Scandanavian crime is in a class of its own.  One of the highlights for me at this year's Edinburgh Book Festival was to be the Crime Fiction event featuring two Norwegian writers - Jo Nesbø and K O Dahl.  Or it would have if either of them had turned up.  Nesbo cancelled a few days before the event to be fair.  Dahl cancelled with about an hour to go.  Was it the weather?  Charlotte Square was swimming in about 3 inches of water at the time.  But I'd stuck it out ..... 

Not only that I'd read about 1200  pages of their fiction in preparation - 3 novels, to be precise - 2 by Nesbo, 1 by Dahl.



K O Dahl has been a published author in Norway since 1993.  The Fourth Man is the first of his novels to be translated into English.  In it we are introduced to Frank Frolich, who for a cop seems remarkably well-adjusted.  Then he saves Elizabeth Faremo from getting caught in some crossfire, falls hopelessly in love and risks his reputation and career to be with her.  For she is the sister of a crook suspected of murder.  As the investigation unfolds and the body count mounts, Frank Frolich finds it increasingly difficult to maintain his professional objectivity, especially when Elizabeth herself is threatened.  Art theft, a malevolent businessman and the suspicion that Frank meeting Elizabeth was a setup in the first instance make this an excellent and highly recommended read.  




Jo Nesbø has been published in English since 2005.  However, the English translations did not appear in chronological sequence. The Devil's Star (published 2005) is actually the sequel of The Redbreast (published 2006).  I'd advise you to read them in the correct chronological sequence, although some readers don't deem this detrimental to the reading experience.  Either way, it's hard to fault either of these fast-paced and furious thrillers.  Nesbøs detective Harry Hole has the usual problems yet he differs from other fictional detectives in that he's a full-blown alcoholic and struggling to keep his job. Serial killers aren't necessarily his worst nightmare either for he has enemies in the force.  If the booze doesn't kill him, these enemies might.  Both books pivot around events from the past bearing consequence in the present.  The Devil's Star focuses on contemporary emnities while in The Redbreast rivalries emerge from the Second World War.  This latter novel won the Nordic Riverton Prize and was recently voted best Norwegian thriller of all time by Norwegian readers and it is certainly a cracking and educational read.  There is much to be learnt about the reasons for Norwegian collaboration with the Nazis and how this still resonates in contemporary Norway.  In terms of plot, action, dialogue and entertainment I should really award 5 stars to both books.  Harry is a brilliant creation, too brilliant, though, for the raging alcoholic he is depicted to be?  Hence  for both.

In her award-winning Regeneration trilogy, Pat Barker concentrated on the experiences of the WWI poets.  In Life Class she has turned her attention to the experiences of the artists of the same era, specifically the artists who are being tutored by Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Art in the spring/summer of 1914.



It was a lazy , Edwardian summer, a time of frivolity, an assertion of independence and meaningless love affairs.  Paul Tarrant's biggest crisis is determining whether he has sufficient artistic talent:

Paul looked at his drawing.  If he'd been dissatisfied before he was dismayed now.  As Tonks drew closer, his drawing became mysteriously weaker.  Not only had he failed to "explicate the form", but he'd also tried to cover up the failure with all the techniques he'd learned before coming to the Slade: shading, cross-hatching, variations in tone, even, now and then, a little discreet smudging of the line.  In the process, he'd produced the kind of drawing that at school - and even, later, in night classes - had evoked oohs and ahs of admiration.  Once, not so long ago, he'd have been pleased with this work; now, he saw its deficiencies only too clearly.  Not only was the drawing bad, it was bad in exactly the way Tonks most despised.  More than just a failure, it was a dishonest failure.

He took a deep breath.  A second later Tonks's shadow fell across the age, though he immediately moved a little to one side os that the full awfulness could be revealed.  A long puase.  Then he said, conversationally, as if he were really interested in the answer, "Is this really the best you can do?"

"Yes."

"Then why do it?"

Why indeed?  For Paul and his fellow students are mere months away from being pitched into the maelstrom of the great war.  Thanks to a fortuitously timed bout of pneumonia, Paul cannot fight.  Instead he finds himself serving as an untrained medical orderly.  Pat Barker's view is that, while the official pictures of WWI feature the devastation of the landscape, WWI was a war fought on the human body and the unfllinching graphic images she presents vividly depict that war;  the carnage inflicted by battle, the pain resulting from often ineffective medical procedure, the heartbreaking reaction of a mother whose young son has lost his limbs, the robotic manoevres of the medical staff as they seek to preserve their sanity in the midst of the greatest insanity of all.

