The Guard

Starred review from September 8, 2014
Guards Harry and Michel inhabit the basement garage of the luxury apartment building whose erstwhile residents they were hired to protect. Confined to the quarters supplied by their invisible employer, their work is their existence, even as they wonder why the tenants have fled. Terrin twists this absurdist nightmare with the arrival of a unnamed third guard, who is evasive about the outside and the reasons for his presence. As an increasingly unnerved Harry demands answers, Terrin uses a pesky fly, a faulty toilet, and mounting uncertainty about the nature of the guards’ employer to create a claustrophobic world that recalls the works of Pinter and Kafka. Harry and Michel’s ascent to the residential level to locate and protect the building’s possibly mythical last tenant grows increasingly hallucinogenic, and is related through Michel’s unreliable narration. Terrin unabashedly invokes existentialist philosophy, and his vivid portrayal of characters gripped by unresolved fears and faced with absurd situations makes his work nectar for reflective readers.

October 15, 2014

In a near future in which the extremely wealthy lock themselves away in impregnable high-rises, two guards stand watch in a basement garage. Their jobs are unending tedium, made bearable only by a rigid and unfailing belief that what they are doing is important. Never allowed to leave their posts, the guards long to be called up to the ranks of the Elite who get the plum security jobs. But boredom and a blind trust in the unseen organization that hired them lead our protagonists to paranoia and violence when they no longer have anyone to protect. VERDICT Shades of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot are present, as the two guards are absurd in their devotion to the minutia of their job, but if there is comedy here it is of the darkest, bleakest sort. Flemish author Terrin won the European Union Literature Prize for this novel, his first to be translated into English. The sf aspects of the hinted at but unseen dystopian world outside the claustrophobic confines of the guards' universe shouldn't prevent this from reaching a wide audience.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2014
In an unspecified (but presumably near-future) time, after (or perhaps during) an unspecified (but presumably apocalyptic) event, two security guards, Harry and Michel, keep a vigilant watch on the basement of a large apartment complex. Their mission: to keep the outside world out and the building's residents safe. Harry, the dreamer, keeps saying they're due for promotion any day now, while Michel, the more pragmatic, just wants to get through each monotonous day without losing track of, well, everything. Suddenly things start to happen: the building's residents pack up and leave, Harry and Michel stop receiving regular supplies, and the two men start to wonder if the world is finally coming to an end. With a lively translation from the original Dutch, this novel asks a whole lot of questions and provides very few answers, leaving us in Harry and Michel's position, trying to figure out the big picture from looking at a few small clues. It's a wryly funny book, sort of a claustrophobic version of Barry England's Figures in a Landscape (1968), which also features a pair of protagonists in an unspecified time and situation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)