For readers unfamiliar with Alain Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman or new novel, Djinn is a good place to start — it was even written with an English-speaking audience in mind. Like Robbe-Grillet’s first novel The Erasers, it takes its cue from the detective genre but differs from the latter in one essential way: neither time nor space (nor, consequently, reality) are stable.


As Djinn’s protagonist worms his way into a secret society of latter-day Luddites dedicated to fighting the machine and traipses in blind man’s garb through a series of clandestine meetings, often with what turn out to be mannequins or loudspeakers, he is unsure whether to grant events the status of experiences, recollections or fantasies. When he visits a café frequented by members of the organisation he’s told that the waiter who served him the day before has been dead for years and then discovers that the waitress has assumed the identity of the child who gave him instructions on his previous visit. A short while later an event of the previous day begins to replay itself — although it has perhaps never taken place before; the narrator experiences memory of the future and is eventually told not that he is dreaming but that he is being dreamed.


Laced with reality-loops as it is, Djinn does not belong to the Anglo-American science fiction genre already familiar to readers of J.G. Ballard. Instead, it inverts novelistic genres: rather than linking the consciousness of its protagonist to the external world, it roots the external world in the consciousness of the protagonist, or rather of the text itself.


Such is the figure of the injured (or maybe even dead) child who remembers, with astounding precision, events that have not yet taken place. She is here nothing but a character out of the narrator’s afflicted memory — not even a character but the principle behind the novel, a cipher for the bizarre logic that generates the extraordinary literary space of Robbe-Grillet’s writing.

‘The girl keeps staring at me silently. The whole scene is so unreal, ghostly, frozen, that the sound of my own voice rings strangely off-key to me, unlikely, as it were, in this spellbound atmosphere under the weird bluish light...

As there is nothing else to do but venture a few words, I force myself to speak this innocuous sentence:

Your brother fell.

My syllables fall, too, awakening neither response nor echo, like useless objects deprived of sense. And silence closes in again. Have I really spoken? Cold, numbness, paralysis begin to spread through my limbs.’ p28-29