But then, that's the question.  Should you even pause to consider your own reactions?  These men suffer so much more than he does, more than he can imagine.  In the face of their suffering, isn't it self-indulgent to think about his own feelings?  He has nobody to talk to about such things and bludners his way through as best he can.  If  you feel nothing - this is what he comes back to time and time again - you might just as well be a machine, and machines aren't very good at caring for people.  There's something machine-like about a lot of the professional nurses here.  There's something machine-like about a lot of the professional nurses here.  Even Sister Byrd, whom he admires, he looks at her sometimes and sees a robot.  Well, lucky for her, perhaps.  It's probably more efficient to be like that. Certainly less painful.

While Paul is supporting the war (although disagreeing with it), his fellow student and lover, Elinor is not. Her viewpoint is not that of conscientious objection,but that the war is irrelevant and she chooses to ignore it.  Asserting her independence (a pattern established pre-war), she refuses to support it in any way.  She will not even knit a sock.  She certainly is not going to be badgered into becoming a nurse.  She wishes to continue working i.e painting beautiful landscapes.. At times Elinor can appear selfish, superficial and fey.  In response to one of Paul's letters, a letter in which he has described his latest mind-numbing, horrific twelve-hour shift, she asks "Have you done any work?"  The nearest the war touches Elinor is the way in which her friend, Catherine, is treated.  For Catherine's father is German and interned at the beginning of the war.  Hard times descend upon his daughter and it is the true friendship extended to Catherine that defends Elinor's character from accusations of selfish superficiality.

The life classes given to both Paul and Elinor during 1914/1915 separate them physically and mentally.  Elinor maintains her view that art should depict only the beautiful.  When asked by Paul how she would depict the war, should her brother be killed she replies that she would depict the places they enjoyed together; the places filled with happy memories; certainly not the reality of what had become of him. Paul, on the other hand, begins to document the war on the human boda.  On a trip home he shows his drawings to his tutor, Tonks

Tonks took the drawing to the window.  It was of a young man who had had the whole of his lower jaw blown off by a shell.  It was several minutes before Tonks turned to face Paul again.  "I don't see how you could ever show that anywhere."

And that is the argument at the core of this novel. Should depictions of horrific war injuries be made public?  Barker obviously believes they should be.   At the Edinburgh Book Festival she stated that it is only a true record of the cost of war that enable us to determine whether the price is worth paying.  My take on that is that is is not an argument relevant only to WWI.  In the C21st we see the body bags returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, but how many visual images are there of the walking wounded?

Serious considerations?  Indeed.  Yet Barker's novel wears its intellectualism and its research lightly.  Written in her down-to-earth, yet vivid prose, it is easily read in 2 to 3 sittings. Though a historical novel, the language is not  of a pseudo-historical nature,  Indeed for some it may be too modern.  (Was  "You're looking good, sis!" really an Edwardian idiom?).  Another quibble is the abruptness of the ending.  Paul and Elinor are still together in a sexual sense, the sense of their parting is inevitable.  Yet does life have further lessons to teach them before this happens?  We may find out for Barker confirmed yesterday that she is working on a sequel ....

.... which is very good news indeed.

If you take the test, be sure to leave a comment on your score. Regarding the level of my own literary proclivities, the only surprise is that I didn't score a full 25!  



 

Though my preparations started a couple of months ago,  I finally step onto Charlotte Square soil later today ... and tomorrow ... and most of next week.

Back in June, I posted a picture of preparatory reading:



To my delight,  I've read them all!  Reviewed three of them to date: The Lizard Cage, When We Were Romans and Measuring the World.  Further commentary along with reviews of the others: The Fourth Man, The Redbreast, The Devil's Star, The Pesthouse and Love Over Scotland to follow pending insights gleaned from the authors at the festival.  Although Jo Nesbo has cancelled .... 

Anyway I'm off to pack my tickets and a bag of books.  In addition to deep literary analysis I shall collect a few signatures.  I wonder if anyone will surpass the creativity David Mitchell showed last year:



Isn't that just lovely?

Literary prizes are funny beasts and reader reactions to Booker longlists are even stranger.    Once I'd passed the astonishment of "What?  No Lizard Cage!", I was then amazed by the listing of a piece of chicklit.  An assumption based on the cover.  Hang on a second:  the cover is a muted aubergine, not pastel pink.  The content must similarly be deeper and more subtle.  Indeed, first impressions can be deceptive.





The mystery at the centre of the book concerns the disappearance of Kate Meany, a lonely 10-year old child, whose compulsive spying leads her into deep waters.  In 1984 she spies on her neighbours and the consumers at Green Oaks Shopping Centre and then she vanishes.  Twenty years later she reappears on the surveillance screen of a nighttime security guard, a man whose existence in 2003 has many similarities with that of Meany's : dead loved ones, chronic loneliness and a survival strategy centred around long shifts in the shopping complex.  

This is a strategy he shares with many others, in particular, the shoppers who run around in a flurry of activity, desperate to buy the latest must-have and kill the desperate hours of a long Sunday afternoon - their plight in O'Flynn's analogy something similar to that of pandas (!).

