30 posts tagged “sweden”
Translated by Laura A. Wideburg.
Six years after the events in GOOD NIGHT, MY DARLING, we re-encounter Justine Dalvik, still living in the house in the woods left to her by her father, the 'candy millionaire' whose 'Sandy Concern' bought material comfort if not happiness to his daughter and second wife, Flora. Justine is still with Hans-Peter, a middle-aged concierge at a small, traditional hotel in town, though unfortunately he is no longer portrayed as a bibliophile.
Justine is haunted by one of the events in particular of six years ago, described in GOOD NIGHT MY DARLING, and spends her days rowing out into the middle of the lake, peering beneath the surface to see if she can see the drowned body of Berit, the woman she knew from her schooldays and who now haunts her dreams. Berit's husband, Tor, has not worked since his wife disappeared, and is being romantically pursued by Jill, Berit's best friend. This fifty-something unlikely couple travel on a ship off the coast of Norway to see the whales, but Tor is too seasick and miserable to enjoy the holiday. Jill does shift-work as a pilot at the harbour, guiding the maritime traffic through the treacherous shallows of the canal. Relationships among the stunted and strange characters in this creepy novel are no less treacherous.
Many passages in THE SHADOW IN THE WATER repeat themes and incidents from the previous novel. Ariadne is the cleaner at the hotel where Hans-Peter works. Her blind daughter is now 16 and the picture of their domestic life with Ariadne's violent husband, Tommy, a policeman, is deeply disturbing and chilling. Tommy has inherited a suspicion of Justine. Not only was she the last known person to see Berit alive, but Justine's ex-lover Nathan, as well as a photographer called Maria, both either vanished or were killed on a Malaysian adventure holiday. The police can't prove anything, and nor can Micke, Nathan's feckless son who spends his life living with his shrewish mother, observing and plotting revenge on Justine, who he believes should be mourning Nathan instead of beginning again with Hans-Peter.
The novel revisits the lives of these and other characters, mostly elderly and all eccentric or damaged to a greater or lesser degree. There's a damp, claustrophobic air over the whole novel. Although Justine is the main character in the previous book, here she is far less central, appearing as quite a pathetic figure with her decrepit, smelly bird. And although she is obsessed with Berit, her nemesis comes from a different direction altogether.
Some degree of closure is obtained for some of the characters by the end of this book, but it is a very disturbing novel, clouded and obscured by perceptions and suspicions so that nothing is what it seems. I admire the translator, Laura Wideburg, for so ably conveying the many subtleties of atmosphere and character. Both this novel and its predecessor won the Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year for the years in which they were first published (1998 and 2005), and I can see why. THE SHADOW IN THE WATER is even less of a comfortable read than its predecessor, in showing the nasty things that go on under the surface of apparently ordinary, small-town lives.
Translated by Laura A. Wideburg.
GOOD NIGHT, MY DARLING tells the life-story of Justine, a lonely woman in her mid-forties who lives on her own in an isolated house in the woods near a lake, somewhere in Sweden. Justine is trying to move on with her life after what seems to be a disaster involving her boyfriend Nathan, but we are not sure exactly what has happened. She decides to begin running to get some exercise, but most of the time she wanders round the house with her tatty raven, who flies freely around, and muses on her childhood with her father, owner of a sweet factory, and her stepmother Flora. She has some dim recollections of her French mother, who died suddenly of a cerebral stroke when Justine was very young.
Gradually we realise that Justine had a deeply unhappy childhood, being bullied and ostracised at school, as well as having to cope with Flora's bitter jealousy and abuse. Justine was a withdrawn child, becoming even more so as a result of this misery. Her father loved her but failed to take any real interest in her. More is revealed about the traumatic events of Justine's early life, and we become more aware of how her past informs her present behaviour.
