Firewall

Firewall

By Henning Mankell

Forget Afghanistan.

Forget the Congo. Never mind Somalia, Rwanda or Colombia. Safe havens, all of them, compared to the world's most dangerous country. If the novels of Henning Mankell serve as any indication, the country in which you are most likely to be murdered in cold blood is undoubtedly Sweden. And it's not run-of-the-mill sort of violence one needs to fear while traveling the Great White Nørd but rather the grisly variety. The sorts of crimes that require a full forensic team to identify the remains. The sort of crimes that have remains rather than simply bodies. Mexico City is as secure as a bank compared to Stockholm, Malmo and Ystad.

Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander Series serves as a reminder to anyone thinking of traveling or (worse!) relocating to Scandinavia: Think twice, O weary traveler for thou goest forth into the realm of Scandinavian Crime fiction, the most specific pop culture genre after Spaghetti Westerns, Lucha Libre and German Scheiße videos.

Firewall is the eighth book in the Kurt Wallander Series but it is only the second (after Faceless Killers, the first in the series) that I have read personally. Firewall begins with the seemingly senseless and disturbingly violent (of course) murder of a taxi driver by two teenage girls. Another man dies a natural death on the other side of town. But slowly Wallander and the Ystad Police Department begin to piece together a cyber-conspiracy that combines the two cases and expands its reach intercontinentally. Along the way there are any number of grisly and disturbing murders (just in case the original murder wasn't gristly and disturbing enough). And to think there are seven novels preceding Firewall (and that doesn't even account for the uncountably number of murders that occur in the novels of Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo). Given the population density compared with the total number of violent murders, well... Scandinavia is a dangerous place.

I was a bit concerned about jumping to book eight in the series. I worried that i was breaking the continuity of the narrative, and there were some unavoidable spoilers along the way, but I was surprised how well Henning was able to contain the story within the confines of Firewall without divulging the previous stories. I like that can always go back and read any of the books I skipped knowing that I haven't the faintest idea what will happen.

However, the jump was a little awkward in that it was a little like watching the original Rocky and then skipping to Rocky V without watching the slow degeneration of the series along the way. While I don't think the Wallander Series suffered the sort of fall Rocky suffered along the way, there did seem to be a degree of implausibility to the plot in Firewall that didn't exist in Faceless Killers. I wonder whether Mankell spent seven books upping the ante to the point where Firewall's narrative wouldn't have seemed so outlandish to someone who had read the entire series up to that point.

Furthermore, Firewall is not the sort of novel that could have aged well. Books that rely heavily on technology never do. It was published in 2002 and Mankell spends a lot of time explaining terms, such as "firewall", "server" and "code," that most of us understand, at least in principal, nowadays. Even if you aren't computer savvy, a reader in 2013 doesn't need a half page explanation about how banking transactions can be performed over the Internet. Naturally, Mankell could not have foreseen a world in which this would be common knowledge and nit-picking over a few dated references shouldn't dissuade anyone from reading this novel. But forewarned is forearmed.

But where the storytelling lapses into the realm of the dated or the implausible, the actual writing remains consistent to what a fan of Scandinavian Crime Fiction should expect. Ebba Segerberg's translation is hauntingly austere and completely lacking in idioms giving the novel a cold, stainless steel tone. As with Faceless Killers, Firewall reads like a veritable policing manual on how to (and sometimes how not to) run an investigation. Readers will enjoy the almost belabored way in which Mankell presents the facts of a case, dissects them and divides them, rethinks them and rehashes them and then does it again every time a new piece of information becomes available to the investigating team.

The constant reinterpretation of the facts is not only helpful to the reader but also in accordance to what a detective would do throughout an investigation. For all Firewall's implausibility, Mankell remains loyal to the spirit of policing in that he has written a consummate police force, but one that suffers from the same politics as real life forces. A police force that often stumbles and bumbles under pressure. A police force that is often understaffed and unappreciated. A police force that is populated by real people with real problems and real lives.

One might say that Mankell has written a wonderful novel about a typical police force, but this is the Scandinavia of the literary world. Mankell's typical police force is destined to clean up the world's most atypical crimes. And while Stockholm may weep, readers should rejoice.

But it's no wonder Wallander is consistently threatening to retire.

