I went to Norway once. It was early in the spring in 2005. Our ship paid a port call at Oslo and we spent the day on a ship's tour of the area. It was overcast, cold and rainy. My kind of weather. Seriously, I live in a desert that has skies of varying shades of blue with summer monsoon storms that build up in the afternoon and disappear by evening. Winter turns the skies a paler blue and adds grey, but the sun still shines on most days.
In Norway that day, it was hard to believe there was a sun. Even harder to believe that the sky would ever be anything but different shades of grey as the clouds descended and rose in a misty haze.
When they lifted a little, they revealed so many different greens that it was breathtaking. Even the sod roofs of the houses at the Open Air Folk Museum were brilliant.
But where the clouds touched the earth, the atmosphere was eery and even oppressive.
This is a picture of the The Holmenkollen Ski Jump. Can't you tell? From here we were promised a sweeping view of Oslo. And I am sure it was there, somewhere under the cloud.
These were the pictures I had in my mind as I read Don't Look Back by Karin Fossum.
In an interview with the UK Independent in 2009, Karin Fossum admitted that she knew
a murderer and victim:
"I have experienced a murderer among my friends," she declares. "Many, many years ago. At close range I have seen the impact of it. I knew the victim, I went to the funeral, I have been to the house, to the specific room where the killing took place, and I was stunned by it. It's such a blow." It is the perpetually building wake of such an event that intrigues her. "This killing will be in people's minds for generations. 'My brother did this,' 'My father did this,' 'Do you know what my grandfather did, what my great-grandfather did so many years ago?' It never stops."
Perhaps it is that insight that gives her work such a depth of compassion for all involved in a murder. She admits that plotting is not her strength, and so focuses on the people involved in a crime; the victims, the perpetrators and even the innocent bystanders. She likes to examine the good person who does something evil rather than an evil "bogeyman" since the good person is one we all know and can relate to, making his crime "much more frightening."
Don't Look Back opens early one morning as a young girl leaves the house of a friend and, pushing her doll carriage, starts the walk to her home. An old van pulls up and the driver offers her a ride. She gets in the van.
The village lay in the bottom of a valley, at the end of a fjord, at the foot of a mountain, like a pool in a river, where the water was much too still. And everyone knows that only running water is fresh.
And we all think we know what will happen next. When she doesn't reach her home Inspector Konrad Sejer and his colleague Jacob Skarre are called in to investigate. But then, in the first surprise, the little girl is returned safely with a tale of the body of a young woman beside a lake up on the mountain.
The teenage girl found nude at the water's edge is the universally admired Annie Holland. In order to solve this murder, Inspector Sejer tries to find out who Annie Holland was, and who would want to see her dead. But she is apparently blemish-less; an athlete who loved babysitting the small children of the village. There is a hint here, and one over there that something else may have been going on, but nothing that is easily uncovered by the two detectives.
Inspector Sejer is a widower, rebuilding his life after the passing of his wife, with his dog Kollender. His daughter, son-in-law, and grandson live nearby and give him what joy his life appears to hold. He is fortunately, neither a drunk nor a deeply depressed soul, merely a man trying to do his job and continue his life. I especially liked his willingness to accept his own limitations. In discussing Annie's character with the younger Skarre, he says, "I'm not entirely sure. I'm not sure about anything anymore."
According to Karin Fossum,
"My detective is not very important to me," she says. "He's in the book because he has a job to do for me, but I never intend him to be a major character." Equally, the relationship between Sejer and his assistant avoids the formulaic mentor-protégé template familiar to police procedurals. Over the past decade, the pair have become intellectual equals. "Sejer is a bit of an old-fashioned guy," admits Fossum. "So he needs this young one to see the world with fresh eyes."
He does the job in this novel, which is told in alternating perspectives, as each character gets to be at the center of his own story, even if only for a few pages at a time. And that alternating point of view is one of the strengths of this mystery as we look into the heart and mind of a murderer, never knowing which character it is until the end. Because a villain is never a villain in his own eyes, Fossum is able to keep us guessing for most of the book. And the final twist at the very end is perfect. It left me smiling in admiration for her skill.
This is a police procedural set in a haunting atmosphere in which graphic violence is unneeded and so not included. The violence is internal, taking place in the minds and souls of the characters, creating a psychological thriller with very little blood. As it should be since,
The emphasis, as ever, is on the why rather than the who. "I usually say that this book is about death. Then people say all crime stories are about death, and I say no, they're about killing, and that's something else." It's a clarification Ibsen would have understood.
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