What is it with me and these books?
 
I am strongly attracted to the genre, yet struggle to find a Nordic author who really does it for me.
 
I was once asked as a boy my favourite colour. “Dark black,” I said. And this is what noir in the land of the endless winter night promises to be. The dark represents, of course, the Underworld of our unconscious, the unknown. Its thrill and its risk and its magical potentiality. Will it be disappointment or reward? Will the light go on and show you to be in an empty, manmade cellar, or a natural cave whose rock can be mined for something more valuable than gold? Is it a trap, or the only way out? A scenario where fortune favours the brave. Courage, said Aristotle, is chief among virtues, for it is the guarantor of all others. Something in the bleak and austere emptiness attracts the human soul. Its very featureless draws out the searching question. Does the winter offer a place of death or a hidden refuge, despair or the sheltered seeds of spring? 
 
So, then, in the overland netherworld, in countries which represent for us the quintessence of social normality, cool, calm and collected, conscientious citizens and intelligence ruling passion, the scene is set for the totally unexpected. I am ready to be darkened with delight.
 
Sweden
I started with The Laughing Policeman, the first in Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series and found it flat and uninspiring. The Man Who Went Up in Smoke had the same plodding out of sentences. Was it a clumsy translation? Or was the style just off? The prose is just so lifeless. There’s no rhythm. A series of sentence statements. No Hemingway or Elmore Leonard, this. The visual scenes are unclear (eg Beck under the bridge in Budapest) and the investigative solution humdrum.
 
Henning Mankell – Faceless Killers
I had high hopes for Kurt Wallender, but was neither charmed by atmosphere nor gripped by tightness of drama. Again, I don’t know if something was lost in translation, but there was no pace or tension.
 
Iceland
Snowblind by Ragnar Jónasson. Again, the tension fails to mount and hold. It drags and becomes repetitive. The revelation in the end is no great shakes. A darn shame. I have had a fondness for Iceland ever since I fell in love at first sight in Reykjavik post office.
 
Finland
I then tried The Man Who Died by Antti Tuomainen, for no better reason than it was the same title as a story of mine. In Tuomainen’s book, an overweight, terminally ill man springs into action in extraordinary ways and it’s all rather fatuous. Carl Hiaasen high jinks without the satirical solidity.
 
Norway
Jo Nesbo. Come on, Jo, I thought. Give me a cracking good read. Neh, it wasn’t to be. I found Blood on Snow simply unremarkable and I just gave up on Redbreast, one of the early Harry Hole series, after 150 pages and still waiting to be given a clue of what it’s about.
 
Writing for TV, on the other hand, has produced absolutely gripping Nordic drama in The Killing and The Bridge, not mention the wonderful Unbeforeigners.
 
Meanwhile, I continue to look for Scandi or other European noir writing with depth, brilliance and a lead character to rival, say, Philip Kerr’s splendid Bernie Gunther.

On this day three years ago, a tyrant with the cold of death where a heart should beat invaded Ukraine again to subjugate its land and people to his rule of fear. He has failed. He will always fail, because these people value themselves and their integrity in a way he cannot grasp. This is the aggressor’s profound and permanent defeat. An intimation of his inadequacy keeps the bloodless worm of his brain awake at night. Where another people would have crumpled, the Ukrainians have resisted the second army in the world. They love their own and to them their land is family.
 
This war started in 2014 with the illegal Russian annexation of the Crimea and occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of the Donbas region, where fierce fighting took place. That is the setting for this book. For many Ukrainians, especially those in the border regions who had grown up thinking of the Russians as difficult but viable neighbours, who spoke Russian and shared many cultural traits with them and decades of common history, the military assault was not just murderous and destructive, it was totally disorienting.
 
In Zhadan’s book, this confusion is reflected in the absence of clear references to Russian and Ukrainian sides. For a despondent mining town used to being under one form of onerous rule for so long, the occupiers are “the new ones” and the orphanage of the title is lost to a zone of battle that it cannot win. Pasha, the everyman hero of the novel, is a meek non-combatant, a teacher with a crippled hand, whose lone attempt to reach the orphanage-boarding school and bring home his nephew, Sasha, is the relentless subject of the book. 
 
Relentless because that’s what a war zone is. The destruction of house and home, school and store, everything people have worked for, everything broken down to abandonment, burning, fear, hunger, cold, rain and snow, muck and mutual distrust, pain, bodies and wild dogs. Page after page and through it all struggles Pasha past broken buildings, evading tanks and soldiers from both sides, “an empty school, a destroyed newsstand, a bullet-riddled obelisk, scraps of metal, burnt bricks, bloody clothes,” doubtful of himself always, imagining his nephew’s angry resentment for having been sent to the Internat in the first place.
 
“They can’t see the city, but long black streams of smoke are rising from over there. They have been since yesterday; it’s as if the ground has been ruptured and now something truly terrible is coming out from the earth and nobody knows how to stop that something, the worst thing, since nobody knows how it happened, how the earth split and released all its blackness…”
 
I was surprised that Zhadan presents the pitiful disarray and havoc as a kind of inhuman phenomenon that civilians and fighters of whichever flag are caught up in, and it seems a generous, nuanced and brave move to have Pasha and Sasha aided at one point by a civilian who is one of “the others”. Especially since the writer is such a stalwart supporter of his country (last year he joined the Ukrainian army’s 13th Khartiia Brigade). We all know that there is a very clear human agency behind the aggression with a name and a pasty face, but Zhadan prefers to push past the politics and centre on the misery that all people suffer on the ground in the midst of battle and carnage.
 
“The dark sunflowers, dried out by the summer heat, look like a scorched forest” and “the moon hovering over the crushed city is spreading the smell of a body chopped to pieces.”
 