"They spend their lives looking for leaves and bamboo to eat, but eathing that stuff does them no good, they can't digest it, so they have no energy.  They have to lie down and rest all the time.  .... They spend their whole lives in this pointless pursuit that just saps them."

The point is cleverly emphasised  in a series of  vignettes interspersed throughout the novel, short pieces written by individuals who frequent the huge complex:  an anonymous youth, an anonymous woman, an unidentified customer. The loss of identity is significant.  For in a novel with a backdrop of constant surveillance and noise (be it of music pumped into the stores or the low-level static hiss of the crowd) communication within personal relationships is empty at best, dishonest at worst.  True intimacy and friendship have been lost in the noise and consumerism of modern life.

It is the same failure to communicate that leaves the disappearance of the girl unsolved for 20 years ... and the fallout from that leads to further family breakdown and heartbreaking tragedy in the present.  The skillful timing of one key revelation (the identity of the man in the car) literally took my breathe away.  That O'Flynn chooses a neat, if somewhat rushed and implausible (?) solution to the central mystery demonstrates that this is not her prime concern. In doing so, however, she delivers a satisfactory ending and a very readable, though extremely thought-provoking debut novel.  I look forward to her second.

1/2

P.S I went shopping Sunday last.  The latest must-have requiring instant gratification was, of course, a booker longlistee.  Just as well it wasn't this one.  O'Flynn would never approve!

Karen Connelly was an annoyance to fans watching this year’s webcast award ceremony.  For instead of fulfilling her allocated role by silently accepting her statuette for the Orange Broadband for Debut Writers, smiling to the cameras and exiting stage left, she stood her ground and delivered a political acceptance speech of some three minutes - thus blowing webcast timings to the winds and ensuring that those watching did not get to hear who had won the main gong.  I freely admit this was a turnoff despite the fact that minutes earlier Jackie Kay had described The Lizard Cage as “extraordinary, lyrical and compelling”.  In the months since fellows bloggers have waxed passionate about this novel.  That coupled with the fact that Connelly is Canadian (and Canadian Literature is an ongoing strand in my reading) has finally persuaded me to read.

The lizard cage is a prison where Teza, a musician, is spending 20 years in solitary confinement for writing political protest songs.  Prison conditions are barbaric; the guards are sadists. Connelly does not flinch from delivering graphic descriptions of starvation, torture, drownings, beatings, rape and the resulting physical consequences.  Think Midnight Express – only this time the prisoner is innocent.  The author’s outrage is evident yet she avoids polemic and didactism.  Teza uses the opportunity afforded by his imprisonment to practice the 8 precepts of Buddhism, transcending the brutality of his environment and, ironically becoming a better Buddhist than he would have become had he remained a free man.

The novel can also be seen as the story of prison contraband, in this case paper and a cheap pen “made-in-Thailand ... its plastic casing carefully marked, at the bottom and the top, little cuts with a razor blade.  Identifiable” and the centre of a sting, conceived by the authorities to entrap political prisoners and ensure a lengthening of their prison terms by 5-10 years.  Teza is a prime target and defenceless in his solitary cell.  At this point the novel ignites.  As Teza realises the danger, the pounding in his heart echoes the pounding of the guards' boots as they march to his cell, echoing the pounding of my heart and the blood in my head as I become part of the scene ..... it's too intense, I have to stop to reading.

That pen (symbol for words and the capacity for freedom of speech) provides narrative continuity.  For wherever it lands, trouble and danger follows.  Ownership passes from Teza to Nyi Lay to Chit Naing.  Nyi Lay is a innocent 12-year old rat-catching orphan, scratching out a living within the prison complex; Chit Naing, a humane prison guard who befriends Teza.  Yet innocence and humanity are as dangerous as possession of the pen, and both child and guard are inexorably drawn into sympathetic complicity (at least in the eyes of the authorities).  Safety depends on disposal of the pen and fittingly, in view of its symbolic meaning, neither Nyi Lay nor Chit Naing, choose to dispose of it (despite this reader internally screaming at them to do so!).

No thriller has ever raised my blood pressure the way this novel did.  Yet this is undoubtedly a literary offering.  The colour palette is not as black and white as at first appears.  The villains, while evil, are products of their time and place.  In chapters written from their point-of-view, Connelly allows us, the readers, to inhabit their skins and confront the possibility that those choices, the choices of the masses after all, are ones we would make ourselves.  Connelly is an award-winning poet and it shows.  Yet she hasn't delivered a poem in prose and, therefore, lost her novel and theme to the language.  Her prose is controlled, by turns gritty and graphic, lyrical and rhythmic, as here: 
 

“Teza closes his eyes again.  Before he’s settled back into his mediation, he thinks how mysterious, how ordinary the breath is, this thin line of air cast between spirit and death, always here.  Until it’s gone.