The Snowman

The Snowman

By Jo Nesbo

I've said it once and I'll say it again: Scandinavians are morbid. They tend to be tall, blond-haired and blue eyed (as if that wasn't creepy enough). They have a propensity for burning churches. Their ancient mythology is brutal, savage and tragic and has spawned an entirely unlistenable sub-genre of metal music only appreciated in Scandinavia... and Brazil). They are just neat enough and tidy enough and socialist enough to make you assume they were all born Virgo and they seem to prefer their crime novels on the darker side of macabre.

(Aside: As if to accentuate the point, the Heavy Metal band, Morbid, was Swedish)

Whether it's the cyber-punk horrors of Steig Larsson's Millennium Series or the more sedate brutality of Henning Mankell's Wallander Series, the people of Norway and Sweden seem thrive on extreme violence and murder. When you add Jo Nesbo and his series of novels featuring Harry Hole into the mix, one has to wonder how three of the best (if not most morbid) writers of the last quarter century have all come from the Northern Europe. Must have something to do with lack of sunlight and fjords.

I mentioned three novelists, but as of the writing of this blog post, we seem to be down to just one. With the tragically premature death of Steig Larsson and the last of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels drifting ever so slowly out of the zeitgeist, it is Jo Nesbo that has remained to carry the torch of the Scandinavian crime fiction genre (that absurd title always reminds me of metal heads who go on and on about the New Wave of British Heavy Metal from the late 1970s). And much like Larsson with Lisbeth Salander and Mankell with Wallander, Nesbo has come equipped with a character every bit as intense and intoxicating as his predecessors: Harry Hole.

Detective Harry Hole is what would be produced if John McClane, Bruce Willis's legendary character from the Die Hard franchise somehow begat a child with Jimmy McNulty from The Wire. Brash, bold and dangerous but also self-destructive, and at times hopelessly lost and completely uncertain about his job, Harry Hole is a man with more personal demons than the people he arrests. He makes giant, terrible mistakes and, although not lacking in critical and analytical thinking, he makes wild, sweeping mistakes. Harry Hole is the Hamlet of Scandinavian crime fiction (though without the tragic endings). He is about the most humanized police officer you will ever read in a novel not written by Richard Price. While Lisbeth Salander is deftly hacking into your computer with nary a typo in her code, Harry Hole is mortally wounding the wrong person while trying to fight the urge to chuck a bottle of Jack Daniel's. How can you not root for this guy?

In fact, I spent a lot of time wondering whether Hole was a metaphor for how Nesbo views Norwegians on the world scene. At one point in the novel one of the characters, Arve Stop a media personality, laments that Norway loves the loser. Losers provide stories with grit and tragedy and pain. Winners are uninteresting by nature. One wonders whether Harry Hole is the embodiment of this sentiment. If so, Norwegians have a lot in common with Canadians. It comes with the territory of sidling up next to an economic  and military powerhouse. But I digress.

The Snowman recounts the events of Norway's first really artistic serial killer and it's up to Hole, Oslo's best if not brightest, to lead the investigation. The killer, dubbed the "The Snowman" due to his penchant for building snowmen at the scene of each of his crimes, has somehow flown under the radar of the police for a couple of years. When a new detective, Katrine Blatt, joins the Oslo police force she and Hole begin to make the connections between the victims of several missing persons reports. A series of increasingly grisly murder scenes seem to validate the assertion that they are dealing with something more than the average Norwegian gangland killings and Scandinavian church burners. As the crimes begin to spiral ever closer to Harry Hole, it becomes evident that the killer is engaging in a battle of wits with the policeman himself. Something rotten north of Denmark.

The story is incredibly complex with all sorts of the twists and turns one expects from good crime writing but without the implausible elements that leave many readers rolling their eyes. Often a writer tries to make that one last twist to shake off those final readers who may have actually solved the mystery before the protagonist leaving a bitter taste of the ludicrous in the reader's mouth. Nesbo doesn't go in for such shenanigans. While Nesbo certainly serves enough twists and red herrings to open a seafood bar and grill, they were done with the panache of a writer working at the top of his game. It took the entire first half of the novel for me to realize that trying to stay ahead of the investigation was futile because Nesbo was manipulating the reader with the deft and clarity of vision. Nesbo knew exactly where both the story and the reader were going.