Interspersed with Justine's story, we also get to know some people who live in the nearby town, particularly a divorced man called Hans-Peter, a bibliophile who works as a night porter in a local hotel; the stepmother Flora, now totally disabled and in a nearby care home; and Berit, who works for a local publisher. I loved these character sketches: the author has a wonderful ability to draw the reader right in to her subjects' lives and preoccupations.
The second part of the book flashes back to Justine's holiday with Nathan, her lover briefly introduced at the start of the novel. He is handsome and feckless, having had three wives, various less formal liaisons with women, and a lot of children. He's decided to start a business running adventure holidays to the Malaysian jungle, so he and Justine decide to go on a trip to check out the locale and logistics. As the couple arrive and join up with a party of fellow-trekkers, Justine is subject to Nathan's mental bullying and unpleasant behaviour, under the surface of his false bonhomie. She cracks, and has to return home - but not before cracking again when she is yet further provoked.
The final section of this excellently translated, haunting novel weaves together all these elements, as the complete picture of Justine's life and character comes into focus from all the previous hints and fragments, as she decides to take decisive action. The author deliberately does not allow the reader to sympathise with or condemn most of the characters, which gives this atmospheric and gripping book a satisfyingly unsettling air. The treatment of the police investigation into various incidents is also told with a dry humour and a rather different perspective from the way in which the police are usually portrayed in crime novels.
Translated by Reg Keeland.
The long-awaited final part of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy reaches an English-language readership in 2009, five years after its first publication in Sweden. And it is certainly worth the wait. The story of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist (after earlier hints, here explicitly adult versions of Astrid Lindgren's children's characters Pippi Longstocking and Kalle Blomqvist), pulls you right in on page 1, and is terrifically difficult to leave behind on page 600, especially as so many aspects of their stories (particularly Lisbeth's) have not begun to be explored - and never will be, owning to the sad early death of the author.
THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST begins directly after the dramatic finale of THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, the first 100 pages reflecting the confusion of deaths, illnesses, attacks and conspiracy that culminated in the confrontations at Gosseberga. Most of these 100 pages take place in hospital where Lisbeth lies critically injured, where Zalachenko, her father, is also severely wounded, and where the police, security personnel and other vultures are circling round the pair. Anyone who has not read the previous two books will probably find this long introduction almost incomprehensible in its details - those who have read the predecessors will need good memories but will have no difficulty being drawn into Lisbeth's predicament as she lies paralysed in the knowledge that her father, lying in a nearby room down the corridor, is trying to finish his malign task - while other forces are keen to try her, label her as insane and send her back to the secure institution where she spent her unhappy adolescence - assuming she survives her terrible injuries.
Next, the canvas of the book expands to a compelling history of Swedish politics post-1964, consciously continuing from the social analysis of the Maj Sjowall/Per Wahloo Martin Beck series, charting the failures of Swedish democracy from within the security forces by the formation of the SSA, an unofficial secret police within the official secret police (Sapo), known only to one or two people in the country. Real and fictitious events and characters are seamlessly juxtaposed, though there's an essential brief glossary to help the non-Swedish reader grasp the non-fictional essentials.
In this novel, SSA consists of a small, secret core of very hard-liners, determined to uphold and protect what its members consider to be the country's best interests. Primarily, it seems, this task has consisted of containing Zalachenko, the most important Soviet defector to the West ever. The grey men of the SSA have created a new identity for him and over the years have given him free rein and protected him from the consequences of his criminal activities and gross abuse of his wife.
This army of old men from another time come together in the realization that the Zalachenko affair is likely to blow wide open once he and his daughter Lisbeth are able to communicate with the authorities. Although they have lost one of their main means of controlling Lisbeth (how she disposed of her guardian is part of the plot of book 2), they enlist the help of psychiatrist Peter Taleborian, the man who locked Lisbeth away after her pyrotechnic actions when aged 12, and whom she has good reason to hate. Only Dr Jonasson, the surgeon who is currently caring for Lisbeth, seems to stand between her and the strong forces who want her silenced.
