Biblioasis
Review by Walter Cummins
I must admit that throughout my initial reading of this novel I fell for Burnet’s ruse, believing I was really engaging with his translation of a work by a French novelist named Raymond Brunet and accepting the truth of Burnet’s foreword: “Raymond Brunet was born in Saint-Louis, an unremarkable town of twenty thousand people on the French-Swiss border, in 1953. Aside from a short sojourn in Paris following the release of Claude Chabrol’s screen adaptation of his 1982 novel La Disparition d’Adèle Bedeau, he spent his whole life in the town, before throwing himself in front of a train in 1992.”
One reason for my gullibility is the fact that I had never heard of either Burnet or Brunet and wasn’t paying enough attention to question the close similarity of names despite the very different pronunciations. Another reason is that Burnet quickly convinced me of the authenticity of apparent facts. I had seen several Chabrol films, though not this one. By the time I finished that opening paragraph I believed in the reality of St. Louis, which in fact is a real town of 22,000 inhabitants, and of Brunet’s suicide.
While the title notion of matricide does play a central role in the plot, for me—after catching onto Burnet’s strategy—the real point of the novel is what might be called authorcide—a version of the death of the author. The novel’s protagonist, Police Chief Georges Gorski, could be an autobiographical manifestation of the apparent author, Raymond Brunet, with his bleak life a strong motive for suicide by locomotive. As Burnet admitted in a 2019 interview at Napier University, “So yeah I’m very much playing with the idea of interpreting the text in relation to the life of the author by presenting this fictional author.”
Burnet furthers his Brunet invention in the book’s afterword by first questioning Brunet’s significance as a writer: “When Une affaire de matricide appeared in 2019, veteran critic Antoine Dutacq was to pronounce in Le Monde that ‘Raymond Brunet cannot be regarded as a major writer—his canvas is too narrow for that—but he is a major minor writer.’” His supposed main fault is that having chosen the crime novel genre, “he is less interested in the evidence a witness might provide than in what his detective might do with the gift of a block of cheese.”
When asked during a Booker Prize interview what appealed to him about the boundary between fact and fiction, Burnet said locating his characters in real places and surrounding them with real people supported the feeling of authenticity. Burnet reveals “that he [Brunet] was my Gallic doppelgänger if you will,“ comparing Brunet’s growing up in St. Louis with “my own younger self growing up in the industrial town of Kilmarnock in the west of Scotland in the 1980s.”
In the afterword he goes on to concoct a story of how he became the novel’s translator and describes an eventual trip to St. Louis to search out the places with an important role in the story, frustrated when he cannot find the important bar called Le Pot and overjoyed when he stumbles across its exact duplicate in “Le Recoin—the nook.” The precise details of this afterword solidify the existence of the town of St. Louis and the seeming reality of the settings Brunet apparently chose for Gorski’s wanderings.
So far I’ve devoted to much of this review to Burnet’s trickery, primarily because it is ultimately inseparable from the actual novel Burnet pretended to have translated. That novel, A Case of Matricide, is very engaging, belonging to the same category of those Burnet coyly says it doesn’t equal, such as Simenon’s existentialist mysteries.
Gorski, as police chief. is drawn in by several possible or likely actual mysteries and becomes the source of one himself. By exploring those unknowns, the novel creates a concern for what was going to happen next. But, instead, its real subject is the rigidity of small town life. The interactions of the distinctly drawn characters exemplify the fixed roles of people in the daily doings of a community.
The novel itself explains, “… like all towns, Saint-Louis has its tribes. It has its proletariat; it has its middle class; and it has its grande bourgeoisie.” And these tribes each fulfill expectations in their relations with each other. The tinpot Brahmins, insecure in how they achieved their status, look down at all others, except for the poor, whom they pity. The middling folk—the petite bourgeoisie—fear the poor. The mediocre envy and venerate what passes for the aristocracy. At the bottom are the poorest who populate the area around the railroad station, brawling with each other, fixated on drink and sex.
Gorski, however, has no distinct tribe. His father had been a mere pawnbroker, but Gorski had risen to police chief and, therefore, became a unique outsider who confounded the others because he couldn’t be categorized. Although crime and potential crime dominate the action, the novel’s true tension exists in the community’s goal of ridding the threat of a Gorski who might do something that would disturb the town’s balance.
By creating a convincing Brunet as a local whose own fictitious writing had exposed the town, Burnet gives a deeper substance to the power of conformity in a place. Brunet, who ends up a suicide because he does not belong, provides another story to parallel that of Gorski, serving as one more doppelgänger, as Brunet is Burnet’s doppelgänger. This complexity becomes a thematic necessity in the ultimate authorcide.
