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As the fifth and last volume in The Great Intrigue, Time to Turn is slightly anticipatory: the action takes place after the year 2010. We are already in World V, the relocated world predicted by the mysterious “Charlemagne.” It is still our world, but a bit worse. “Time to turn” is an advertising slogan launched by a leading digital network, one that has unprecedented reverberations. This turn means changing your life, your habits, points of reference, culture, country and behaviour. It may mean a metamorphosis, being open to innovation, adventure… or abandonment, denial, betrayal. No one knows. But the concept sheds light on each character’s life or death.

The main theme constitutes two counterbalanced love stories. Greg Rubien meets Clara, a former disciple and confidante of “Charlemagne’s”. At first it is a happy relationship, then it turns: Greg finds he is overwhelmingly, irresistibly jealous. This obsession gradually poisons their relationship, and Clara runs away.

At the same time, Nicolas, Greg’s father, has set off to turn Africa around with his town planning, and begins an affair with a woman called Anne-Lise, project manager for the Aelys company which provides transport, water conveyance and digital technology. Unlike his son’s naïve and sincere relationship, this is between two so-called adults, both fairly disillusioned and who, deep down, don’t really believe in it themselves: after a few pleasurable episodes they will mostly give each other a feeling of disappointment. Nicolas hates himself for being unfaithful to Louise but cannot find a good enough reason to behave in any other way. How do you measure our capacity to love? This was the opening question of volume IV.

Meanwhile, François Rubien, a former vet from Villefleurs, died in 2009, leaving two houses, one in Villefleurs and one in Vernery-sur-Arre which originally belonged to his wife. Emmanuelle, one of Nicolas’s sisters, has made a lot of money developing the Celiman ready-to-wear clothes chain, and sets up home in the family house in Vernery. She then seems to mutate into a sort of protective figure, trying to maintain a link between the past and the present.

“Homer has no conclusion, the Bible has no conclusion,” Flaubert commented. Well, neither have I. There’s no final revelation in The Great Intrigue, no big secret, no theory. It’s about the world and how it changes, the dead and the living, fathers and sons, the origin and the turn, love and the absence of love. I really think I’ve finished." François Taillandier

With Time to Turn, François Taillandier (Anielka, winner of the Académie Française prize for a novel, Stock 1999), concludes his literary suite The Great Intrigue. Other volumes in the suite are Option paradis, Telling, Il n’y a personne dans les tombes and les romans vont où ils veulent.