The book bursts into real life after this long prologue, history and setting-of-scene, when an odd coalition including Mikael, Lisbeth and her hackers' group form the online ‘knights of the idiotic table' in their first real act of striking back. Mikael begins to dig into the story of Zalachencko, gradually becoming to suspect the existence of ‘The Section', as he calls what the reader knows to be SSA. When a crucial report is stolen from his apartment, he uses this circumstance to find out more than the perpetrators had bargained for, and to strike back at them, in a clever game of double bluff.
In THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST, Lisbeth (who until the final chapters is a relatively insubstantial figure in the novel) serves as an allegory for Sweden itself - both the woman and the country have been betrayed over many years by secret allegiances of people bound together by delusions and evil impulses. Just as the young Lisbeth is wrongly diagnosed with mental illness and incarcerated in an isolation cell, so the young Swedish democracy is betrayed by people whose actions can only be explained by Mikael as being like those who have a mental illness and have separated themselves from normal society (p 475). Mikael is as much driven by his journalistic, crusading need to expose political corruption as his friendship and gratitude to Lisbeth compel him to expose the corruption that is continuing to threaten her by this coalition of "men who hate women".
Yet the novel is not a mere spy thriller - what gives it such massive heart are the characters - Mikael, Erica, the Millennium journalists, the Armansky operation, the police, Sapo agents, asylum seekers and others who give the novel such life - and the immense amount of absorbing, authentic details - of the workings of a newspaper office, a secret police organisation, computer hacking, police operations, investigative journalism, the security business, the race to publish Mikael's discoveries, and far more than can be covered in this review - a rich, dense and compelling context for the gradual uncovering of Lisbeth's story, cumulating in her trial where the main players take turns on centre stage.
There are certainly gaps in this book. One glaring weakness is that we never know why Zalachenko was so useful to the SSA, and why he continued to be so uniquely valuable for so long after he defected. We learn little of his criminal empire. Lisbeth, the very core of the trilogy, plays a passive role for almost all of the book. Some plot lines, for example the police search for the cop-killer Niedermann, are never developed. Other stories are hinted at but never told - we can only imagine that the author intended to pick those up in future books.
The Millennium Trilogy is a fantastically exciting and original set of books, admittedly with flaws, but with a great breadth and intelligence - of the characters as well as of the story - and with an ability to draw the reader in to an exciting narrative so that one is lost in the book, not knowing whether to turn the pages rapidly to find out what happens next, or to turn them slowly to prolong the totally mesmerising read, so ably conveyed to English readers by the translator, Reg Keeland.
Translator: Marlaine Delargy. THE DARKEST ROOM is a wonderful book, framed as the story of a wooden house, Eel Point, on the coast of the small island of Oland, Sweden - an island where the population is small and the old traditions continue. The house has a long, tragic history associated with the building of the two lighthouses on the nearby rocks, shipwrecks and various residents. The brief stories of these old tragedies are told in short sections interleaving the book's chapters, showing how Eel Point has become regarded today as haunted. The reader is never sure whether the ghosts are real, or to what extent the house's sad, cruel past is influencing current events.
A family moves to Eel Point, ostensibly to start a new life away from the city and the pressures of work and commuting, but as we gradually realise, there is another reason for the move. Katrine and Joakim have been married for seven years and are a typically smug, professional modern couple - good jobs, two lovely young children, well-off, and spending their spare time renovating their homes, which has enabled them to gradually move up the property ladder to the extent that they can now afford to buy the enormous yet run-down manor at Eel Point. At first it is hard to like either adult in this self-satisfied couple, but we gradually see the cracks in their personalities as, little by little, their story is revealed, and they become more sympathetic. Some of the revelations are from Katrine's estranged mother, Mirja Rambe, an artist of some renown and a determined Bohemian, for whom truth is an elastic concept. Mirja and her mother, an even more renowned artist, lived at Eel Point for a time during Mirja's childhood, and their secret history is central to the mysteries of the present.
