A CASE OF MATRICIDE
Graeme Macrae Burnet
(Contraband, £14.99)

There’s no denying that Booker nominee and Saltire winner Graeme Macrae Burnet’s clever blend of crime and literary metafiction has been an artistic and critical triumph. His books engross as much as they tease, setting up questions about authorship and artifice, but never at the expense of a compelling narrative.

The third of his books set in the French town of Saint-Louis, A Case of Matricide ends the trilogy on a high, bringing to a satisfying close the saga of Georges Gorski, the town’s chief of police.

The conceit of the trilogy has been that Burnet is merely the translator of the original works by French author Raymond Brunet, a version of whom appears also to be a character in the novel. The importance of these textual games, though, recedes the deeper one is drawn into the story.

Saint-Louis is a dull, unremarkable place (look it up on Google Street View if you’re in any doubt), but in Burnet’s novel, set at some point in the 1990s, it retains some of the charms of a traditional community in which everyone knows each other’s business. There are still tiny, hidden restaurants down winding backstreets where lovers might discreetly meet, and bars where staff remember all their regulars’ favourite tipples.

A Case of Matricide ends the trilogy on a high

Georges Gorski has lived there his entire life, always feeling like an outsider. A high-functioning alcoholic, he spends his days figuring out ways to escape from his desk and sneak off to one of the town’s many and varied licensed premises. Since the end of an unsustainable marriage to a woman far above him in social status, he has lived in a flat above a florist’s with his mother, who is gradually becoming overtaken by dementia.

It’s a crime novel that for the longest time withholds what the crime is and who the criminal. A factory owner dies in his office, ostensibly of a heart attack, although there are whispers of foul play.

There’s a guest at a local hotel – described by some as Gorski’s double – who is reported to the police for no better reason than that he’s booked in for five days, which is longer than any normal person would want to spend in Saint-Louis. And an old woman complains that her son is threatening to kill her. The son, Robert Duymann, once wrote a novel about Saint-Louis, which saw him ostracised for its unflattering portrayal of the town. Gorski can see that Duymann has another manuscript on the go, chillingly entitled A Case of Matricide.

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Whether any or all of these are indications of any actual crimes is secondary to the effect it’s all having on Gorski’s mental state, as Burnet explores the tragic figure he’s become, haunted by lingering guilt over a minor childhood transgression.

A man whose first big case was a cover-up he willingly colluded with, who married above his station and paid the price, an undistinguished time-server who never posed the slightest challenge to the real criminals of Saint-Louis but hid in bars and drank. The temptation to throw it all away and quit Saint-Louis forever is as irresistible as it is unthinkable. Pushed to the brink, he can only see one way to end his troubles ...

Burnet’s post-modern sensibilities bring an ironic archness and darkly comic undertones to what is essentially the tragic story of a man’s journey down a lonely road to confront the person he really is. But the despair, confusion and sense of entrapment felt by this well-realised and oddly sympathetic character are no less affecting for all that.