He shakes the thought away and breathes

In

    Out

In

   Out

In”

A meditation to calm the most agitated of souls ... and this, at times, hyperventilating reader.

 


p.s.  Question: Why wasn't this included on the Booker longlist?  Answer:  Because Harvill Secker didn't submit it as one of their two choices.  I find this absolutely shocking!  Does anyone know which two novels they did submit?

This is not a piece of inverse snobbery.  Six months book-bloggery has left me with a TBR mountain so high that it would be crazy to increase its proportions by adding the 13 Booker longlisted novels.

For weeks now I have been innoculating myself against the Booker virus, maintaining that I will instead concentrate on reading the books recommended by those I know have good taste.  4 weeks in advance of the real Booker shortlist, I have drawn up an alternative book-blogging shortlist.

The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam - Chris Ewan (Susan Hill)
The Needle In The Blood - Sarah Bower (dovegreyreader)
Out Stealing Horses - Per Petterson (dovegreyreader)
What Was Lost - Catherine O'Flynn (eve's alexandria, dovegreyreader)
The Welsh Girl -  Peter Ho Davies (John Self)
Mr Pip - Lloyd Jones (paddyjoe at palimpsest, John Self and dovegreyreader)

I keep discerning company for the last three titles also appear on the Booker longlist.  It seems I won't be ignoring  Booker 2007 after all.  However, if you're seeking all things Booker, please visit the Bookerthon pages of dovegreyreader and John Self, both of whom are intending to read and review the entire longlist prior to the shortlist announcement.

In the meantime I shall resist adding The Gift of Rain (also recommended by dovegreyreader), Consolation and Gifted to the TBR. Was researching the longlist the thin end of the wedge?  Only time will tell .......

My first read for the Through The Decades Reading Challenge is a novel I have been meaning to reread for ages.  I enjoyed it as a teen – how does it fare now I’m at the wrong end of my forties?

Very well, indeed, as it happens.  

It’s not a thriller in the modern sense for the lens is not focused on the derring-do of spies and terrorists. It’s an examination of the fallout of a terrorist act gone badly wrong.  More I cannot say without spoiling what is actually an intriguing and horrifying set of circumstances.    And though the title points to Mr Verloc, The Secret Agent, as the prime character, the story is really that of his wife, Winnie.  And what an emotional rollercoaster that turns out to be. 

Winnie and her dim-witted brother, Stevie, are the only characters painted positively in Conrad’s novel.  The Victorian anarchists are a bunch of immoral and incompetent ne’er-do-wells; their outer appearance as repulsive as their morals.  Yet the world in which they operate is quite often as amoral.  The halos of embassy officials and the police force have slipped also.  Thus the novel retains its currency for a contemporary audience.

The core of the novel lies in the examination of the relationship between Mr and Mrs Verloc -  a marriage of convenience for both.  Verloc marries Winnie to give himself an edge of respectability and a front for his activities.  Winnie marries him to provide a safe-haven for her brother and doesn’t look too closely at her husband’s habits, preferring to turn a blind eye to his unsavoury associates.  Neither does she tell him of everything she does.  The arrangement works well enough for 7 years, when the unravelling begins ….

Much is made of Conrad’s use of complex sentences with unwieldy vocabulary.  Fortunately the plot is such that the pages turn themselves at times.  I was particularly engrossed in the final scene between Verloc and Winnie. They are at complete cross-purpose.  The damage is done and yet Verloc’s self-confidence remains undented.  Winnie is his wife.  Ergo she is fond of him.  Yet she does not seek solace in his arms.  Verloc “was disappointed.  There was that within him which would have been more satisfied if she had been moved to throw herself upon his breast.  But he was generous and indulgent.  Winnie was always undemonstrative and silent.  Neither was Mr Verloc himself prodigal of endearments and words as a rule.  But this was not an ordinary evening.  It was an occasion when a man wants to be fortified and strengthened by open proofs of sympathy and affection.  Mr Verloc sighed and put out the gas in the kitchen.  Mr Verloc’s sympathy with his wife was genuine and intense.”  And, it must be said, fake at the same time.  For Verloc simply doesn’t understand his wife’s viewpoint. The reader does. In the same scene Conrad dissects Winnie’s mental state with real sympathy and acute psychological insight. While  Verloc’s incomprehension and self-justifications make Winnie’s blood boil,  the reader is laughing at his bumbling idiocy.

Conrad, writing in his 3^rd (!) language, has other stylistic tricks up his sleeve, including tight control of the timeframe.  The identity of one key figure remains hidden, revealed only to the reader as it is revealed to the characters.  Thus are the suspense and the horror magnified.

Final Analysis:  I’m really pleased I revisited this novel, which is now confirmed as one of my favourites.