Another plotline involves a series of robberies on the island. Three bored young men regularly get high on drugs before stealing from and vandalising holiday houses whose owners are absent in their regular jobs on the mainland. The police are completely unsuccessful in solving the case until Tilda Davidson, a new recruit arrives. Tilda is the connection between THE DARKEST ROOM and the first novel in this loose series, ECHOES FROM THE DEAD, as she is the granddaughter of old Gerlof Davidson's brother Ragnar. Tilda is both determined to make her mark as a policewoman subject to patronising sexism from her male colleagues (and smarting from an unfortunate affair), and also is interested in her own family history, of which she knows only fragments. Her grandfather Ragnar is dead, so she visits Gerlof in his old people's home to tape-record his reminiscences of his brother and their lives on the island. These sections of the book are among my favourites, both in Gerlof's reactions to the tape recording project and the way in which he infiltrates himself into Tilda's investigations. He immediately provides her with some good leads to the burglary case, as he knows old people who live near the properties concerned, people to whom a car passing down the road is a major life-event. Sure enough, Tilda and her colleagues soon begin to track down the perpetrators based on this evidence, and a case is gradually built up.
There are so many wonderful aspects to this book that it is impossible to note them all in a brief review. Above all, the author himself is a wonderful storyteller; one becomes totally immersed in his Oland world and in the lives and personalities of the superbly well-observed characters, major and minor. He is also a great plotter - the main stories as well as the minor ones weave in and out of each other: apparently small details in one story turn out to be highly relevant in another. He also has fun with the ghost-story concept, keeping the reader guessing as to whether he'll pull a supernatural solution out of the hat or whether he can possibly create a down-to-earth explanation for all the disparate events.
There is so much that could be said about this excellent novel, packed full of subtleties and stories, but my main advice is to read it and experience it for yourself. I wonder if, like me, you will be left thinking that there is more to the "solution" that the main protagonist, Joakim, realises? Does the author intend us to conclude that Joakim and Katrine have paid a price for a misdeed they themselves have done? I think so - for I believe that the couple has committed a terrible crime but are in total denial about it, and I believe that Johan Theorin wants us to see the novel as a story of acknowledgement and retribution.
A final note: I appreciated the translation by Marlaine Delargy: the collaboration between her and the author makes the book read as if it were written in the language in which I read it. THE DARKEST ROOM was a number one bestseller in Sweden and won the 2008 Glass Key award for the best Nordic crime novel of the year. If there is any justice in the world, the book will be winning many more awards now that it has been translated into English and so eligible for a greater number of them.
Although long, FROZEN TRACKS is a satisfying read, both in terms of plot and characterisation. Edwardson introduced his series characters DCI Erik Winter and colleagues in his two previous books, SUN AND SHADOW and NEVER END, and in this third outing the characters have matured into a familiar team with distinct identities. (Thankfully yet unusually, Edwardson's novels so far have been published as translations in series order, though starting with the third in the series rather than the first.)
In the run-up to Christmas in Gothenburg, two sets of crimes are occurring. The more dramatic sequence involves a series of young men who are brutally attacked at night, possibly with a branding iron. More subtly, various young children tell their parents that a strange "mister" has taken them for a ride in his car. This second, disturbing set of crimes goes undiscovered for some time, partly because they occur in the suburbs so are reported to different police stations who do not communicate efficiently, and partly because there is some doubt in both the parents' and police minds as to whether the children are making up their stories.
Part of the novel is a straight police-procedural investigation, describing how the detectives seek out clues and gradually piece together evidence. Although there is no indication that the two sets of crimes are connected, the reader suspects that they might be, and indeed this proves to be the case. However, because there are two apparently distinct investigations, the chapters told from the point of view of the criminal have an uneasy feel to them, as the reader is never sure which crimes the perpetrator is responsible for.
I like the characters of Winter, his team and the descriptions of their domestic lives. As with everything else in this book, these are understated, but effective – Winter's new family and the gradual steps that the bereaved Halvers is taking towards a new family life are absorbing.
