Passage à l'ennemie is a clever satire about an undercover policeman who is assigned to infiltrate a delinquent youth gang in a high-rise estate on the fringes of Paris. Over the course of eight months living with the young men of the estate, smoking pot with them, sharing in their resistance to all forms of authority, and not least falling in love with the only female member of the "gang", the beautiful but silent Dulcinée Savedra, he gradually realises that his sympathies lie more with the people he's being paid to betray than with his colleagues on the side of law and order.

Salvayre is obviously a writer who is very interested in the way conflicts in our lives play out in the collision between different languages (Pas pleurer tells its story largely through the confusion of Spanish and French in the mother's mind) - in this book, she tells the story entirely through Arjona's official reports to his superiors, and we watch him gradually going off the rails as the painfully bureaucratic, impersonal language starts to give way to little touches of coarse but fully-human street French. She handles this beautifully - Arjona's attempts to pour his heart out in numbered bullet points are hilariously touching, and it's only in the very last report that he manages to kick the habit of referring to himself in the third person as "le soussigné" (the undersigned).

Names matter in this book. The narrator is using the alias "Adrien Arjona", a name he has borrowed from the absent father he never met. Arjona happens to be Salvayre's maiden-name (being an Andalusian name, she points out that it could easily be of Arab or Jewish origin), but it was also the family name of two famous Andalusian brothers from the Enlightenment, one a poet and the other a reforming police-chief and later mayor of Seville. The gang's resident intellectual is a student drop-out called Wallenstein. And of course, Dulcinée's name tips us off that there's something else going on here as well - this is a story fully compliant with the First Law of Spanish Literature. Arjona's mind has been distorted by his reading of spy fiction - in particular Gérard de Villiers's "SAS" series - his image of himself as a James Bond/Prince Malko action-hero figure is every bit as unreal as Don Quixote's role as a knight-errant. It is only through his love of Dulcinée and his need to enter sympathetically into her mind and find out why she is unable to speak that he recovers his own sanity and the clear view of life that shows him what disgusting animals his police colleagues are.

Fun, subversive and very clever, but don't look to it for a balanced view of France's social problems! ( )