Surface Olivier Norek Review

In Olivier Norek’s latest crime thriller, Surface, translated by Nick Caistor, the French author demonstrates the distinctive skill required to construct a top-notch police procedural. Genre writing demands a set pact with the reader that can be toyed with, but ultimately must be fulfilled: wrongdoings, suspense, clever twists and a lead detective we can root for. Surface has all those essentials neatly packaged and solidly presented from start to finish. We follow police capitaine Noémie Chastain through a ripper of an opener. She is shot in the face during a drug bust, which leaves her with pock-like scars and a crescent-shaped gash along one side of her face. Because of her altered appearance, she is ostracized by both her boyfriend and boss; a brutal double whammy. She allows herself one month of wallowing in her filth, wrapped in a duvet, before deciding to return to work.

‘Noémie was sitting cross-legged on her sofa, her hair now a boyish crew cut. She was surrounded by a month’s worth of greasy takeaway food containers . . . the ashtray was full, there were empty bottles all around her . . . Noémie looked like an unclean hermit in a state of deep depression. “Right, I’m good and ready”.’

There is something satisfying about how much of healing is, for lack of a better phrase, just getting on with it. She is temporarily reassigned from her high-profile Paris police team to a middle-of-nowhere French village. She has thirty days to decide if the local police station should be closed, after which she expects to be welcomed back to Paris with open arms. Before embarking on her rural tryst, she writes in lipstick on her Paris mirror, ‘So? Do you love yourself?’ anticipating she’ll know the answer once she returns to her flat.

Banished to the Provinces

For her first few weeks in the countryside, she gets acquainted with the (sometimes cartoonishly nasty) village mayor and his estranged son Lieutenant Romain Valant. Her team is rounded out by the lightly brutish Bousquet and naïve new cop, Bambi. Noémie is in charge and proves to be a tough cookie who ‘insults almost everyone’, though I found her to be enjoyably sarcastic with quick wit. When her new commandant remarks, ‘“The Paris Bastion would never send me a completely fit officer. I suspected there was a hidden twist,”’ she replies, ‘“Hidden? Not really. I’d say it was rather . . . visible.”’

As Noémie struggles with her scarred face and the trauma of the shooting, she starts to unravel a cold case tied to the village’s past and its survival. She tries to ignore what will become an all-consuming murder investigation; her primary concern is finishing up her assignment and getting back to Paris. Village life feels too quiet, too slow. Some of Norek’s sharpest prose lies in Noémie’s first impressions: ‘Behind her, ragged hills covered in scabrous vegetation, exhausted by more than a century of heavy metal pollution from a zinc factory and beneath them, hundreds of metres of grey, corrugated-iron warehouses,’ or else, ‘a tall, rickety little house sticking up on a hilltop like a twisted nail.’

Moments before Noémie is set to deliver her verdict about the police station and return to Paris, a child’s decomposed body is found in a barrel floating in the village lake. Surface turns out to be anything but cosy. I knew there was bound to be a body, but finding a child’s body ups the ante and shifts the tone entirely. Up come the village secrets: Three children went missing a week before building the dam was finished and the old village was flooded.

It’s ‘the old village releasing its ghosts,’ Noémie observes, ‘The village and I have the same scars.’ While that comparison feels a bit on the nose — a piece of the thematic puzzle I would have liked to piece together myself without the guiding hand of the author — of course what is left unaddressed will fester. Finally given a real purpose, Noémie settles in, determined to solve the case.

A Village Haunted

The plot and procedural elements of the book unfold seamlessly. The narrative momentum builds a genuine desire to know what will happen and to whom and for what motive. Running parallel to the investigation is Noémie’s internal struggle to adjust to her new appearance and professional standing, which is ultimately the most compelling part of the novel.

Her belief that her scars make her undeserving of romantic or sexual advances is hard to fully believe at times. This is exacerbated by the TV adaptation, in which the woman who plays Noémie with the ‘disfigured’ face is conventionally very attractive. The lead actress also doesn’t have a shaved head like in the book. The scars were clearly toned down for visual appeal: a reminder of TV’s discomfort with ‘unpalatable’ female characters. Yet deformity and ostracism are central themes throughout the novel.

I oscillated between finding the frequency and intensity of Noémie’s self-loathing a bit stereotypical, yet seeing it as understandable within Norek’s world. She has lost her boyfriend and her job because of her appearance, though losing the job hits her hardest: ‘Hidden behind a function, a position, an authority, a power, a gun, I’m no longer a woman, still less a disfigured one. I’m quite simply a police officer.’ Reclaiming that professional identity is her primary motivation to recover fast, but this proves to be difficult.

Trauma and Identity

Noémie tries to only show the uninjured side of her face and flinches when her scars are touched. She is repeatedly subjected to colleagues’ stories about other visibly scarred people and how easy she’s got it compared to them, while they make jokes and jabs behind her back. This pushes her into some dark places — a strange, off-putting bout of sex with her now ex-boyfriend, or distancing herself from a new colleague turned romantic interest — referring to herself as ‘“No” instead of ‘Noémie’.”

While some of the characters’, and her own, responses to her scars feel a bit extreme, her sessions with her therapist, a man with ‘unbearable professional kindness’, are interesting and present her as a nuanced person processing severe trauma. She is empathetic and is able, for the most part, to brush off people’s awkwardness when they look at her scars, as ‘they were poor actors but were making a real effort’. She can at times be a pushover, crass or unapologetic. She is also decent, neighbourly and brilliant at her job. Even while suffering from insomnia, has lapses in memory and isn’t able to shoot, or even hold, her gun for most of the novel, she trudges on with what she is good at: finding the bad guy.

Ultimately, it takes small connections — the slow work of opening up to a new lover and a scrappy dog — for Noémie to be able to look at herself in the mirror again. I cared less about her aim of being ‘healed’ than her efforts to regain some kind of normalcy. She endures trauma in the way I imagine many do: through small daily annoyances, minor victories, moments of tenderness, a new environment, being good at something. At times there’s a risk of healing turning sentimental, but Noémie (and Norek) are skillfully self-aware, so such moments are often framed with a flash of humour keeping it grounded.

Similarly, while the ‘bad to the bone’ bad guys initially read as a bit Disney, each time I felt that way, Norek mixed in a bit of grey and the villains redeem themselves, if only a little. The ultimate resolution is satisfying, though at first the bad guys and their choices seem shallow. The villains act under the classic impulse: ‘I’ll do anything to protect the ones I love,’ a motivation complicated by Norek when ‘anything’ means the murder of innocents, and the definition of who and what deserves that ‘protection’ lies entirely in the eye of the beholder.