The Locked Room

 

And so back to Martin Beck. The Locked Room is the eighth volume in the Martin Beck series. This time the story concentrates on two parallel investigations by the Stockholm Police – a bank robbery (or a series of bank robberies) and the discovery of a murdered corpse in a room that has been locked and secured from the inside. In his introduction, American writer Michael Connelly says that he finds The Locked Room the most satidfying in the series and I can see why he might say this. The plotting is the most complex so far and it differs from the other volumes I’ve read so far in a number of ways.

Firstly, Martin Beck plays something of a backseat role. Beck is convalescing after receiving a gunshot wound and he is given The Locked Room case as a kind of mental exercise to ease him back into work. And he works on the case alone. Despite the book’s title, it is the bank robbery that is the prominent case and Beck plays no part in this investigation until the very end, when it is established that there are tenuous links between the two cases. So Beck is absent from a large section in the middle of the book.

Secondly, whilst in the other books Sjowall and Wahloo’s social and political commentary is never far from the story, in The Locked Room, they are more forthright and strident, with whole paragraphs given over to attacks on the establishment, the police hierarchy (a pro-fascist organisation) and an uncaring Welfare State that hides its failings behind a liberal facade. The judicial apparatus, in particular, comes in for harsh criticism, as the book seeks to expose the brutalities and inequalities within a so-called liberal democracy. Yet whilst the authors’ outrage is almost tangible, they are never po-faced about their politics and they are always entertaining. In fact, some of the most bitingly effective pieces of political commentary sit alongside the funniest scenes, some of which would seem more at home in an Inspector Clouseau film than in the pages of a crime thriller. It is also easy to forget that this novel was written in the early seventies – at that time I was just starting to read crime fiction and was cutting my teeth on Agatha Christie, in particular. This is so far removed from all that, not least in its raw exposee of society and the way that the authors capture at least a flavour of the ordinary voices of working people.

The Locked Room clearly refers directly to the room in which the corpse is found in Beck’s case. But it just as equally refers to the prison cell in which the murderer will spend the rest of his life, and, most of all, the claustrophobic Swedish society itself with a police force that is given more to surpressing free political expression and dissent, especially that of the Left, than to contributing to a safer and more equal society.

Making an Elephant

Below is a video review (recorded in our house in France!) of Graham Swift’s collection of esays, Making an Elephant.

Let The Great World Spin

The majority of Colum McCann’s novel Let The Great World Spin Takes place in and around New York in August 1974. New York is Dublin-born McCann’s adopted home and this is very definitely a New York novel, where the character of the city looms large. The starting point for the novel is a fictionalised version of a true event when Philippe Petit walked between the twin towera of the World Trade Center on a tightrope. It is this death-defying feat that locates the novel in its particular time and place, a time of political and social change and upheaval in the wake of the events of 1968, the anti-Vietnam War movement and the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Nixon. And, of course, New ork, the melting pot, where prostitutes and drug addicts rub shoulders with judges’ wives, recent immigrants and bohemian artists. McCann uses this point in history to relate the stories of a varied cast of characters, who together represent this multi-dimensional city. Like the charcaters on the busy streets, looking up at the tightrope walker, their stories also rib shoulders and intertwine.

On one page there is a reproduction of a photograph taken of Petit’s actual tightrope walk, although here it is fictionalised and attributed to one of the characters in the book. As the tightrope walker makes his way between the Twin Towers, in the top left hand corner an aeroplane speeds by, in an eerie anticipation of the event of almost thirty years later. And, of course, this is really a 9/11 story, in spite of its setting in 1974. The final section of the novel takes place in 2006.

This is ultimately a geneous and tender portrayal of New York and New Yorkers. It is a city of ordinary people, trying to do what’s right and get by, disconnected (indeed victims of) the greater political context – whether that is the war in Vietnam or the war in Iraq (part of the context of the latter part of the novel). McCann has the benefits of being both an outsider and an insider and his message is clear and articulate. There is a compassion with a people who suffer history, rather than make it, and just as the tightrope walker travels betwen the Twin Towers, so do they (and, by extension, we) travel precariously between events of political magnitude. Careful not to look down, one smallmistake could cause us to fall off our tightropes.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

You’ll find a video review of this book below.