When they reach the city defenders, uncle and nephew “walk down the street among the soldiers. There are more and more of them. Black pits under their eyes. The inflamed eyes, the parched mouths, and the screams—abrasive, loud, discontented—that they let out in an attempt to communicate.”
 
Only at the end do we hear Sasha’s thoughts, and in the shot-up streets of a neighbourhood that still stands, a kind of resolution rises from the meaninglessness of the war.

What a disappointment.
 
Halting and wooden, weighed down by unremarkable recollection and precious little action. So much soporific backstory that there is no real main story. Above all, it’s confusing. Who the characters are and how they fit together and what is happening is unfathomable. And for some reason, there’s a reluctance to name the countries where the significant players are.
 
It is not even interesting. There is no tension. Scraps of information that contribute nothing and are included simply because the author had made a note of them. “Maxim machine guns, thirsty for water when fired, were mounted on wooden machine gun tables.” Water is not an issue, adds nothing, and is irrelevant. So are the guns in the island’s potted history which tells no human story. I found it impossible to like or sympathize with any of the characters. The assassin sent to kill the scientist apparently feels (hackneyed trope) sympathy for his prey: we only know this because the narrator says so. There is no sense of urgency or need to eliminate the scientist who, like the reader, might just as well die of bored old age.
 
Accumulated phrases of heaped words, sentences that drop at the end with the same leaden cadence.
 
If only it had been written by Graham Greene.

Another short story collection.
 
Whether fantasizing or acting out their guilty desires, Boyd’s characters are neither at peace with themselves or others. Unsurprisingly, they provoke situations in which someone is going to get hurt. Sometimes humorous, mostly sad, always solidly written.

It’s 1891 in Butte, Montana, a town filled with Irish miners and dissolution, and poet manqué but consummate wastrel and opium addict Tom Rourke meets spunky Polly Gillespie, newly-wed to a dry stick of a man but not married to a loveless existence and before you know it, we are joining the young runaway lovers on an unprettified, achingly intense flight and romance through the wilds of the American west.
 
Under icy stars and suffering a love that you feel in your own blood and bones, their faithful Palomino takes them where their fate and bravado must go, with curious characters and hunters on that trail. What a pair of desperados they make, Tom the hapless hero, Polly the more knowing, if equally vulnerable, of our hope-cursed sweethearts. Their voices are utterly real, common and sublime.
 
The brightest star of the brilliant tale is the language itself. The entire novel is a prose poem. Barry is one of those Irish writers who make English a language of their poetic very own. Open the book at any page and you will find imagery to charm with its surprise. Such a prosaic an object as a radiator “throbbed like a fat little sun god”, while “an acre of starlings” is a “a great thumbprint forming and breaking and reforming”. “The clear light of day was a kind of forgiveness.”

Stories with portentous momentum that carries them and their characters to sometimes startlingly inevitable endings. In what was her first publication, Keegan brings out the pain and longing, the understandable and questionable acts of human relationship in mature and unflinching exposure.

The writing is true and bright as ice. You can tell that she has edited like a butcher paring away the fat to leave the words clean cut and lean. The paragraph should “go into, not on about the subject,” she said once, the comment of one who knows her craft.
 
As a matter of course, a set of stories is often tied to a certain place and culture. What I found worked very well in these is, as we switch from rural Ireland to the American South—Keegan writes authoritatively on both—the stories refresh each other with alternating voices and expectations.

You know how Elmore Leonard said: “I try to leave out the parts people skip”? Best writing advice I ever heard. Well, Barry Hannah is a master of it.  He can make Carver sound wordy. Hannah gives you the poetic American South in all its heart-wrenching brutality.  Of these twenty, some are real short. Stories that last as long as a song, strength and beauty packed into a box the characters cannot fight a way out of. Rich in imagination and turn of phrase, almost sexually intense, he is not trying to be smart, but is so anyway. Just superb.

When it comes to American short stories, I found Richard Ford’s last collection, Sorry For Your Trouble, well-crafted but predictable, stale even, the same tropes revisited. No new light comes to pierce his dim view on life. But he can certainly spot and pick some good’uns by other writers, and although there’s a tendency to be period pieces about family and place, the standard in this selection is high.
 
I particularly liked C.S Godshalk’s The Wizard and there were two that made me sit up and really take notice—you know, that lift you get when something really interesting is going on in the writing: Car-Crash While Hitchhiking by Denis Johnson and How to Talk to a Hunter by Pam Houston.

More short stories.
 
Disturbing, moving, stylish in a good, old-fashioned way. A book for the winter fireside.

I got so excited about the first story that I thought I’d struck genius. I found the other stories fabulously inventive, original and just a whole bunch of fun and dream logic let loose—Secret Identity and The Lesson are outstanding—but it was “The Summer People” that really got me. It’s the way the sassy but abandoned and put-upon girl protagonist presents the outlandish circumstance as if it’s tiresome (she has, in fact, had enough of it) that works so brilliantly well.
 
Kelly Link does this thing where she slips something utterly weird into the narrative while you’re not watching and makes out it’s perfectly normal. I adore this trick. She can also be very amusing and for that I, for one, am thankful. Misery is present in most people’s existence and serious fiction must deal with this reality, but it need not acquiesce in it and there has, also, to be an antidote.
 
Superheroes, a recurring theme, are presented as working people with a difficult job to do. “Sometimes you’ll be fighting somebody, this real asshole, and you’ll be both be getting winded, and then you start noticing his outfit and he’s looking, too, and then you’re both wondering if you got your outfits at this same place.”
 
And how about: “Werewolf Boyfriends go on and on about the environment, and also are always trying to get you to go running with them.”
 
And there are the mermaids, “an invasive species, like the iguanas. [….] they didn’t speak, only sang and whistled and made rude gestures”.