It  was only last year, when I read my first Gunnar Staalesen’s crime fiction novel, We Shall Inherit The Wind that I realized that Nordic Noir hadn’t been created in the ‘90s by Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankel and Steig Larsson. With 20 novels in his Varg Veum crime-detective series published since 1977, Gunnar Staalesen’s reputation as one of the pioneers of this gritty, socially-conscious, self-aware style of crime thriller is truly deserved.  In this months book Where Roses Never Die  – the latest of Veum series to be translated into English and published in June  by Orenda Books http://www.orendabooks.co.uk  –Staalesen does not disappoint. His time-honed mastery of plot, characterization, story-telling and atmospheric scene-setting is evident throughout.

At the outset of the story, Veum is in a sorry state. Still mourning the three-year-old death of his girlfriend, Karin, his days revolve around the next glass of aquavit. Socially isolated and with little work, he’s hanging on to a semblance of normality by his fingernails. His lifeline appears in the form of Maja Misvaer, the mother of a 3-year old girl, Mette, who had disappeared without trace almost 25-years earlier. The case had never been solved and within 6 months will be time-barred. So a desperate Maja, who, understandably, has never come to terms with the unexplained disappearance of little Mette, comes to an equally desperate Veum in a last-ditch attempt to find something – anything – that could prompt a reinvestigation of the case.

And she has, of course, come to the right place. In classic fictional gumshoe mode, Veum is that dogged workaholic who leaves no stone unturned, no nuance unprodded and no secret unearthed in his terrier-like approach to solving the case. Inevitably he unearths more secrets than those involved are comfortable with – Maja herself included.

With Staalensen’s consummate mastery of storytelling, a multi-faceted plot unfolds, drawing together a series of seemingly unrelated elements: Mette’s disappearance, a recent jewelry heist, the relationships between neighbours in the tightly-knit community where Maja lives – and from where Mette had disappeared. For my liking, some of the links between elements were a bit thin and tenuous and the eventual denouement stretched my credibility to straining point (to my mind there were too many people involved for the final secret to be maintained for 25 years).

But even with these reservations, the book was compelling reading. And this, of course, is where Scandinavian crime writing trumps over it’s standard UK and US counterparts. Because it isn’t just (or even primarily) a case of finding out ‘whodunit’. It’s not simply a ‘Where’s Wally’ exercise in recognising the clues and putting them together with a ‘Hey, presto – he’s the murderer’ outcome. The Scandinavian approach also focuses on the aftershocks. The sundering judders, shudders, waves and even ripples that spread out into the lives of people affected by the trauma of the central event.

It’s at this that Staalesen really excels. With exquisite subtlety, via descriptions of a character’s appearance, clothes, facial expressions, involuntary responses – even the pictures on the walls and arrangement of furniture in their homes – he paints a detailed picture of their “back story”. A story that the reader cannot fail to be moved by. I defy anyone to read Staalesen’s description of Maja on that first visit to Veum without feeling empathy for a woman struggling to keep going – even before we hear her story. Or not to be moved to sadness at the corrosive effect the keeping of a shameful secret has on the young Joachim Bridgeland.

The story ends on a hopeful note – for Maja, Joachim and for Veum. He’s solved the crime and has a new romantic interest in his life. But aquavit beckons … will he succumb? We have to wait for the translation of the next in the series, No One Is As Safe In Danger, already published in Norwegian.

The story was inspired by the actual disappearance of two young girls in Norway in the ‘70s. Unfortunately these real-life events have not ended on a hopeful note. What happened to the young girls is still unknown. Staalesen choose the title of the book from the gospel-style hymn “Where Roses Never Fade”, the Norwegian version of which is called “Where Roses Never Die”. Commenting on the title in a recent interview he said “for the people left behind there is comfort to be found in the belief that close relatives who are dead have simply traveled to another and much happier world: a place where the roses neither fade or die.” We can only hope that the families of these two girls – and the families of all children who have disappeared – can find some solace, somewhere, to help deal with such a catastrophic tragedy.

If you’ve thought ‘The Door’ has seemed shut for the past month, it has and there’s a good excuse, I got married. It’s been hard to find time to write and upload reviews for the latter
part of May and most of June, what with assisting my fiancee – now wife to juggle numerous details of the nuptials, while enjoying the ceremony and various events and parties in both Lincoln and Dublin. Now that it’s done and dusted normal service will resume.

 

“IRISHMAN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of god and the dead generations from which she receives her old traditions of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom…” The opening lines of the proclamation read by Patrick Pearse from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916.

If you are Irish, have any Irish blood or tenuous connection to the emerald Isle and are looking for a  book to mark the 100th anniversary of 1916? One that evokes the complexity of the time rather than a flag-waving polemic or a nostalgic romp? Then this months book should definitely be top of your list. Its Sebastian Barry’s “A Long, Long Way”.

