A Gun is Unloaded by André Stil

Suffers from middle-book-in-a-trilogy syndrome
A Gun is Unloaded is the second book in French author André Stil’s trilogy, Le premier choc (The First Clash). This volume was originally published in 1952 under the French title of Le Coup du canon. The trilogy focuses on the lives of dockworkers on the Atlantic coast of France in the years following World War II. These workers are struggling under what they perceive to be the American occupation of their seaport home. The Americans are unloading arms to be shipped across the country by rail to France’s former enemy, Germany, whom America wants to rearm to help protect western Europe from the Soviet Union. The dockworkers, most of whom are Communists, refuse to handle any of these arm shipments to Germany, as well as any weapons headed for Korea or Indochina. In retaliation for this partial strike, the dockworkers’ hours are drastically cut, plunging them into living conditions of abject poverty.

The first book in the trilogy, The Water Tower, ended with the laborers collectively leaving their squalid shantytown to take up residence as squatters in an unused office building. This second book picks up where volume one left off, showing us further how the dockworkers respond to the activity of the American military in their midst. Secret meetings take place among the workers to discuss tactics of sabotage and propaganda. There are moments of open defiance as well, like when they stand in solidarity to stop a local farmer’s land from being seized. The story takes the form of a series of vignettes in which we follow one character through three or four chapters. A young woman named Gisèle, for example, becomes romantically involved with an American soldier. Henri Leroy, the head of the dockworkers’ local Communist Party cell, meets with members of the railroad workers’ union to try to coordinate a plan of resistance. A Gun is Unloaded suffers from the same fault that many middle books in a trilogy share. While it serves the purpose of a bridge between the first and last volumes, the plot just kind of treads water. The story doesn’t really move forward until the final chapter, which sets up a promised climax in book three.

André Stil was the editor of the French Communist Party’s newspaper, L’Humanité. He does a great job of writing from the workers’ perspective and vividly depicting their living and working conditions in a naturalistic style is reminiscent of Emile Zola’s novels of social justice. A Gun is Unloaded has a few really memorable moments of profound pathos. Overall, however, there is a detachment to this second book that I did not feel with The Water Tower. The narrative switches from first to third person, often taking the form of stream of consciousness from a variety of characters’ perspectives. Stil employs a strategy of full immersion, treating the reader as if he were a member of the dockworkers’ community, intimately familiar with all the characters and their histories. Rather than increasing the reader’s involvement in the story, however, it makes it harder to understand what’s going on. Stil expects the reader to know the ins and outs of the dockworkers’ occupation, the organizational structure of the French Communist Party, and the entire history of labor strife that led up to the trilogy. If you don’t happen to possess such knowledge, you constantly feel like you have been thrust into a conversation already in progress, struggling to get your bearings and figure out what everyone is talking about before the chapter ends.

The third novel in this trilogy, Paris avec nous, to the best of my knowledge has not been translated into English. I was thinking of trying to read it in French, but now I’m not so sure it’s worth the effort. A Gun is Unloaded is a fine novel, but not nearly as compelling as The Water Tower.
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The Water Tower by André Stil

A proletarian novel against American imperialism
The Water Tower was originally published in 1951 under the French title of Au château d’eau. It is the first volume in a trilogy entitled Le Premier choc, or The First Clash. At the time of publication, author André Stil was editor of the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, and The Water Tower reads as if it could easily have been serialized in that party organ. In fact, the Soviet Union awarded the book the Stalin Prize for literature in 1952. The plot is based on real historical events that took place at the port of La Rochelle in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of France’s Atlantic coast. It focuses on a community of dockworkers who live under conditions of extreme poverty in a squalid shantytown.

As is often the case with people’s history, this novel opened my eyes to historical events which were previously unknown to me. The dockworkers in this novel are not just struggling against unfair labor practices, crippling poverty, and capitalist persecution, they are also resisting what they term the “American occupation” of France. In the early years of the Cold War, America was working toward rearming defeated Germany to help protect western Europe from Russian encroachment. Needless to say, many French people, who had just undergone years of Nazi occupation during World War II, were not too pleased about this. The Americans, with the cooperation of the French government, had commandeered ports on the coast of France to serve as military bases, which they shared with German submarines. Americans were unloading arms at these ports and shipping them by train across France to Germany. In response, the French dockworkers, many of whom were members of the communist party, went on strike against this practice and refused to receive American ships in their ports. These workers also envisioned their ports being used to fuel wars in Korea and Indochina, wars they saw as furthering American imperialism to the destruction of their brother workers in other lands. The conflict escalates when the Americans begin to seize portions of the workers’ lands and enclose them in a military compound.

Not every character in the book is a socialist or communist. Stil represents the bourgeoisie as well, though there’s little doubt where his sympathies lie. The narrative delves deeply into the workings of the local communist cell and its party politics. The reader attends heated meetings where issues and strategy are debated and accompanies the characters on a dangerous mission of resistance. Through Stil’s engaging storytelling, the reader becomes intimately involved with these characters and drawn into their world. One can’t help but sympathize with these poor workers struggling against the forces that enslave them. The Water Tower calls to mind great classic social novels like Emile Zola’s Germinal, yet it is written in a more modernist style, with shifting perspectives and occasional stream-of-consciousness passages, reminiscent of Man’s Fate by André Malraux.

The English translation by Mollie Guiart and Yvonne Kapp can be a bit clumsy at times. Nevertheless, the power and passion of Stil’s prose shines through. The only fault I find with the book is its lack of an ending. As a stand-alone novel, it is incomplete. Sometimes a trilogy consists of three interrelated novels arranged in sequence; other times a trilogy is simply just a novel cut into thirds. The First Clash appears to fall into the latter category. After having read the exceptional first installment, I am definitely going to seek out the other two volumes to get the whole story.
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