I admit, I had the culprit pegged somewhere toward the end of the second third of the novel but it didn't seem to matter. In fact, I'm actually pretty confident that Nesbo wanted me to guess the killer by then. Like the characters in his book, Nesbo was playing me right into his hands. Knowing the killer hardly dissuaded from the enjoyment of the novel. I simply needed to understand how it all went down. I continued on, often like a reader possessed. The Snowman is so psychologically intense that over the course of the week I spent reading it, my wife repeatedly asked whether something was bothering me. I would always answer with: "Yes... The Snowman is bothering me."

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the superb translation done by Don Bartlett from the original Norwegian. Obviously, I didn't read this in its original language (my Norwegian is a little rusty after 37 years of having never once studied it) but Bartlett conveyed what I can only assume was the intensity and ferocity of the narrative without much compromise. What little may have been lost in translation was lost to me and if the story suffered as a result I was none the wiser.

If you are lamenting the end of the Wallander series or still in mourning over the untimely death of Steig Larsson and you haven't yet read or even heard of Jo Nesbo I strongly urge you to get out there and pick up a copy of The Snowman (or any of the other novels featuring Harry Hole). If you are already a

Pillars of the Earth

Pillars of the Earth

by Ken Follett

Transitioning from one book to another is never an easy exercise. Some people let a few days go by between books. Let it stew. Ruminate on it a little. I don't. I insist on starting a new book on the same day I finish my previous book (and I never, ever read two books at the same time). Some people think that's crazy. Sometimes I agree, but it's what I've done for so long, there's no real way for me to break the habit.

Transitions can often be quite smooth, especially if the previous book was simply terrible. Moving from The Shack by William P. Young to Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen, for example, was a slice of heaven. I'm was so happy to be back in a good book that I began devouring it. As well, it could be a book that I have been anticipating for quite some time (like Keith Richard's Life) and I'm just in a hurry to get things started. These transtitions are easy.

But sometimes transtitions are difficult, especially after having read an extremely good book. Leaving behind a great read such as Replay by Ken Grimwood and starting up something entirely unknown is heart-wrenching. You're leaving behind characters you have come to love and understand. Like any break-up, you're not entirely sure you can go on without them right away. Perhaps you need a little time on your own to rest, meditate and catch up on some television. You just couldn't possibly care about any other characters right now. I have to ease into books slowly when this occurs.

This happened to me last year while making my way through The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series. I was determined not to read all three in succession, so I broke the series up with two books in between. When I finished the first book, it took all my energy to stick to my austere program. As luck would have it, I picked up Azincourt by Bernard Cornwell and enjoyed it immensely ( I love me some medieval history). It was the proverbial slice of cheddar between sips of red at a wine tasting. With my pallette cleansed, I dove into The Girl Who Played With Fire. No problem.

It was between The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest that I made a critical error. Cheekily, I picked up G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. I should have taken this selection far more seriously. Chesterton is torturous reading when you know you have the finale of something you care about sitting on the shelf 10 feet away. I crept through the book. The only thing pushing me on was the promise of a better book at the end. Not the best attitude to have while reading. I have promised myself to give G.K. Chesterton another chance.

This is not exactly what happened with Pillars of the Earth. I had just come out of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and I had had just about enough of that one, so I was ready for something new. But there is a little of the 10 year-old reader in me and when I saw the 983 page opus sitting on the shelf, I got intimidated. That's a lot of pages to slog through if I don't like it. And I haven't given up on a book in four years. My first few days in Pillars of the Earth were very tentative. I wasn't really ready to settle into such a large book and I wasn't giving it much of a chance. I usually get a kick out of watching my bookmark move its way through a novel, but with Ken Follett it doesn't ever seem to move! I waited and waited for Follett to make me care.

I had this same problem with Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, but for slightly different reasons. I was given Cloud Atlas by two people within a month and told to drop all other books and read it immediately, which I did. Two people who seprated by the Pacific who don't know each other insisting I read something is a fairly ringing endorsement. The first two chapters (before I realized what Mitchell was doing and subsequently fell head over heels in love with the book) made me feel like I was being cheated. I read the bare minimum (25 pages a day) for days and grumbled how both a friend and a relative could be so terribly wrong about a book. I was never going to finish this brick.

But there comes a point in these sorts of books when it begins to click. The characters seep into your subconcious and you need to get back in there, see how things progress. In Cloud Atlas, it was the third chapter. In Pillars of the Earth it was the burning of the church. From that point on, you know things are going to be ok. It doesn't matter if the book is 183 pages or 1183 pages, you're hooked. The bookmark makes steady progress and by the time you finish, you agonize about your next book.

Can it possibly compare to this one?