On Oct. 5, 1999, a courtroom in Oslo heard a defendant, a man who was proud to show his swastika tattoos and to describe himself as a racist, speak of “the great betrayal” of Norway.
“Since 1945, National Socialism’s enemies have been masters of the land; they have developed and put into practice their democratic and economic principles,” he said. “Those who are supposed to protect our interests have let us down. They let the enemy build mosques in our midst, let them rob our folk and mingle blood with our women. It is no more than our duty as Norwegians to protect our race and to eliminate those who fail us.”
“Europe is threatened by mass immigration and the resultant chaos, deprivation and struggle for survival ... Those of you who pretend that there is not a racial struggle going on here are either blind or traitors,” he said.
The defendant, who had attacked a Vietnamese kebab shop owner with a baseball bat, was not a young Anders Behring Breivik, nor one of his associates. He was not a real person. His name was Sverre Olsen, a shaven-headed character in one of Jo Nesbo’s acclaimed thrillers featuring the troubled Harry Hole, Oslo’s famous alcoholic detective.
Nesbo is not alone in writing of political extremism and deep social problems in Norway, just as many Swedish, Danish and Icelandic authors do in their own homelands. A fear of outsiders is voiced by characters, be they criminals, police, politicians or ordinary citizens, in the works of many writers who have been translated into English. British readers, as well as many others in Europe and, slowly, the US, are turning to Scandinavia for its crime writing and drama.
The work is full of social commentary, many of the writers are former or working journalists, and there is a clear sense of difference from the mainstream: more introspective, more gloomy, and with far more depth than most American and British crime writing.
In the words of Hakan Nesser, one of Sweden’s top writers: “In general, the pace is slower. It’s a European rhythm. There isn’t as much action as you need to have in a US crime novel.”
Among the most popular Norwegian crime writers whose books — or some of them — are available in English are: Anne Holt, the country’s former justice minister who writes about a former FBI profiler in one series and a hard-headed female investigator who has to work from a wheelchair in another; Gunnar Staalesen, whose Varg Veum series is set in picturesque Stavanger; K.O. Dahl, whose thrillers are set in Oslo and contain much comment on modern Norwegian life; and the best, in my view, Karin Fossum.
Having “experienced a murder among my friends, at close range” in her youth, Fossum is noted for her empathy with the perpetrators, as well as the victims in her books. She writes, she says, about death, whereas most crime writers focus instead on killing — “and that’s something else.”
Of the central figure in her best-selling Konrad Sejer series, she says: “He is not very important to me, not intended to be a major character. He’s in the book because he has a job to do.”
Strangely, you will hear more of these Norwegian writers, and doubtless others too, in the coming months. When neighboring Sweden was traumatized by infamous crimes, it led, directly or indirectly, to a surge in crime writing that made many authors, the better ones, globally popular.
Henning Mankell began his Wallander series in 1991, five years after the assassination of then-Swedish prime minister Olof Palme and the year when a notorious Swedish criminal, John Ausonius, shot 11 immigrants, killing one of them. Ausonius, now serving a life sentence, used a laser-sighted rifle and became known as the Laser Man, the title of a book about his crimes by journalist Gellert Tamas, who described him as “a mirror of Swedish society.”
Crime writing is so popular in Scandinavia because “it’s modern, it depicts society in a way that is easy to recognize and doesn’t shy away from serious problems,” critic Marie Peterson said.
If Palme’s death and Ausonius’ extremist hate crimes led to a welter of new work over the border, Breivik will likely do the same in Norway. If this seems unusual, it is perhaps because of the esteem in which writers are held in Norway.
It is explained in a biography of Jan Kjarstad, arguably Norway’s most influential living writer.
“In much of Europe, unlike North America, there is a societal expectation that authors, as representatives of the intelligentsia, take a prominent public role in debating political and social issues,” Kjarstad’s biographer Tara Chace said.
Kjarstad has suggested “that an author’s fiction is the most appropriate medium for influencing public thought.”
Norway’s greatest ever writer was Knut Hamsun, about whom there is never-ending debate, particularly over his political views. Hamsun won the Nobel prize in 1920 and, in 1943, gave it to Joseph Goebbels as a gift. There was much consternation two years ago over the extent to which the 150th anniversary of his birth should be celebrated nationally. More recently, there was Jens Bjorneboe, a controversial critic of Norwegian society who drank heavily and hanged himself in 1976.
The Norwegian critics and public seem to be as wary of Kjarstad as they were of Bjorneboe. He is an intellectual heavyweight, a postmodernist with a degree in theology. He is well traveled, lived in Africa (like Mankell) and has written about Norwegian heroes, Norway’s place in the world and what it means to be a Norwegian. It seems many readers in his homeland do not agree with him, but he is very popular elsewhere in Scandinavia.
Jo Nesbo is likely to be ever more popular, even though he is something of a contradiction. The main plotline of The Redbreast concerns Nazi sympathizers, stretching back to those who fought for the Germans in the war, despite Norway’s supposed neutrality. Other books in the Hole series — 5 million copies sold in 30 languages and another one due out next month — feature severed heads, serial killers, torture, corrupt policemen, rapists, assassins, drug addicts and religious perverts, not to mention the mundanities of alcoholism, failed relationships and Norway’s many social ills. If it all sounds a bit racy, it is certainly in comparison to most other Scandinavian writers.
Last week he was asked by the New York Times to write about the Breivik massacre.
Norway, he said, was a country where “fear of others had not found a foothold ... where everyone’s material needs were provided for when oil was discovered in the 70s, and where the political path was established right after the second world war. The Norwegian self-image before 22 July 2011 was that of a virgin — nature untouched by human hands, a nation unsullied by the ills of society.”
Another contradiction, given there are so many ills of society for Harry Hole to deal with in fictional Oslo.
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