As a child whose native language was French but who was soon so at home with English that it, too, became fibres of my being, I was being intoxicated by that ‘tongue of wonders’. I would write words down to compare and capture things of the world: ruisseler, for instance, as opposed to streaming. To me, the French word captures the play of light on water, its gentle susurrant sound; the English word gave the movement, the relentlessness of water. Each was nominally translatable by the other; yet neither was. For the language had made a different thing in each case. And I, inhabiting both, yet also inhabiting that gap between both, was both dumb and garrulous in their presence. As a child, I was at home in that gap; later, as Makine also details in his novel, that gap became both an irritant and a source of existential anxiety. Neither one nor the other; I could never truthfully say I was wholly French, never truthfully say I was wholly Australian. And that bothered, at a time when the ‘adolescent mini-societies’, in Makine’s phrase, were forming their indissoluble barriers. Border-crossers are not easily tolerated, in adolescence. Yet despite all the anxious wish to conform, to reject, the gap was too deeply there, so that always there was a sense not of detachment but of a patient and not always welcomed observation.

Most, if not all, writers feel a gap of this kind, whether they be monoglot or not; but language accentuates it, makes the gap both more profound yet simpler. Later, still, of course, I was to learn to live and even celebrate, at times, the gap within me, that ‘langue d’étonnement’, and to know that its not-often-achieved truth was a gift as great as it was uncalled for. That to speak its cadences, to allow for its silences, to know the frustration of not being able to communicate exactly, exactly, was something inexhaustible. Of course, it is, because it is very much the gap we all share, that gap between the lived and the spoken, the wordless and the word, a gap which is in every human being. But in those brought up in between not only human existence and mother tongue, but also between two mother tongues, the gap is both widened and narrowed. For we think then that if only we distil hard enough, if only we understand well enough what ‘ruisseler’ and ‘streaming’ actually are, actually mean, then we will have discovered the key to the world. In the beginning was the Word … the Word itself. Or is that merely a yearning for pre-Babel language, for something that can never exist, but is always just tantalisingly in sight?

In English, we have seen writers like Salman Rushdie make and transmogrify something which it was thought was understood. His English is still English but one so enriched and endowed with other things that it moves closer to that ‘tongue of wonders’ which Makine also lies in wait for, in French. The stories in Le Testament Français of a Russia and a France both illuminated and distorted by that tongue of astonishment are evidence of something beyond even the theorising of the past, recent and not so recent – something manifestly complex yet unutterably simple. It is the inheritance of bilingualism, an inheritance that more often than not does not lead to masterpieces. For every Makine, every Rushdie, every Conrad, there are many who struggle to express the inheritance and only succeed in obscuring it or making it laughably simplistic.

My father used to say to me, ‘I don’t know how you can write in English; it is not a soul-tongue.’ Yet I also knew English-speakers who said that French was a spiky, cold language, all surfaces, no uncertainties. And I could not argue, could not express why they were both wrong. I had to try and understand it in writing. But sometimes it seems impossible; sometimes in despair I agree with people who claim that you can only make English your own if it is your own; that a bilingual writer actually has not two tongues, but half a one, for they are neither fish nor fowl. Makine’s hero, towards the end, has his books rejected because he is a Russian, yet writing from scratch in French. What kind of a thing is this, suspicious publishers ask. It is only when he hits upon the ruse of telling them that he has translated his originally Russian text into French, that they relax and look more interested. For that is something understood; when we read books in translation, we are made aware of the gap between the two languages, a certain ‘not quite rightness’ which is comforting even as it disconcerts. When they are not mediated in this way, when a writer uses, instinctively and deliberately, the language not of their birth, that is a more subtly troubling, challenging thing. For in that perfect, idiomatic French or English, there is another presence, something which, like ‘ruisseler’ and ‘streaming’ is nominally translatable, but in reality, lies in the domain of that ‘langue d’étonnement’ and can only be felt, never fully pinned down.