Canongate £9.99 pp224

Even when read at third-hand, in this translation from a French version of the original Albanian, Ismail Kadare’s novel is suffused with the power of thought and feeling. The plot echoes reality. Mehmet Shehu, the heir to the dictator Enver Hoxha, died suddenly in 1981, and it was never clear whether Shehu had committed suicide or been murdered. In the book, the two men are referred to bleakly as the Successor and the Guide (or simply Himself). You don’t, however, need a degree in Balkan studies to be gripped by the story and what accompanies it.

In an atmosphere of intense dismay and rumour, people understand “the relief that a newly buried corpse brings to the living”. Readers in comfortably muddled democracies can merely try to conjecture what this really means. There is refined irony at the expense of foreign analysts, dusting off their Albania files and offering possible explanations of the death — competitive male vanity? class warfare? trouble in Kosovo? oil? — only to conclude that the proper way to grasp a place overcome by paranoia “is by becoming a little paranoid yourself”. The cleaners sweeping up after a public meeting don’t detect the usual odour of “feet, sheep-wax and sour milk”, but “the smell bodies make when they are afraid”.

All this is skilfully fitted into the format of a whodunnit. There are countless versions of what happened on the night of the Successor’s death, stories about locked doors, secret tunnels and alleged sightings of the interior minister’s silhouette at the scene of the putative crime. The Agatha Christie business risks becoming wearisome through repetition, but Kadare develops ingenious variations on the theme. He shows how the ingredients of the mystery, recombined in countless variations, themselves “remained irreducible”. Strange men in white coats arrive in the house, re-creating the nightmare in early daylight by shooting at a huge chunk of raw meat. The Successor may be a traitor or a martyr, wandering “from one hypothesis to another like a damned soul” in Dante.

A deeper shifting undertone comes from the many references to proverbs, folk tales, epics, ancestors and precedents; tradition can weigh heavily on almost any action or utterance. There are allusions to the curse that falls on a new house, to the bonds forged by blood spilt in the name of doctrine, to the wasteland that separates “this world from the shadow world”. The Successor’s daughter calls out to God, aware that she has invoked a forbidden name. An old aunt warns against vengeance; who knows, however, whether she is just a garrulous relative, a member of the secret police or a ghost returned from a country graveyard?

This is not a novel of character, but we learn just enough about the cast to keep the narrative going and our sympathies fully engaged. The Successor’s daughter is a sensualist with a rich memory. Her engagement has been sacrificed for the sake of the regime; she compares the “heavenly evanescence” of orgasm with the flags and anthems of public life. Her eloquent wish is both simple and impossible: “Let life become liveable again! ” Her mother offers a strong and disturbing contrast. She grieves for the party’s sake; even when evicted from the family home by uncouth soldiers, she clutches a portrait of the Guide.

Other men are affected by the Successor’s death and are given their enigmatic troubled pages of sombre reflection. A pathologist fears that to carry out an autopsy might result in his own death; the interior minister tries in vain to probe the Guide’s labyrinthine hatreds. An architect fears that, by designing a house that was too good for a mere vassal, his love of beauty might have made him the effective murderer. But “the gates of the hereafter” have one-way hinges, and he will never learn the truth.

Above all, Kadare creates a haunting sense of the absurd. This is a world in which political changes have as much influence on the bodies of the dead as on the fortunes of the living; in which the announcement of another plot is a relief for those who can believe they’re not part of it; in which a senior minister is prepared to write a confession assuming “responsibility for all possible and imaginable crimes”. Yet there is no consolation for the reader in wryly contemplating this evident absurdity. As the epigraph chillingly asserts, “Any resemblance between the characters and circumstances of this tale and real people and events is inevitable.”

Available at the Books First price of £9.45 on 0870 165 8585

Times Recommends

• Simon Kernick's Harrogate festival diary
• The 10 greatest sci-fi films never made
• Europe Between the Oceans by Barry Cunliffe