The gifted writer Graeme Macrae Burnet makes a mockery of the genres publishers impose on credulous readers. The author of two ostensibly literary novels (both longlisted for the Booker prize), Burnet has also written a trilogy of self-declared thrillers. Yet the concluding volume, A Case of Matricide, demonstrates literary talent of the highest order.
It features the same protagonist as in the two earlier volumes – Inspector Georges Gorski, chef de police in Saint-Louis, a provincial French town near the Swiss border. Divorced from his wealthy wife, whose father is the corrupt and powerful mayor of Saint-Louis, Gorski lives rather sadly with his mother, who suffers from increasing dementia. He seems virtually friendless, and an embryonic relationship with the owner of a flower shop below his apartment is the only hint of romance in his life.
The inspector’s morose equilibrium is disturbed when a stranger shows up in town and attracts the suspicions of the keeper of the inn where he is staying. Interest piqued, Gorski visits the man, who is unforthcoming and seems untroubled at being questioned. After putting surveillance on him, Gorski discovers that the man is actually following him. Then a local factory owner is found dead, and despite the attending physician’s insistence that it was an accident, Gorski investigates what he believes has been a commissioned hit. Gradually the skeins of the story start to suggest their interconnection. Has the mysterious stranger been hired to murder the factory owner? Is the crooked mayor, Gorski’s former father-in-law, somehow involved?
These are links that are never fully realised, and the ending defiantly fails to resolve much of anything other than Gorski’s continued tenure as chef de police. Denied the usual satisfactions of a thriller’s closure, we begin to realise that even the suggestion of a conclusion is being made more by us than by the author.
This is just one of the book’s singularities, and the story is enveloped by a postmodernist wrapping that pretends the volume, like the series’ others, has been taken from the manuscripts of a French novelist, Raymond Brunet, after his suicide in 1992. The novel’s narrative presence is that of the putative translator of the trilogy. In the stories themselves we find a minor character at work on a novel, also called A Case of Matricide. He is Robert Duymann – an anagram of Raymond Brunet (whose surname in turn is an anagram of Burnet). This panoply of postmodernist tricks would grow wearisome were they not executed deadpan. Burnet makes no effort to disguise them, but stops short of the look-at-me cleverness that even Paul Auster’s staunchest fans can tire of.
Although the plot of A Case of Matricide is ungiving in its dry ambiguity, there are manifold satisfactions. The writing is full of illuminating touches. Of an old woman who claims her son is trying to murder her we’re told: ‘The skin of her face and neck had grown loose, so that she resembled a newly hatched nestling. In the V of her nightdress, her clavicles protruded like wishbones.’ Details of place are especially rich, and the subtle mores of the small town are reflected in Gorski’s misguided incorruptibility. When he refuses free drinks from bar owners, ‘they resented him for it. He had broken the code that bound them together.’
If you read thrillers for the resolution of a pacy, action-filled story, this book is not for you – and its action all takes place off-piste. If, however, you read for acuity of observation recounted with a knack for pithy aphorism, then few writers can rival Burnet.
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