The Accident on the A35

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Unflashy yet highly accomplished, The Accident on the A35 works on several levels. It’s the story of a bereaved schoolboy going off the rails and a middle-aged man whose wife has had enough – and his subsequent poignant need to return to his boyhood home to live with his widowed mother, who has dementia. It has a denouement like something out of Greek tragedy but delivers as a proper police procedural too, with further mystery when Gorski is drawn reluctantly into the unsolved case of a Strasbourg woman strangled, it turns out, in the unaccounted hours before Bertrand’s death. Dorset Police are said to be at the scene and no further information has yet been provided. Traffic is being diverted via local routes. Had Graeme Macrae Burnet not made last year’s Booker shortlist with his previous novel, His Bloody Project, you probably wouldn’t be reading this review: it wouldn’t exist. After all, Burnet’s Maigret-influenced debut, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, went unnoticed outside his native Scotland. But the enterprise of his publisher Saraband (once of Glasgow, now based in Salford), the wisdom of the 2016 panel – and the quality of His Bloody Project, about a crofter’s son bound for the gallows after a triple murder to which he has confessed guilt but not motive – have won Burnet a keen audience for his next move.

The story opens when a lawyer is killed in a road accident, the titular "accident on the A35". It appears a routine accident however Georges Gorski wonders where the lawyer was prior to the accident and this query opens a can of worms which sustains the rest of the book. The mystery at the centre of the book is fairly straightforward. A lawyer, Bertrand Barthelme, in a small French town is killed in what looks an accident late at night but on a road he shouldn't be on if he was where he told his wife. When Chief Inspector Georges Gorski informs the man's young and attractive wife of his death, she asks him to find out where her husband had been that night. Bertrand's 17 year old son, Raymond decides to carry out his own investigation into his father's movements that night. One more thing: the metafictional nods in the introduction and epilogue work very nicely this time; I was less keen on them with the previous novel but this time they add an entirely new dimension to the reading of this book. I can't and won't say why, but all becomes very clear. The Accident on the A35 is the second book in the Georges Gorski series by award-winning Scottish author, Graeme Macrae Burnet. It looked pretty straightforward: Bertrand Bethelme’s Mercedes had run off the A35 into a tree, sometime after 9pm on Tuesday night. He probably fell asleep at the wheel. But after confirming his identity the following morning, his widow, Lucette raised a query: where had her husband been that night? His usual Tuesday night dinner with his club would not put him anywhere near the A35. There’s something a bit Wes Anderson about Graeme Macrae Burnet. There’s a dry humour to his characters. It’s hard not to love. He skilfully portrays absurdity and contradictions of characters that have a very strong sense of self.would be keen to hear from any motorists who may have captured the incident, or the events leading up to it, on dashcam footage. A spokeswoman from Dorset & Wiltshire Fire Rescue Service said: "At 2.56pm yesterday, we were notified by the police about a road traffic collision on Puddletown Bypass.

The conceit that the novel wasn’t actually written by Macrae Burnet pays off less happily in stretches of prose that it’s hard to believe really were composed by a Man Booker prize-shortlisted author. The formulations “greatly concern” and “greatly concerned” turn up in adjoining sentences, the adjective “little” is employed twice within three lines, and “resulting” and “result” inside 10 words. Postmodernism may mean never having to say you’re sloppy, but it takes great charity to see these repetitions as a gag about the dodgy quality of English translations from foreign novels. I’m afraid I struggled with The Accident on the A35 by Graeme Macrae Burnet. It could well have to do with the translation, but as well as being unable to get close to the characters, I couldn’t raise any enthusiasm for the plot. A word of warning – don’t expect a thriller with a few curve balls or twists with this book, it’s more of a leisurely paced character-driven journey in which the setting also plays a prominent part. Also, if you’re the sort of person that likes a crime or mystery solved and don’t like things left open-ended then this book may not be for you. Set in Saint-Louis, France, very close to the Tripoint, where France, Germany and Switzerland meet, the main characters are the Chief of Police Georges Gorski, and the Barthelme family – husband and wife Bertrand and Lucette and their 17yo son Raymond. The metafiction element of this book turns it into a work of art, and opens up a discussion about fiction and literature in general, and the way it may or may not be intertwined with the lives of the writers who wrote it. After reading this you may question other books, and which parts of them are real or fiction. It’s very poetic. Macrae Burnet becomes a character himself, that comments on and critiques the work, which to some extent, absolves him of the responsibility for any of it’s flaws. He says exactly what you are thinking at the end of the book. If it was overused it would be a cop-out, but it isn’t (to me at least, in fact I think it’s the first time I’ve seen this), so it feels very original. We’ll leave it at that before we spoil it for anyone. But it is a very interesting device which is beginning to characterise and define Macrae Burnet’s work.

Over the past year I’ve become an aficionado of Grame Macrae Burnet after becoming entranced with his Booker-nominated novel, His Bloody Project. That was followed by reading The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau, and now I’ve dipped into the well for the third time with his thoroughly absorbing The Accident on A35.

I read straight through its small-printed chapters of a defeated, mildly miserable detective and an even more defeated, miserable teenage boy; wandered through the bleak compromised labyrinth Burnet had built for them; and then… Well, there is no then. There's only a translator's afterword that is even funnier than the foreword. The narrative is told from two perspectives, that of Detective Gorski and that of Raymond, the teenaged son of the deceased. Gorski is still in the town of St, Louis, a small city in France where "the inhabitants are most comfortable with failure. Success serves only to remind the citizenry of their own shortcomings and is thus enthusiastically resented". Gorski's wife has left him and he spends his time drinking heavily at Le Pot. While he misses his wife, he enjoys solitude and the ability to do as he wishes when he wishes. Accident on the A35 is a literary mystery. Not like other crime mysteries that are plot-driven with many twists and turns. It’s important to step into this novel realizing you are about to read an easy flowing mystery that is character-driven.

The third person narrative of the books drifts between different perspectives. This is very pleasing. It allows you an insight into the characters thoughts without too much exposition. The way the narration is handled in scenes where both of the main characters feature is masterful. The introduction of these characters is seamless. Police are appealing for witnesses and would like to hear from anyone who saw either vehicle prior to the incident or witnessed the collision itself. There were 1,390 reported road deaths in Britain from June 2020 to June 2020, data from the Ministry of Transport shows.