There is also plenty of dry humour in the book, but where it really comes into its own are the descriptions of the young children and their accounts of their experiences. Edwardson also writes books for children, and Winter's (and other police staff's) questioning of their young witnesses is portrayed with great believability and sensitivity. I was not quite as compelled by the scenes of rural life, but this is a minor point in a book that overall is a good, old-fashioned (in the best sense) read. Laurie Thompson turns in his usual superb translation, conveying vernacular and jokes with apparent ease.
The description and dissection of a failing marriage that takes up the first chapters of BETRAYAL is one of the most realistic and gripping accounts I have read of how happy expectations gradually wither into the ashes of hard work, obligations, indifference and exhaustion. Eva and Henrik seem to have it all: he's a freelance writer, she a successful businesswoman. They have a four-year-old son, Axel (who still sleeps between them at night) and her parents, if not his, are supportive and always on-hand to babysit. What goes wrong? Henrik has gradually become resentful of his wife's decisiveness and leadership in all matters. Eva has become aware of what is missing in her grey life (as she sees it) - the weariness, the inadequacy, the rare commodity of time even in an era of more and more time-saving devices, the overwhelming influx of information that the human brain has not evolved to be able to handle.
Interspersed with the account of this stressed-out woman and her feelings of inadequacy is another story, that of Jonas, a young man whose partner Anna has suffered an accident and is in a coma. Jonas has been devotedly visiting Anna for two years (this being Sweden, he has been "off sick" from his job as a postman for all this time) and providing her with physical therapy and kind conversation. Jonas, however, is not what he seems. Soon we realise he has an obsessive-compulsive disorder and has suffered a particularly nasty childhood, chillingly portrayed. Yet Eva, who has had the opposite experience of an idyllic early life, is driven by her need to provide Axel with a "safe childhood home", a purely self-imposed drive that fuels her poisonous feelings towards Henrik. It is as if she is in competition with her own parents to be better than them, while at the same time being unable to admit to them that her marriage is in trouble - yet the older couple are the very people who understand, and hence support, her the most.
Eventually things come to a head for Eva when she realises that the main reason for Henrik's indifference is that he is having a secret affair. She soon unearths the most likely suspect, and in her bitterness and rage, takes an evil revenge. She also meets Jonas, an encounter that is going to have devastating consequences.
BETRAYAL is a compelling read, in which the tension is almost unbearable. The author's psychological insight is sharp: we identify with each character while we see the world through their eyes, but when the author pulls back and shows a more objective view, we realise things are definitely not as they had seemed. Each player in this grim story is locked into their own particular emotional straitjacket, all of which are cleverly, and with almost unbearable tension, built up into a perfect house of cards. It's all going to come tumbling down, but for who, and how? The final chapters are horrifically chilling - but in common with the very best of Scandinavian crime fiction, no car chases, fancy technology, thrills or spills are necessary for the gut-wrenching impact. This novel is psychological suspense at its finest.
I've spent about a month away from Scandinavian crime fiction, reading a wide range of alternatives, but THE MIND'S EYE reminds me from page one of all the reasons why I love the best exponents of the genre from this geographical region. The plot is simple yet powerful; elemental themes are involved; there is lots of droll humour and neat touches; the solution is satisfying; and one is left hoping for more.
THE MIND'S EYE was written before the other two Hakan Nesser books I've read, BORKMANN'S POINT and THE RETURN, and I wish I had read it first, as it reveals not much but sufficient about Van Veerten's domestic life to provide context for the subsequent books in the series.
As the three-act tragi-comedy that is THE MIND'S EYE opens, Janek Mitter awakens from a drunken stupor and can't immediately remember who he is. When he sorts it out in his mind, he discovers his wife dead in the bath. He's rapidly arrested and tried for her murder, in a drolly superb court case that had me laughing out loud on several occasions.
