After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo the British authorities exiled him on St.
Helena in the South Atlantic. Simon Leys' historical experiment, first published in 1986, concocts a conspiracy whereby the real Napoleon is replaced with a doppelganger, enabling the Emperor to escape. 'Eugene' is put aboard a Scandinavian vessel headed for France. He is told that once in Bordeaux a contact "would guide him to the huge secret organization that had been prepared to propel him back into power, and which needed only one spark of his genius to set it in motion." The plan goes awry when the ship is diverted to Antwerp. Napoleon is still confident of his own destiny but when he arrives on land it is clear he will "have to struggle alone, groping in the dark to find his own way back toward the glorious dawn of his future".
This slim, exquisite novel is about the slow death of glory, an individual's delusions, and how time erases even the most notorious of personages. It brings to mind Auden's famous lines: "O let not Time deceive you, you cannot conquer Time." Leys' style is refreshingly straightforward when it needs to be, yet still displays subtle, complex shifts in tone. Napoleon treads ghostlike through a world where everyone apart from him has moved on from the past. In Brussels he stumbles upon a sign advertising tourist trips to "Waterloo and the battlefield!" He joins the party, only to find the places where he supposedly lived strangely unfamiliar to him. This sense of history and memory merging is handled with a deft slide from the past into the present tense. On his way south Napoleon is arrested for not paying a hotel bill and put in a cell with a hulking creature called - hilariously - Louis. A loyal soldier recognises Napoleon and releases him but the Emperor's hopes are dashed again when he learns of his doppelganger's death. Napoleon spends an evening with some soldiers who mourn their dear departed leader.
The novel ends beautifully with a tragi-comic twist, and we are reminded that not only can no-one conquer time but that even great minds fail to see what matters most in life, and perhaps have to be reminded what does by greater minds. During the crossing from St. Helena the ship's cook, Nigger-Nicholas, drags Eugene out of bed one morning to show him "the dawn breaking over the ocean". Napoleon stands "under the spell of that extravagant splendour, so unexpectedly presented to him" and is "momentarily made one with Eugene, reconciled with himself by the impact of an ecstasy that obliterated both his dream of glory and his present humiliating condition."
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