Friday 2nd December

What is it about these Scandinavian writers? Where does this fascination with death and pain, and the whole macabre side of crime come from, and more to the point, where does the incredible talent for writing this stuff come from?  Is it the darker longer colder winters that bring out this side of human nature, or just a fascination with the darker colder side of people? Just look at the plays of Ibsen, not a lot of laughs there, very little in the way of happy endings, at least the ones I have seen.

I thought I had had my fill of Scandinavian crime after reading in pretty quick succession ‘The Girl Who’ books by Stieg Larrson, with his quite unlikeable but incredibly resourceful heroine Lisbeth Salander, and the very unlikely but well written storylines – but I was attracted to this book by both the reviews, which were unanimously good, and the title ‘The Snowman.’  A few years earlier I had read the brilliant ‘Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow’ by Peter Hoeg, which was set in Greenland of all places, so the recurrence of the word Snow was a good omen I felt.  I had also watched ‘Wallander’ on BBC2, and those bleak wintry landscapes had worked their way into my psyche, I was just itching to read the book, and on an impulse I bought it and rather than waiting a few weeks, building up the anticipation of a new book, savouring it, as is my usual modus operandi, I dived straight in on the bus home from Waterstones.

I find both a fascination and a frustration in all the street and place names in these Nordic thrillers, with all those slashed ‘O’ s (my keyboard may be capable of printing Scandinavian characters but I am not competent enough to find out how) and a positive contagion of consonants. In this book, set in Norway by the way, there were also quite confusing character names, including a male Gert, which I kept thinking of as woman’s name. (I had an obscure relative called Auntie Gertie, after Gertrude).  The saving grace was that the hero detective was called Harry Hole, god knows if that was it in Norwegian too – they are weird enough to accept that as normal.

Well, it was quite pacey and a good page turner, but I found the plot confusing with a lot of blind alleys and the story seemed to jump about a lot between time and place so I kept losing my way.  Not that I find I read nowadays for the story anyway, I mean who really cares who the killer was, or what clues we all, except Harry, missed on the way to finding him out.  One reads these books to try to discover what it is that drives people in extreme circumstances, both the killer and the detectives hunting them, and the seedier, sadder, more lonely and obsessed and generally ‘fucked up’ they are, the more we seem to like them. Gone are the days of the immaculate Hercule Poirot or the very proper and very English Miss Marple, now we like our detectives flawed and near to breaking down and slipping into criminality themselves.

I finished the book in two days, which was quick for me, as I am generally a slow reader, going back and re-reading whole pages at a time if for any reason my mind has wandered, or I found a particular passage beautifully written or just saying something that strikes a chord in my soul.  Not this time though, I could have omitted pages at a time and would have missed little I suspect.  A good read, but I don’t think I will be rushing out to seek out other stuff by Mr.  Nesbo.  Maybe I have gotten that Nordic existential gloom out of my system for a while.  Next up ‘The Bertrams’ by my old standby Anthony Trollope, no more gruesome murders, no more alcoholic detectives for a while, just an England that maybe once existed but like a beetle in amber is now beautifully frozen in time.