All does not end well for Mitter, however, who is convicted of the crime and incarcerated in a secure mental hospital. Van Veerten, the head of the local police, is uneasy about the resolution of the case, but before he can put a definite name to his doubts, another tragedy happens. Eventually, the detective realises that the only way he can solve the crime is by digging back into the victim's past. On the way, he and his colleagues encounter a number of citizens of varying degrees of respectability and culpability, each vignette being telling, humorous or sadly pathetic in its own right.
Scandinavian crime fiction as a genre seems to excel at the good, simple story, well-told and with classical underpinnings, echoing ancient tragedies and sagas. THE MIND'S EYE is no exception. I was absorbed from start to finish, and cannot recommend this book highly enough. If you are lucky, it will be the first book by this author that you have encountered, in which case you can read the rest of his output, or at least some of it, in the order in which it was written.
Put aside two or three hours and read this book from beginning to end. It's a tense and involving read, and you won't want to be distracted.
Sybilla is an outcast, living off the radar of the authorities in Stockholm. She has various safe places and strategies for surviving each month until her meagre payment from her mother arrives at a PO box. One of her ploys is to put on a smart suit she keeps in her rucksack (bought from Oxfam), go to a luxury hotel bar, meet a businessman, flirt, pretend to lose her wallet, and trick the mark into paying for her room for the night. Unfortunately, on one of these outings, the man she tricks is found murdered the next morning. Sybilla escapes, but soon finds that she is the main suspect, becoming the victim of a police and media hunt.
Sybilla's survival over the next few days is interspersed with the story of how she came to drop out of society. She suffered a childhood of awful mental abuse, which made my blood boil to read about. With nobody to sympathise with her (to the contrary, everyone is against her and/or betrays her) she falls into a trap made of her own idealism and trusting nature, as a result of which she is abused even further by the authorities. The story of Sybilla's childhood leading up to her eighteenth birthday, is equally as harrowing as that of Lisbeth Salander, the main character of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, and Sybilla's solution, of living "off the grid", is remarkably similar to Lisbeth's.
Matters come to a head when Sybilla discovers that her source of income has dried up. She's now desperate, and friends she's made since living rough cannot or will not help her now. The hunt for her intensifies. Eventually, she thinks of one hiding place where she is likely to be safe - and while there, she finds an unusual ally and a strategy for dealing with her dilemma.
MISSING is a tensely exciting book with an extremely sympathetic and capable main character. I think Karin Alvtegen is one of the very best talents writing crime fiction today. Congratulations to her for writing such insightful, exciting and thought-provoking novels, and to her English translators for bringing them so effectively to a wider audience.
SHADOW opens in 1975 with the discovery of a four-year old boy who has been abandoned in a park. The boy, Kristoffer, is bought up by foster parents, and when an adult becomes an addict and drifter. The only thing that connects him with his forgotten childhood is his receipt of money every month until he is 18 – a small amount but sufficient to fund his dissolute lifestyle. When the money dries up, he realises that this is a chance for a fresh start. He's obsessed and intensely ashamed by his past, but he determines to clean himself up and become a writer. He befriends another struggling young author, Jesper, and the two provide each other with some mutual support. Kristoffer, however, is too repressed to tell anyone that he was abandoned and rejected, and that he has no idea who he is.
A 92-year-old woman, Gerda, dies in her flat. As she seems to have no relatives or friends, Marianne from the social services department is put in charge of sorting out Gerda's affairs and organising her funeral. During the course of this process, she discovers that Gerda lived for most of her adult life as the maid of Axel Ragnerfeldt, a Nobel laureate for literature, and his family. Axel is now an old man, paralysed by a stroke and unable to communicate except by moving his little finger. Marianne therefore contacts Axel's son, Jan-Erik, who has made a profession of setting up a foundation in his father's name, and who goes around giving lectures and readings from his books. Jan-Erik is trapped in a loveless marriage, which he does not leave because of the terms of his father's will.
