Grab your credit card, borrow money from a friend, or steal
from a casual acquaintance – but please don’t mug any old ladies in the street. Well...
Neil Randall’s latest novel The Belgrade School Shootings is released
today!
The first part of The
Belgrade Trilogy, written in a frenzy of literary activity in the dark
depths of everyone’s least favourite year 2024, is a hard book to define. Some
early reviewers have called it ‘a razor-sharp literary thriller’, others ‘a
book about obsession, and the perilous intersection between fiction and
reality’. Whereas the author himself always saw the novel as a ‘love letter to the act of reading’. But stopped short of aligning himself with the protagonist’s
chilling warning: ‘If the younger generation isn’t prepared to read and arrest
the alarming intellectual decline, then they should be put against a wall and
shot.’
The plot?
Serbia’s most
acclaimed novelist Issak Lazarevic guns down 10 of his students in a seeming
act of madness. But as veteran journalist (and Lazarevic’s former
fiancée) soon discovers – there is so much about the killings that don’t aid up
– the way the children were shot in an execution-style manner (Lazarevic had
never fired a gun in his life), uncanny Lazarevic lookalikes popping up all over the city,
and most bizarre of all, the emergence of a novel written months before the
school shootings, clearly written by Lazarevic, which predict events that
hadn’t even happened yet.
Lazarevic’s most acclaimed
piece of work? – The Professional Mourner.
Here is a short
sample from the novel to whet your appetite. At this point in the story,
Lazarevic has just been arrested for the shootings, and the police
investigation is just getting underway.
When police raided Issak’s apartment in Dedinje, they made
some curious, if not disturbing discoveries. Most peculiar of all, it looked as
if the same two people were living in the one same space. And I articulate that
in somewhat obscure terms knowingly and intentionally. In the only bedroom,
there were two identical futon-style beds. The two wardrobes that stood facing
each other on either side of the room contained the exact same clothes. And not
just in style – the blazers, shirts, and slacks I’ve already mentioned – but in
the exact same number: seven blazers, seven shirts, seven pairs of slacks. They
made a similar discovery in the two underwear drawers: seven pairs of boxer
shorts and seven pairs of socks in each one.
In the bathroom:
two toothbrushes, two tubes of toothpaste, two bottles of mouthwash, two cans
of deodorant, two razors, two cans of shaving foam, two shampoos, two shower
gels, and two towels hanging from the back of the door (both black and both
still slightly damp). Even more freakishly and bizarre, when the officers
examined the toiletries in question, either visually or by giving each
individual receptacle a shake, the exact same amount of toothpaste, mouthwash,
deodorant, shaving foam, even the number of cotton buds in their respective
plastic containers appeared to be inside.
All of which
suggested that two people were choreographing and copycatting their everyday
existence down to their oral hygiene and facial grooming routine. And the only
way that that would’ve been possible (and I thought about this so much over the
days immediately following the shootings, it made my head hurt) was for one
person to have painstakingly and with a degree of precision you’d associate
with a highly advanced form of artificial intelligence, to, not so much perform
each individual ablution twice, but, for example, pour out two exact measures
of mouthwash, use one, throw the other away, or spray deodorant under each arm,
then discharge two phantom sprays into the air, and so on.
None of which made
any sense. To be that precise about everything that was discovered in the
apartment would’ve taken a disproportionally huge amount of time out of Issak’s
day. And this was a man who valued every single second, who knew how precious
his time was, and who wanted to do nothing but channel that time into his
artistic and educational activities. The Issak I knew could never have wasted
even one valuable second on such everyday inconsequentialities. It would’ve
been far too painful for him; it would’ve made his artistic soul squirm.
In the kitchen
cupboards and drawers, where you’d expect to find many plates, bowls, cups,
knives, forks, spoons, et cetera – there were only two of each. And two places
set at the table.
In the front
room, two identical leather armchairs with retractable footrests had been
turned around to face the wall, rather than the rest of the space (as if all
the occupants of those chairs ever did was stare at that wall from absurdly
close proximity). But the room contained nothing else. No TV. No coffee table.
Not even any bookcases – which seemed wildly amiss to me, a former resident of
the same apartment, as Issak had one of the most extensive personal libraries
of anyone I’d ever known. Cherished volumes, signed first editions, rare,
collector item tomes we’d discovered in book fairs on our travels. But when
police made inquiries, they never found out where these books had gone (and to
have removed hundreds, if not thousands of books from an apartment would’ve
taken hours and a whole removal team. Activities that would most certainly have
come to the attention of near-neighbours and the building superintendent).
On the terrace,
two wicker chairs were placed at corresponding angles with the best views out
over the city.
But none of the
residents in neighbouring apartments or any of Issak’s close inner circle had
seen, heard, or knew of anyone else living at the apartment. As far as they
were aware, Issak resided alone and considered his apartment his own personal
writing den, the place he sat and wrote stories which had touched people all
over the world and been translated into fifty-plus languages.
All of which
segues into the most glaring anomaly of all: Issak’s work. His laptop. Memory
sticks. The printouts of his early drafts. Copies of his works-in-progress.
Folders and files. Notebooks. Where were they? Nothing was found at the
apartment, nor his office at the institute. What had he done with his entire
life’s work, the new short story he’d been discussing with a fellow writer in
the days before the shootings, the big, sprawling novel he’d often referenced
in interviews and on which he’d been working solidly for the last two years?
Then there were
his three main email accounts – one for everything writing-related, one for his
teaching activities, and a personal account he used to keep in touch with
friends and family. Not only were all the inboxes empty, but a little digging
around in the cyberworld revealed a mass deletion the night before the
shootings and, even more confusingly, a whole swathe of cancelled services and
subscriptions, ranging from his internet provider, to the utilities for the
apartment, and memberships to around half a dozen literary organisations he’d
been affiliated with for over twenty years. ‘It’s the kind of behaviour you’d
expect from someone who’s had a fatal prognosis from their doctor,’ said one of
the more senior officers who examined the scene, ‘someone who wants to tie up
any loose ends before they pass away’.
It was a similar
story with his phone records. On the night before the shootings, Issak had a
series of lengthy telephone conversations – all to the same number, and all
lasting over ninety minutes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible for the
authorities to follow up on this information as the number in question was
government-affiliated.
“What’s a
‘government-affiliated’ number?” I asked Vladimir’s source.
“It belongs to
the highest office in the Serbian government.”
“The Prime
Minister? Bukic, you mean?”
“I didn’t say
that – I said the highest office in the Serbian government.”
If you like what you’ve read so far, you can buy the book here.
And if you’d like to learn more about the author’s other
published work, take a look at his amazon page.
