
The basic plot is loosely modelled on James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which features a similar hostage situation. Unlike Chase’s passive, exploited heroine, however, Gertie is the instigator of all manner of depravity as she gleefully thwarts the rebels’ best attempts to behave “correctly” towards her in order to bring honour to their cause. The men’s pitiable inability to resist her seductions undercuts the scenes of violent murder played out in the opening pages, puncturing their pretensions to power. Thus, Queneau subverts that model of gratuitously violent genre fiction he initially appears to be employing.
Indeed, Queneau’s trademark humour is very much in evidence throughout We Always Treat Women Too Well; he clearly relishes Gertie’s transformation from prim postal clerk to self-possessed seductress, and her closest parallel is perhaps Ruth in Pinter’s The Homecoming. The most comic parts of the novel are those in which Gertie utterly disarms her captors, confusing and exciting them in equal measure – though among the 124 pages there isn’t one that isn’t thoroughly enjoyable.
OB
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