Published in 2005 by Faber & Faber  www.faber.co.uk  (and shortlisted for the Man Booker prize that year) Barry’s novel stands head-and-shoulders over the many recently published books on all conceivable aspects of the time.

It has no heroes. No impossibly romantic figures who bestride history with emotion-stirring rhetoric or valiant deeds. It tells the story of Willie Dunne, a young Dubliner who had the misfortune to be born in 1906.

When we first meet Willie he is seventeen, working as a builder’s apprentice and in love with Gretta, the daughter of a man who has been blacklisted because of his involvement in the 1913 lock-out.  Willie’s father is a superintendent in the Dublin Metropolitan Police and, to both Willie’s and his father’s disappointment, Willie has not been able to follow in his footsteps because he doesn’t meet the six-foot height requirement to join the constabulary.

Despite this disappointment, Willie enjoys building work and looks forward to a future with Gretta – a future woven into family and place, like his father and grandfather before him.

But the world has different plans. 1914. The “Great War”.  Able-bodied young men wanted to join the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. For Willie it’s the chance to don a uniform – “if he can’t be a policeman, he can be a soldier” – and to gain his father’s approval.

So, at 18 off Willie heads to war, waved on by cheering crowds. And like the millions of other young men of Europe who headed to war, what awaits Willie in Flanders is the unimaginable squalor, futile slaughter and desolation of the trenches.

Barry’s description of the unconscionable horror of trench warfare is realistic, evocative and, at times, poetic. But overall it’s impact is an echo of the many other poets and writers who have gone before. Sasoon, Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front) and, more recently, Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy have so exquisitely – and excruciatingly – mined this material that Barry has little to add.  But the inhumanity and terror of the front is only a part of Willie’s undoing.

Unlike their other British and French counterparts, for Willie and many of the hundreds of thousands of  Irishmen who were waved off to war by cheering crowds, a return to cheers, gratitude and appreciation of their sacrifice was not to be. Fate had another curved ball to throw at them. The 1916 Rising.

How the Rising affected the men fighting in Flanders, as experienced through Willie Dunne, is the unique perspective that Barry brings to this aspect of our history.

“And in from Ireland trickled the names, every day two or three, of the executed, sending some Dublin men into sore dances of worry …………..and the precious cargo of their children tormenting them, calling to them to return home. And they could not”

Barry lays on the unsettling and disturbing effect of the Rising a bit too thickly when, highly implausibly, Willie is called up to take part in a battle against the insurgents while on his way back from brief leave in Dublin. Even without this clumsy episode, Willie’s experiences at the front could not fail but to prompt  questions about his own identity and sense of belonging: One of his company is executed for refusing to fight in a British uniform in protest at the killings back home; English officers treat him with disdain because he is Irish; ‘fellow’ soldiers regard “the Irish” as suspect. In effect, Willie and his Irish comrades are good for cannon fodder, but can’t really be trusted.

In a letter home Willie refers to his sense of ambiguity about where his loyalties lie. As soon as the letter is sent he realises he has made a mistake – his father, who has spent his life defending the realm, will be infuriated. And he is – so much so that, when Willie is next on leave his father refuses to see him or let him stay at home. On this leave Willie also finds that Gretta has married and had a baby. He is spat on by street urchins because he is wearing a British army uniform.

“He knew he had no country now………..he feared he was not a citizen, they would not let him be a citizen” His country had “dissolved behind him like sugar in the rain”.

His home now was at the front, with the small band of Irishmen who had been through what he had been through. Who knew what it was to belong only in no-mans-land. Willie returned to inevitable death because he had no place else to go – and no future to hope for.

The Long Long Way, is the fifth of Irish author Sebastian Barry’s ten books, which include Macker’s Garden (1982), The Engine Of Owl-Light (1987), Annie Dunne (2002) and The Secret Scripture (2008). He’s also written fourteen plays and two collections of poetry. He’s held academic posts in the US and Ireland and now lives in Co Wicklow. He not only has a magic touch when comes to his literary career but also in his family life too having christened one of his three kids Merlin.

In any context Barry’s depiction of Willie Dunne’s short life is a powerful portrayal of how the circumstances of a time can take over and destroy lives.  In the context of remembering 1916 it is particularly poignant – and a reminder that many Willie Dunnes were dispossessed of a country, of place to belong, through no fault of their own.

Those who did survive and return to Ireland faced such social antipathy that, in effect, they were not allowed to refer to their past. In our book club discussion four people had stories of family members who kept their role in the first – and second – world wars secret for fear of being labelled ‘traitors’.  It is only in this generation that the Willie Dunnes, or more accurately the descendants of the Willie Dunnes, have been allowed to tell their stories.  In a small way the nomination of “A Long, Long Way” as Dublin’s 2007 One_City_One_Book marked a welcoming back to Dublin of all those Willie Dunnes.

 

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go. (Suicide in The Trenches – Siegfried Sassoon)