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BOOKS | Reviews
MYSTERY GRAEME MACRAE BURNET The Accident on the A35 (Contraband) ●●●●●
In his Booker-shortlisted novel His Bloody Project, Macrae Burnet styled himself as an amateur historian, publishing a first-person account written by a young man found guilty of a brutal triple murder, a document discovered in the process of Burnet researching his family tree. A similar elaborate and thoroughly enticing set-up opens The Accident on the A35. Macrae
Burnet poses as a translator for the manuscript of the late author Raymond Brunet, who decreed his second novel should only be published after his mother's death. Thus begging the question: what in a book could be so shocking or upsetting that his mother could never have knowledge of it?
For this, Macrae Burnet’s third novel, he returns to the
sleepy French town of Saint-Louis and the character of chief inspector Georges Gorski, first encountered in his debut, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau. The narrative is split between the two main characters: Gorski and a teenage Brunet. The pair are kindred spirits, socially awkward and hyper conscious of how they imagine others perceive them. The novel follows Gorski’s investigation of the titular accident and Brunet’s own investigation of his father’s life, but it isn’t built around the usual pace of a police procedural. Macrae Burnet revels in the banality of small town life, balancing the low-level subterfuge within the town’s population with moments of high drama and revelation. It’s an expertly paced novel of small town characters with big city intrigue. (Rowena McIntosh) ■ Out now.
DEBUT MATTHEW WEINER Heather, The Totality (Canongate) ●●●●● DARK THRILLER BARRY GORNELL The Wrong Child (Orion) ●●●●●
Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s debut novella moves at a pace that leaves you breathless, unnerved and itching for more. The story explores the dynamics of a privileged but unhappy family, whose false utopia is threatened by the actions of an unstable outsider. Mark and Karen Breakstone are stereotypical wealthy New Yorkers who live in a superficial bubble while Bobby, in the parallel storyline, has grown up in a particularly tough environment. Heather is the focal point, seen as the
Breakstone’s golden child and simultaneously as a tool for Bobby to visualise his violent fantasies. The lingering feeling of menace and dread is well executed but, ultimately, Heather is a teenager and the over-sexualisation of her character is difficult to digest. There is also an underlying misogyny which runs throughout the story, with any profound insights reserved for the male voices. The female characters, in contrast, are viewed through a shallow lens, devoid of any real character development.
Weiner’s style is short and sharp, with no laborious context or intricate detail in the two opposing narratives of the Breakstone family and Bobby. While the style helps to weave these two strands together in a way that is unexpected and disturbing, there is a sense that this brevity would be suited better to a medium like television or film. (Arusa Qureshi) ■ Out Tue 7 Nov.
76 THE LIST 1 Nov 2017–31 Jan 2018 76 THE LIST 1 Nov 2017–31 Jan 2018
First published by the now defunct Freight Books last year, Barry Gornell’s novel is being republished by Orion this autumn. At its core, The Wrong Child centres on a horrific tragedy in which a school building collapses, leading to the death of 21 children. But under the surface lies a deeply unsettling tale of loss, abandonment and revenge, where the situation is impossibly complex, and the dichotomy between good and evil blurred.
As the only surviving child of the tragedy, Dog Evans is universally shunned; a problematic burden to his parents and a reminder to the villagers of their suffering and loss. Abandoned by his parents before his 16th birthday, Dog is left to live alone and fend for himself. With seven years having passed, the novel flits backwards and forwards in time, with the present being occupied by bereaved parents and the past moving towards the events of the disaster itself, gradually unravelling pieces of information about each child and their broken community.
The climax is gripping and carefully built up by Gornell, whose vivid portrayal of small-town life presents an interesting study on the ramifications of grief. He ultimately succeeds in depicting a pressure cooker environment in which retribution is the only adequate means of catharsis for a community consumed by their darkness. (Arusa Qureshi) ■ Out Thu 2 Nov.
MUSIC HISTORY STUART COSGROVE Memphis ’68: The Tragedy of Southern Soul (Polygon/Birlinn) ●●●●●
It’s perfectly feasible that Stuart Cosgrove’s exhaustive but briskly readable trilogy of social, political and musical histories of Black America in the late 1960s (of which this is the second chapter) will go on to become deserved future classics, although the world didn’t quite catch up quickly enough to acknowledge the fact that 2015’s Detroit ’67: The Year That Changed Soul presaged Kathryn Bigelow’s movie Detroit by a couple of years. As with that great book, Memphis ’68 draws together a wealth of in-person academic and library research to paint a month-by-month picture of a year and a place which it’s possible to look back on and believe that the world shifted on its axis. As with Detroit in 1967 and its riots and unrest as
the Vietnam War ground on, Memphis in 1968 threw up epochal moments by the month, from the crushing blow to Stax Records of Otis Redding’s death in a plane crash to the confrontations between militarised police and striking sanitation workers which drew the attention of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, leading to the civil rights leader’s assassination in the city that year. The book is forensic and journalistic, but Cosgrove masks his wealth of detail beneath an authorial voice which is as easily, blissfully evocative as a classic soul seven-inch. Once again, he has created a mighty but personable music history book which wears its own importance very lightly. (David Pollock) ■ Out now.