No, this isn’t quite accurate. Flavières is obsessed with who he thinks Madeleine is. Eventually, even his guilt over two deaths he blames on his acrophobia are subsumed with his obsession over Madeleine. The eponymous vertigo plays an important role in the plot, but it’s guilt that plays a stronger role in Flavières’ psyche. In fact, I was more afraid of him than the putative murderers-especially once “Madeleine” resurfaces. Once Flavières becomes obsessed with Madeleine, it became clear to me that no one was innocent in this book. (I accidentally spoiled the book for myself by reading the plot summary on Wikipedia.) What Hitchcock couldn’t capture was the experience of being in Flavières’ head. Hitchcock was quite faithful to the original story. Eventually, Gévigne convinces Flavières to follow Madeleine around, if only to ease a worried husband’s mind. Flavières does so, against his better judgment, only to find himself falling in love with the quiet, elegant, melancholy woman that he doesn’t really understand and cannot really know.Īnyone who’s seen the Hitchcock film already knows what’s going to happen in the book. He says that his mother-in-law is worried that there is a predisposition to insanity and madness in the family. He even reveals that his wife’s great-grandmother committed suicide at the same age his wife is now. This doesn’t strike Flavières as particularly strange, but Gévigne keeps trying to convince his old friend that there is something wrong with Madeleine.
An old, estranged friend named Gévigne comes to see Flavières one day. Gévigne tells Flavières that his wife, Madeleine, has strange spells where she will drift off, sometimes for hours, if no one is talking directly to her. The detective is a lawyer named Flavières.
The original Vertigo takes place in Paris, just before and just after World War II. Hitchcock changed the names and locations for his film. Those readers who’ve already seen Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation already know how well the authors follow that rule. While Hitchcock did a brilliant job taking us into the head of the protagonist, the original novel tells an even more engrossing and sinister tale. The note gives Boileau and Narcejac’s one rule as “the protagonist can never wake up from their nightmare” (n.p.*). They wanted to turn victims into conspirators and protagonists into perpetrators.
They took the genre post-modernist in Vertigo and She Who Was No More. According to the note at the end of Vertigo, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the two French novelists banded together to fight the tropes of Golden Age mystery.
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