Ismail Kadare's new novel begins one rain-soaked morning, on the autobahn heading towards Vienna airport, when a taxi driver crashes through the safety barrier, killing both his passengers and leaving himself severely injured. It looks like an everyday sort of tragedy but, for reasons never explained, the driver's report of what happened immediately before he lost control of the car causes confusion. The couple in the back seat, he said, seemed as if they were "trying to kiss". For reasons that are never entirely clear, there's a suggestion that this seemingly innocuous act may have precipitated the catastrophe.
The deceased were Albanian nationals and their deaths become the subject of a lengthy inquiry demanded by the governments of both Serbia and Albania. The dead man, known only as Besfort Y, worked for the Council of Europe and had an unexplained connection to the war crimes investigations under way in The Hague. It emerges that he and the woman, Rovena, an intern at the Archaeological Institute, had been carrying out a passionate affair in hotels across Europe for the past 12 years. And as the testimonies are gathered from the few people close to them, it begins to look like the crash may have had a more malevolent cause.
The dark, dreamlike sequence that follows is familiar terrain for Kadare, an International Booker prizewinner whose work has been translated into more than 30 languages. His acclaimed previous novels, such as The Palace of Dreams, have documented the paranoid, absurd, often Kafkaesque dimensions of life under the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, perhaps the 20th century's most bizarrely gruesome autocrat. The Accident is set in contemporary Albania and central Europe, but the departed Hoxha's shadow still lingers, as does the fog of war that clouded the whole Balkan peninsula during the 1990s and early 2000s. It's a place still densely haunted by "every possible abomination known to this world – murdering, bombing, setting entire populations at each other's throats".
That lurid backdrop plays an integral role in this shapeshifting tale of two people trapped by each other, their love fated to die even as they search for a "chink through which they can escape" – out of their story, out of time. Layered with countless motifs from Albanian folklore involving betrayal, incest, shame and horror, as well as tragic themes from Plato, Virgil and Cervantes, this section of the narrative is a "crabwise" unfolding of their last 40 days, compiled by a researcher whose own obsession with the case is never explained, but who is ultimately confounded by the unanswerable question: "What right have we got in this pitch-black night to ask about things that are beyond our powers to see?"
To reveal that the mystery is never fully resolved does not ruin the story, but underlines what this book isn't: a conventional whodunit. Instead, it's a provocative exploration of the sinister underside of human relations. In places the characterisation is thin: Rovena, in particular, strays too close to a stock projection of male fantasy – a beautiful supplicant with sapphic tendencies, yet who ultimately remains obedient to one man, always offering herself up to him smelling fresh after prolonged bathroom preparations. But this is not, after all, a realist novel.
"Albania wears you down," a friend of Besfort tells him after leaving for Belgium in 1990. "She drives you to despair and sends you round the bend, but there's no escaping her." The same may be said about this book: it's a flawed yet compulsive and unnerving excavation of love, power and the imperfect art of storytelling.
