Eerily prescient in its depiction of the overwhelming desire among Islamic populations to take action to establish sovereign Islamic governments and free themselves from tyranny in North Africa and the Middle East, this 1955 novel should have been a wake-up call to the western world half a century ago when it was written. Paul Bowles (1910 – 1999), an American expatriate who lived in Morocco for over fifty years, was an eyewitness to the uprisings which occurred there in 1954 after the French deposed the much-loved Sultan Mohammed V. The tumult that developed in Fez in the wake of the Sultan’s removal, and the many factions that evolved within the local population in response to colonial high-handedness, will strike a familiar chord among contemporary readers who are now seeing exactly the same issues being addressed by residents of many other countries in the region, with the same kind of attendant violence provoking the same perplexity among western powers. A novel to fascinate anyone who has any interest at all in the current issues rending North Africa and the Middle East.
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For lovers of Nordic Noir, there’s a new guy in town—at least someone new to me. K. O. Dahl (Kjell Ola Dahl), a highly respected and prize-winning author in Norway, has just had his third novel published in the U.S., though it was the first of the three books to be published in the series in Norway. Featuring pudgy Detective Frank Frolich and his boss, the taciturn Chief Inspector Gunnarstranda, Dahl focuses more on the victims and those who surround them than he does on his sleuths, not even giving physical descriptions of his detectives till many pages into the book. This focuses the action clearly on the victim(s) and helps create a suspenseful and often dramatic novel which sometimes devolves into philosophical, social, and psychological discussions as his characters meet and interact. When a young woman who has almost completed three years of drug rehab is found dead above a lake, Det. Frolich and Chief Insp. Gunnarstranda investigate her past to find her killer.
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Anyone who enjoys mysteries is surely familiar by now with the growing list of Nordic authors who specialize in crime and all its horror, but these authors do not write purely for macabre sensation (though the macabre is not unknown to them). All are writers with larger themes and scopes, and many use repeating characters who keep the reader involved as they solve new crimes and reveal more and more personal aspects from their own lives. For Stieg Larsson, it was journalist Mikael Blomqvist and his computer expert friend Lisbeth Salander. For Henning Mankell, it is Kurt Wallender. For Arnaldur Indridason, the darkest of the novelists, it is Inspector Erlendur, known by his last name almost exclusively. Jo Nesbo features Harry Hole, and Karin Fossum, the most psychological of the authors, repeats with Inspecter Sejer. For Camilla Lackberg, all her novels take place in her own hometown, Fjallbacka, a fishing community in which the whole town’s characters play a role. Her second novel to be translated into English, THE PREACHER, is due in April. (Links to reviews of books by six authors follow.)
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Extremely emotional and powerfully moving, the novel begins as the story of a seventy-year-old man who has returned to Mauritius with his son, specifically to visit the grave of his best friend, David Stein, who, we learn in the first ten pages, died in 1945 at the age of ten. The speaker, Raj, of Indian descent, has never been able to come to terms with the circumstances of David’s death, and has blamed himself for many years for his own part in possibly hastening David’s end. As a child, Raj was shy and lonely, especially after losing both of his brothers in a flash flood, and though he has always been close to his mother, he fears his brutal father, who beats him and his mother. When fate steps in and makes it possible for Raj to come to know a young Jewish orphan, who is interned in the camp where Raj’s father is a warden, he protects this secret relationship, willing to risk all for David, who has become his “last brother.” Author Nathacha Appanah tells the story in poetic language of great natural beauty and imagery, and her musical cadences give the novel a flow much like that of an opera.
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A man’s compulsion to do what he considers good and right, even though it requires him to act in ways that society and the law consider morally and legally wrong, permeates this book on all levels, with several characters assuming this role of “Redeemer” in their actions throughout the novel. Norwegian author Jo Nesbo, in this fourth novel of the Harry Hole series to be published in English, introduces three seemingly disparate plot lines in this thriller set in Oslo—a hired assassin from Croatia is fulfilling contract killings in Europe and has just arrived in Oslo for his last job; the Salvation Army, its officers and soldiers, are trying to fulfill their mission by providing food, clothing, and shelter to those most in need of their help, no questions asked; and Harry Hole, an alcoholic police inspector, who is sometimes off-the-wagon, is still trying to find the Big Boss behind the gun-running and related crimes which brought down one of his fellow police inspectors in The Devil’s Star, the previous novel in this series. Despite his unwillingness (and sometimes inability) to follow the rules, Harry believes in justice, no matter how it is brought about. He, too, can be a Redeemer.
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