Thursday 10th October

What is it about these miserable Scandinavian detectives?  Why are we so fascinated by their despair, the slow disintegration of their lives?  Because, awful as we might sometimes feel, hard-worked, unappreciated, lonely and afraid; it is nothing compared to Wallander.  His life is visibly falling apart in front of him.  In the middle of a series of gruesome murders his father suddenly dies and he has no time to grieve even, just snatching occasional phone chats with his ex-wife and daughter.  He lives in a sort of ordered squalor, eats badly and mostly food grabbed on the run.  He works extraordinarily long hours, sleeps badly, and is worried about the disintegration of Sweden’s society.  And he knows he is unhappy and broods on it.

Strangely he is not really a sympathetic character.  We want to read more about him, in some ways we cannot get enough of him, and the narrative is glued to him with the other characters looming in and out of view; and yet we don’t really care for him.  We don’t want him to be happy, we aren’t even that bothered whether and how he will catch the killer, though we know that he will, we just want to enjoy his misery.  And every page or so we are reminded of the awful weather, the cold, the bleak muddy landscape, just to add to the misery our Kurt is suffering.

But when I am reading a Wallander novel I can’t put it down.  There is something about the man that just pulls you in.  It is written by a brilliant author of course, who has tapped into a basic human need; enjoying watching another human being falling apart.