Death in Oslo

Death in Oslo is the third of Anne Holt’s novels featuring Superintendent Adam Stubo and his partner Johanne Vik, set in the Norwegian capital, as the title suggests. I haven’t read the previous two novels (Punishment and The Final Murder) so it is slightly unusual for me to start reading a series at any other other place than the first book. Nevertheless, Scandanavian writers have justifiably earned their place as international leaders of the genre, so I was very much looking forward to discovering a new writer.

The premise of the novel is straightforward enough. In the 2004 US Presidential election, George W. Bush was not up against John Kerry, but instead the Democratic nomination went to Helen Barclay, a woman of Norwegian descent who, against a backdrop of discontent with US foreign policy and disillusionment with Bush, becomes the first woman American President. Given that this novel was first published in 2006, two years before Obama’s spectacular victory, maybe the author was anticipating a Hillary Clinton presidency. Certainly the author’s own politics and low regard for Bush are not worn lightly in the pages of the book – something that sterngthens it, in my opinion.

Not surprisingly, the new President makes a visit to Oslo her first overseas visit, but no sooner has she arrived then she is kidnapped. What follows is a series of skeletons rattling in cupboards and a lot of interpersonal tension between the characters, as the Norwegian Police are characterised as restrained and hard-working, whilst the FBI are shown to be duplicitous, loud and arrogant. A case of stereotyping, perhaps, but it drives forward the pace of the narrative and it makes for some comic scenes.

Another great strength of the novel is for me the multiple narrative’s that Holt weaves into the story – narratives than span the globe and the decades. The problem for me was that none of the narratives are satisfactorily resolved, or even explained. Whilst what lies behind the kidnapping of Barclay is a plot to destabilise the world financial markets, there is never enough detail to explain how this is going to happen and I was left thinking that the author doesn’t really know either – a good idea perhaps, but in need of some more research.

The other thing that I found problematic is that so much of what happens in the novel is completely preposterous. Of course, in a book of this kind, there is always going to be an element of that, but characters too often behave inconsistently and some of the assumptions on whicjh the story is based are just too unbelievable. I want to resist going into too much detail or giving specific examples here for fear of giving too much away, because I did nonetheless enjoy reading the book despite becoming exasperated as my credibility was stretched time and again.

Perhaps one of the issues here is that Holt has tried to fuse together two genres, the police procedural with the spy thriller. Whilst the first relies on much more local, even paraochial detail, the latter is much more grand and global in its sweep. I’m not sure that Holt has succeeded in resolving these two polarities.

Happy New Year and Something New for 2010!

Here we are – something of an experiment. My first ever video posting! The HD quality of the original seems to have suffered a bit during the uploading process, but let me know what you think.

Books of 2009

I’ve finally caught up with the reviews of all my reading during the year just past. Once again I managed to reach my target of fifty-two books per year, but this year only just made it. Anyway, here is the full list:

1. Alaa Al Aswany, Chicago

2. Jorge Amado, Dona Flor and her Two Husbands

3. Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

4. Mark Billingham, Death Message

5. Lesley Glaister, Nina Todd Has Gone

6. Lesley Glaister, As Far As You Can Go

7. Joseph O’ Neill, Netherland

8. Ian Rankin, A Cool Head

9. Aravinal Adiga, The White Tiger

10. Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

11.Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

12. Ryu Murakami, Audition

13. Brian McGilloway, Borderlands

14. George Ewart Evans, Voices of the Children

15. Jo Nesbo, The Redeemer

16. Ryu Murakami, 69

17. Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book

18. Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

19. Declan Hughes, The Dying Breed

20. David Lodge, Deaf Sentence

21. Neil Gaiman, American Gods

22. Andrea Camilleri, August Heat

23. Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes

24. Kobo Abe, The Box Man

25. Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel’s Game

26. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

27. Brian McGilloway, Gallows Lane

28. Rabih Alameddine, The Storyteller or The Hakawati

29. Manuel Rivas, The Carpenter’s Pencil

30. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Roseanna

31. Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Dumas Club

32. Patrick Suskind, Perfume

33. Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

34. Stieg Larson, The Girl who Played with Fire

35. Ian Rankin, Doors Open

36. John Berger, Why Look at Animals?

37. John Le Carre, A Most Wanted Man

38. James Bradley, The Resurrectionist

39. Paul Auster, Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story

40. Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter

41. Stieg Larsson, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

42. David Peace, Tokyo Year Zero

43. Philip Roth, Indignation

44. John Irving, Last Night in Twisted River

45. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

46. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, The Man on the Balcony

47. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, The Laughing Policeman

48. Andrew McConnell Stott, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

49. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, The Fire Engine That Disappeared

50. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Murder at the Savoy

51. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, The Abominable Man

52. J M Coetze, Dusklands

53. Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Last Rituals

And that’s it!

Last Rituals

And so to the final read of 2009, a debut crime novel by Icelandic writer Yrsa Sigurdadottir. In Last Rituals  Thora Gudmundsdottir, a solicitor, is hired by the family of a German student, studying for his PhD in Iceland, who has been murdered and his body mutilated, to investigate the murder, after they become convinced that the police have arrested the wrong man. In her task she is aided by Matthew Reich, a German ex-policeman, and friend of the family.

This is a straightforward whodunnit, pleasurable enough to read and well-paced with enough twists and turns to keep the reader hooked, as the pair of sleuths, with their developing and confusing relationship, uncover the practices of a satanic sect. Well, I suppose it’s all a bit unlikely, but the charm of the book (which is also its weakness) is that it’s a rather old-fashioned crime novel. The main problem I found is that the murder victim and his unbelievably dysfunctional family are so disgustingly and unworthily rich, lack any kind of moral compass and have closet-upon-closets full of rattling skeletons that I found it difficult to hold them in nothing but contempt. Rather than have any sympathy for them as characters, I found myself rather glad for all their suffering. In many ways they come from a kind of Christie-era when detective novels revolved around the priveleged classes kiling each other off. This story could easily have been transposed into that world.

The persistent banter between Gudmundsdottir and Reich provides some welcome comic relief, as well as giving the author the opportunity to draw attention to the cultural differences between the two, or at least the distinctiveness of Icelandic culture. There is plenty to commend this book and I have to say that it was a pleasurable read in the run-up to Christmas. It weaknesses are probably those of a writer still developing their craft, so easily forgiven.

Dusklands

First published in 1974, Dusklands is the first novel by South African writer J M Coetze and is, in fact, my first encounter with the 2003 Nobel Laureate. It is the kind of book that may be short in length, but – on account of its complexity – demands not to be rushed.

The book consists of two seemingly unrelated narratives. The first, set in the early 1970s is the testimony of Eugene Dawn who, whilst working on developing methods of psychological warfare for the Americans in the Vietnam War (and reporting to a superior named Coetze), descends suffers a mental breakdown which results in his abducting and stabbing his son in a fit of paranoia. The second takes the form of the journal of an eighteenth-century colonialist, Jacobus Coetze, recording his terrible revenge on a Hottentot tribe that he feels had previously humilisted him and challenged his assumptions of his own racial supremacy.

These are both disturbing stories and are linked, of course, by a common concern (albeit from different historical perspectives) of the brutality and inhumanity of colonolialism and imperialist assumptions. His writing has at times been compared to Conrad and this may be true in so far as Dusklands charts two separate, but linked, journeys into hearts of darkness.

The Abominable Man

And so to the seventh in the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. The story begins with the murder, with a bayonet, of a senior police officer convalescing in hospital and leads to a killing spree (culminating in a bloody climax) aimed at the police force, against whom the killer appears to hold a grudge. This is arguably the most persistently violent of the Beck novels so far, but as the novel progresses what is exposed is a history of police corruption, violence and victimisation at the centre orf which is the initial victim. Indeed as the the violence increases, so does our sympathy with the killer as we come to understand him as a victim of a greater injustice. Once again Sjowall and Wahloo use the detective novel form to raise questions about the nature of justice, guilt and blame. Ironically,  it is not the killer who is shown to be abominable – he is simply to be pitied – but the initial victim and his cronies who are the true abominable men.

Disappointingly, this is the first book in the series that is published without an introduction by a modern crime writer. A little bit of a shame, I suppose.