manifestations of the levels of perversion and cruelty that the human condition can harbor, could not help but narrate what its author, the French novelist Sorj Chalandon, with a rich tradition of the novel in his country committed to delving into those abysses of male behavior and the ways in which societies tend to treat the weakest, the most vulnerable, the excludable. By Victor Hugo The wretched and the Duma of The Count of Monte Cristo to Zola’s naturalistic tales (and let’s not forget the famous Bow tie by Henri Charrière), a novel of brutality, perfidy and injustice has been amassed that has attempted, like few others, to reveal what human beings are capable of doing when they practice evil against our fellow men. A narrative that always alters our senses and which, in many passages of this novel, can overwhelm our capacity for tolerance and assimilation.

Taking as an argument what could be the true story of Jules Bonneau, the orphan rejected by his grandparents who was interned in 1932 in the maritime and agricultural penal colony of Huate-Bouloge, on the Breton island of Belle-Ille-en-Mer, Sorj Chalandon offers us The anger under the skin a journey into the hells that have been, that can be, the existences of many people and, as the only reward of relief in the narrative, also receiving the certainty of the physical and mental forces that, as a redeeming benefit, man can also harbor.

Narrated in an unconventional first person, which integrates into his speech other perspectives ranging from what really happens to what is imagined, from what is witnessed by others to what is known to the narrator, the voice of the young adolescent Jules Bonneau records the terrible experience of rebellious children, many of them abandoned orphans, and who, with the alleged aim of being re-educated, were interned until they reached adulthood in that penal colony surrounded by a wild ocean. There, rather than education or professional training, the inmates were not only subjected to all the humiliations, beatings and humiliations (sexual ones could not be missing) that were a natural part of the prison reform discipline, but they also had to give up their workforce in a system of modern slavery practiced in republican and democratic France of the time.

Chalandon forms the personality of an incorrigible rebel who, despite all punishments, can never be broken.

With the voice of Jules Bonneau, known in the colony as Ringworm, Chalandon forms the personality of an incorrigible rebel who, despite all punishments, can never be broken. Around them, seen from their perspective, the different characters of the condemned appear, many of them typical of places like that infernal colony. Among them there was, as could not be missing, the youngest and weakest orphan, played by Camile Loiseau, who El Tiña, without knowing why, at a certain point decides to start protecting. On the other side of power is the stand of guards and custodians engaged in practicing the most diverse methods of physical repression of condemned children.

Perhaps at the moment in which the reader’s sensitivity reaches the limits of accepting such perversity, an important dramatic turning point occurs in the story which will move its plot path outside the walls of the penitentiary colony. The escape that Jules and Camile will attempt and the adventures that the book tells from this moment on constitute, in my opinion, its most successful literary moment, since from the quite predictable excesses described as part of the ferocious disciplinary system of the prison, we move on to a situation in which the characters’ characters, their decisions, their actions and their destinies have different possibilities of realization, have the benefit of the decision. And it is in that less banal and more dramatic atmosphere that the best tension created by the novelist is generated and with which the story will move until its epilogue… which we will not advance.

This entire section of the novel thus functions as a redemptive counterweight to the horrors of its early chapters. The fate of the young Jules Bonneau will depend in this section on the work of the personalities and the temperament of a gallery of characters in which there are very different ways of understanding life and society. Thus, from incombustible goodness to evil incarnate, through doubt, betrayal and loyalty, this chorus of figures, on which the present and future of the fugitive Jules will depend, provides a remarkable dramatic density to the text as it is generated by the much less predictable behaviors of that cast.

How much true story, how much fiction is there in this novel by Sorj Chalandon which is like a complement to her previous piece, son of a bastard (Seix Barral, 2023)? I think that, in essence, this proportion does not matter. If there is something interesting it is to understand that what happened to the lives of those children behind the walls of Huate-Bouloge and in the territory of the island was a documented reality. The transcendent thing is knowing that Jules Bonneau existed and had another story outside of the dungeon island, but it is more touching to know that the people we see adoring their children and walking their beloved dogs are also capable of exercising the most abominable violence because these attitudes are also part of human nature.

Already awarded the French Patrimoines and Eugène Dabit prizes, finalist of the Renaudot, The anger under the skin (I would have preferred the literal translation of “the fury” for its Spanish edition) it is one of those works of art that attack us directly to the heart, that lead us to disgust, but that also give us a reprieve to make us believe that human beings are also capable of feeling and giving love, of practicing kindness and decency.