Alfred Hayes, an almost-forgotten author who wrote this book in 1958, spent much of his career writing screenplays, both in Hollywood and in Europe, and he uses the skills he developed in writing for films to great advantage here. His economy of language, a necessity for great film scenes, allows him to develop a novel in which the reader becomes a participant, imagining the dramatic pauses in dialogue, the tones of conversations, and the words a character does not say at times in which s/he might be expected to reveal something crucial. As a result, this brief novel, close to a novella in length, is so evocative that upon reading it for the second time, the reader gains even more appreciation of the author’s technique – and his brilliance. His control of both his material and his literary objectives is absolute, his writing style is flawless, and he never has to resort to literary trickery to keep the reader focused on two characters who, despite their lack of uniqueness are, nevertheless, emotionally exposed to the reader and for all the world to see.
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Addressing a “hypocritical reader, my double, my brother,” a former revolutionary from Chile is telling her story to a someone who may be part of a truth commission investigating events that occurred in Santiago in the 1970s, a man who has traced her from Chile to a hospice in Stockholm. Lorena has consented to being interviewed, though she has little hope that the writer will be accurate in conveying what she wants to say, fearing that he will reduce her story to a “moral adventure tale.” She is old and dying, and she has a long history, however, and as she begins her story, we see her back in the years just before the death of President Salvador Allende (in 1973). She is a young woman and a new, unmarried mother. When a university friend visits her after the birth of her baby and takes her to a political demonstration in Santiago, she soon finds herself “caught up in something big, an enormous collective body.” She eventually becomes an active participant with this group, the Red Ax. Readers will empathize with Lorena, recognizing some of the turning points in which she may have made the wrong decisions, and, at the same time, understanding the pressures which have led to her decisions. As she tries to protect her interests on both sides of the political spectrum, Lorena eventually finds herself admitting, “I’m the one I want to erase from my life.”
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Wanting to find serenity, a new life, and maybe even a new love, Kerrigan has arrived in Copenhagen, the birthplace of his mother, hoping for changes in his own life, but “like Gilgamesh he kept finding instead a Divine Alewife who filled his glass and chanted” words like those above, urging him, instead, to eat, drink, and be merry. Kerrigan, who has a Ph.D. in literature, experienced a personal disaster three years ago, one in which he lost his young wife, his three-year-old daughter, and an unborn child, and he has come to believe that “that is how all stories end. With the naked, withered Christmas tree tilted against the trash barrel.” Now, as the new millennium is about to arrive, Kerrigan plans to “clothe himself in [Copenhagen’s] thousand years of history, let its wounds be his wounds, let its poets’ songs fill his soul, let its food fill his belly, its drink temper his reason, its jazz sing in the ears of his mind, its light and art and nature and seasons wrap themselves about him and keep him safe from chaos.” For Kennedy, as he relates the story of Kerrigan, Copenhagen becomes the equivalent of the Dublin which Stephen Dedalus explores in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
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Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s third mystery to be translated into English continues the characters he introduced with The Keeper of Lost Causes and The Absent One, both of which topped of best-seller lists in Europe for almost a year. Carl Morck, the lead detective of these novels, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of a shootout several years ago in which one of his friends was killed and the other, a six foot-nine inch giant, was left a quadriplegic. Morck’s drinking does not help his attitude, nor does his unfortunate love life. Relegated to “Department Q,” created especially for him, and located deep in the basement of the Copenhagen Police Department, he is assigned the cold cases to keep him out of the way. A several kidnappings over thirteen years, involving the children of members of religious sects, becomes the focus of a series of investigations by Morck and his intriguing assistant, Assad. Though it is difficult to imagine any five hundred page mystery being more complex, this mystery is so well organized, and the characters and actions are so well integrated, that it is easy to see why this novel has won so many prizes in Scandinavia and why it has been so popular. The characters are all observed in action, with lively dialogue, as well as first person commentary, and whole episodes are devoted individually to each of the main characters and their associates. A good stand-alone.
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Helen, a young croupier on the night shift at a London casino, is traveling home during the wee hours in a taxi shared with two co-workers. When they stop at a traffic light, two men, obviously homeless and perhaps drunk, arrogantly step out from the curb just as the the light is about to change and walk slowly, at their own pace, across the street, seeming to dare the stopped cars to move when the light turns green. Wild-looking, scraggy, and rather frightening, one man makes Helen pay attention, though she hunches down in the back of the taxi to avoid being seen. “Brian, it was Brian,” she thinks in astonishment, “her brother Brian,” whom she has not seen for twelve years. Stunned, she silently begins to make excuses for “Brian’s” behavior at the street crossing, applying her memories of Brian’s mild personality to the behavior of the younger of the two strange men on the street. Establishing some of the novel’s main themes in this opening scene, which is more dramatic because of the violence which does not take place, author James Kelman follows Helen from that moment with “Brian” to her arrival at the home she shares with her six-year-old daughter and Mo, a South Asian man who represents “normality” to her. For the next twenty-four hours, Kelman keeps the reader inside Helen’s head as she tries to sort out her life and figure where she may be going.
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