As this compelling book progresses, we learn more of the history of four generations of the Ragnerfeldt family, the dynamics and secrets between husbands, wives, parents and children, as well as the professional rivalries between friends. The connection between the Ragnerfeldts and Kristoffer becomes slightly less obscure when we learn of a literary evening in which a younger Axel and his friend and fellow-author Torgny meet a beautiful young woman called Halina. She is a survivor of the Holocaust who has a terrible past. In her first scene, she tells Axel a fable, and asks him which of the five characters in it is the "least wrong". Axel's answer is prophetic; subsequent events play out the fable, with each character in SHADOW taking the role of the people in Halina's story.
One often reads the word "unputdownable" to describe a book – it is certainly a true description of this one. As the novel reaches its climax, I was on the edge of my seat, my heart was pounding, and by the end I felt wrecked. It has strong parallels with Wuthering Heights, in which two "normal" people (Gerda as Nelly Dean and Marianne as Lockwood) are the filter through which the reader experiences elemental, horrifically tragic and passionate events that are beyond the witness-narrators' comprehension.
This superb novel has so many layers and depths, concerning the biological and societal adaptations of consciousness; the experiences and consequences of the process of creative writing, its "success" and "failure"; an empathy and confidence in describing historical events; and the emotions of friendship, betrayal, passion and rage, simmering and erupting in a seemingly placid environment. The characters, whether central or subsidiary, are all rounded, and even the unsympathetic ones are given full opportunity to present their point of view. I was particularly impressed with the depictions of Kristoffer, whose desperate search for the meaning of his life through his past is unbearably tragic; the brave Halina, who struggles to transcend the ineradicable scars of her horrific past life, overcoming one terrible setback but encountering another awful one once she meets Axel; and Jan-Erik's sad wife Louise. The icing on the cake is that the plot is complete, clever, convoluted and convincing - the author does not flinch from following it through to the bitter end.
SHADOW is a brilliant and rich book, which has had a tremendous impact on me. I urge you to read it as soon as you can.
THE ABOMINABLE MAN is the seventh in the Martin Beck series, and continues the bleak, downbeat trend of these superb novels. A man is gravely ill in hospital, but before the results of his tests are ready, he is brutally murdered - by the abominable man of the title? At first, we might think so, but as the book continues, we come to realise that the adjective does not apply to the killer.
Most of the events take place over a long night. The first policeman from the murder squad on the scene is Ronn, who soon calls in his boss, Martin Beck (always given both his names). Martin is not too happy to have to work with Ronn rather than his usual partner and friend, Lennert Kollberg, but nonetheless he sets out on his usual methodical investigation of the life of the murdered man, in order to see who might have perpetrated the violent act that ended his life.
The investigation proceeds against a background of an overwhelmingly miserable society and unhappy cast of characters. Earlier books in the series have been lightened by some optimistic participants, but THE ABOMINABLE MAN is characterised by policemen who have no life outside their jobs. That isn't to say that there is no black humour in the novel, for example Larsson's suggestion of the police orchestra playing "happy birthday to you" to a suspect, and sending him a poisoned birthday cake - his sarcastic take on the efforts of the incompetent Superintendent Malm to contain a ghastly situation at the climax of the book.
As is often the case with Martin Beck investigations, the interest is not "who" did the crime but what the crime reveals about the society in which it took place and which, in this case, has slowly driven a man to take a drastic and fruitless act. The books are becoming more claustrophobic as the series progresses, as the negative effects of the nationalisation of the Swedish police service, and the influence of the military as well as the political establishment, are felt by traditional cops like Beck and Kollberg.
"In his own mind, Martin Beck had to admit that the whole thing seemed pointless. In the course of his active career, Nyman had of course maltreated hundreds of people. Only a few of them had lodged written complaints and Ronn's brief investigation had uncovered only a few of these. But many years of experience had taught him [Beck] that most of his work was in fact pointless, and that even the things that provided results in the long run almost always looked pointless to begin with."
