58 pages • 1 hour read
Hervé Le Tellier, Transl. Adriana HunterThe Anomaly
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Optimistic Self-Delusion
The Anomaly forces its characters to grapple with questions about their place in the universe. The idea that everything is a simulation leads some people to adopt the nihilistic belief that nothing actually matters; this sense of meaninglessness causes a rise in suicide, including in the case of Victor March. Le Tellier more broadly treats the circumstances of each character’s life as the sum total of arbitrary events—just a matter of probability (maybe dictated by a computer program). This is okay with some, like Lucie’s son, Louis, who throws dice to determine which mother he will live with each day, but for others the idea that everything is a matter of chance threatens the ideas—like free will and responsibility to others—that give meaning to their lives. Those who previously found meaning in religious texts now find themselves cast into an unbearable condition of doubt (210).
Though the existential uncertainty prompted by the mystery of flight 006 leads to a rise in suicide, conspiratorial thinking, and fringe religious fanaticism, most of Le Tellier’s characters move quickly past these existential dilemmas. As the philosopher Philomedius argues, from the perspective of the individual, living in a simulation is no different from living in the real world. Lucie is worried about custody of her son. Joanna must find a new family and a new job. David faces his mortality in the same way as someone in the real world. As Victor says in the same TV interview, “Nothing will change […] we’ll go to work because we still have to pay the rent” (363). People will ignore terrible truths and focus on hope, just as they always have. Victor confesses that there is no such thing as destiny, and yet he feels that his romance with Anne was destined. Leaps of faith are required in most religions. As Victor uses a common expression to describe the habit some readers have of interpreting every text according to a predetermined interpretive framework: “When you have a hammer, everything ends up looking like a nail” (326); Le Tellier demonstrates that humans are tools for finding meaning, and so they tend to find it somewhere.
In The Anomaly, optimistic self-delusion is the default human condition, and the bizarre events surrounding flight 006 merely reinforce the same habits people have always used to make sense of their world. Le Tellier repeatedly cites the current dilemmas in the world—overpopulation, climate change, and medical-science denial—as evidence that humans as a species remain willfully ignorant of anything that would, if fully acknowledged, force them to change the way they live. Philomedius describes this as a constant resistance to “cognitive dissonance” (363). Faced with a sense of meaninglessness caused by the prospect of a simulated reality, humans will be “reduced to living in hope” (364).
Reality and Artifice
Le Tellier consistently finds ways to remind the reader that The Anomaly is itself a work of fiction: a simulated reality constructed by a human author who makes decisions about craft, genre, and style. By switching genres between chapters, Le Tellier draws attention to the artificial nature of the world the book describes; by engaging in fantastical or theoretical premises that require references to science-fiction films to explain, Le Tellier places his novel beside those films; by including a French author who holds opinions of the publishing industry as one of his main characters, Le Tellier manifests a version of himself, the book’s author, in that book’s fictional world; by forcing his characters to question whether they are real or authored by a computer, Le Tellier forces the reader to acknowledge that the characters are indeed artificial and authored by him; and by including fictional versions of The Anomaly within the text, Le Tellier implies that our world is also part of a greater universe of fictionality—in which case “all these simulated worlds slot into each other like nesting tables” (232). The reader, too, is meant to question their own reality. The Anomaly imagines its world, but also our world, as a grand work of fiction.
In step with the goals of the Oulipo group, Le Tellier treats the novel as a game between the writer and the reader. There are repeated references to Italo Calvino’s novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, which includes within it the beginnings of 10 different novels in different genres. Through second-person narration, the reader of Calvino’s novel becomes the protagonist investigating the origins of those 10 other novels; along the way, Calvino blurs the distinction between reality and fiction. When Victor June reveals that he is writing a new novel that he wants to title If On a Winter’s Night Two Hundred Forty-Three Passengers, the implication is that Le Tellier’s The Anomaly is a version of Calvino’s novel, too, and the reader is reading Victor June’s book inside Le Tellier’s simulation. In that simulation, like Calvino’s novel, there are multiple books with mysterious origins; Victor March’s book is written in a fever, inspired by the events of March 10, while Victor June’s book is either based on the events of Air France 006 or a pure invention (suggesting even that the events of Air France 006 never happened). The latter presents a paradox, but one that is perfectly possible when the reader remembers that all of it, including their own position as the book’s reader, is pure invention.
The Myth of the Unique Self
The double, or doppelgänger, is a common theme throughout the history of literature, a way to investigate the nature of identity and the sense of self. Many classic works about doubles adhere to the rules of realism by leaving open the question of whether the double exists outside the protagonist’s imagination; in Dostoevsky’s The Double, for instance, only the protagonist reacts to the presence of another version of himself, while the rest of the world ignores his pseudo-fantastical crisis. In Le Tellier’s novel, the entire world grapples with the arrival of real, confirmed doubles. As a result, each copied character must confront their double while the world must confront the implications of doubles existing at all. The presence of the doubles threatens to undermine the concept of personal uniqueness, an idea that has always defined our sense of the world and forms the basis of most major religions. It is for this reason that the religious debate over whether the doubles have souls, in Chapter 18, takes on such importance. The existence of the doubles challenges notions of true love and monogamy, such as in the case of Victor’s, André’s, and Joanna’s relationships. It challenges notions of mortality because humans understand the limits of their lifetime only in the singular; Victor and David get different kinds of “second chances.” And it challenges the idea that life’s meaning comes in a person’s contributions to the world (unless that “person” can be considered plural).
The Anomaly functions as an experiment—or a series of experiments—in the different possible kinds of interactions between doubles. Le Tellier chose characters based on the possible scenarios: What would happen if two identical professional killers meet? What would happen if someone with a secret meets a second person with the exact same secret, with whom it would be impossible to lie? How different would it be if someone who doesn’t like themselves meets their double versus someone who has learned to love themselves? Le Tellier sets up a variety of these scenarios and lets them play out in the novel’s sandbox. To add another variable, Le Tellier arranges for the doubles to meet after one set of passengers has lived three more months of life, adding important life events in the interim: What if one double is in love while the other isn’t? What if one double is alive while the other has died? These scenarios raise important questions about the influence of life experience on personality and character. If two identical people, with identical memories, begin to have different experiences, at what point are they no longer the same person? By exploring as many of the different ways a person can confront their double as Le Tellier can imagine, The Anomaly forces the reader to reconsider whether there is a difference between a copy and an original, a temporary persona and an inalienable identity.
