Beginning your novel with a hungover protagonist, who’s staring blearily around and trying to handle the pain while he’s getting his bearings, is one of the great literary clichés, and as a rule it’s best avoided.
Then again, when the hangover is accompanied by amnesia so complete that he can’t remember a murder taking place, and when the obligatory stumble to the bathroom results in the discovery of his wife’s corpse, exceptions can be made. So begins Janek Mitter’s day, and The Mind’s Eye, an Inspector Van Veeteren novel by Håkan Nesser.
The first few chapters follow poor Janek Mitter as he’s arrested for the murder and pulled into the legal system, before the narrative gradually transitions to Van Neeteren, whose passing interest in the case begins to grow more serious as events unfold. Van Neeteren is a fine detective in the engagingly depressive mould, his motivations the result of a constant battle between curiosity and fatalism. At one point, he decides to either solve the case in a week or retire, not really minding which happens; either way, he’ll be off to Australia for a holiday.
Håkan Nesser
Born in Sweden in 1950, Håkan Nesser is the author of around twenty novels, although only the first three Van Neeteren stories have so far been translated into English. His books have won several awards, including the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy Prize (for The Mind’s Eye), and the Crime Writers of Scandinavia’s Glass Key Award. The Van Neeteren novels have also provided the basis for a Swedish television series.
You can read an interview with Nesser on Detectives Beyond Borders. He’s also got a website here, but it’s in Swedish.
The Mind’s Eye, the third Van Veeteren story to be published in English, is actually the first in the series, Borkmann’s Point and The Return being the second and third respectively. They’re set in a fictional northern European country, a sort of blend of Nesser’s native Sweden, the Netherlands, and other nearby countries. (This also provides a neat response to a couple of questions of accuracy that came to mind: do prison cell doors really have coat hooks?)
It’s beautifully translated from the original Swedish by Laurie Thompson—I can’t speak for the accuracy, of course, but I’ve read some almost illiterate translations lately, and this certainly isn’t one of them. As the first novel in the series (and Nesser’s second book overall), it does have a slightly embryonic feel to it, but it’s strong enough—and entertaining enough—to make me want to move on to the other two novels. (The fourth is coming out next year.)
There seems to be a rich and dedicated market for crime fiction in translation. Publishing companies like Bitter Lemon and Europa Editions specialise in translating and publishing it, and blogs like Detectives Beyond Borders and International Noir provide great online coverage of new and old titles. As with the previous two Håkan Nesser novels, The Mind’s Eye is published in the UK by Macmillan.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Europa Editions are excellent, I really can’t recommend The Goodbye Kiss by Massimo Carlotto enough for example.
Nice links incidentally, I’d never heard of International Noir before, I shall be spending some time there.
I’m not wholly sure about setting a crime novel in a made up country. Crime seems to me primarily a genre of character and place, Van Neeteren supplies the classic crime focus on character which is often expressed through the detective figure, but how do you focus on a made up place?
What do you think is the reason for taking that approach? Rather than simply setting the novels in Sweden say?
I do like your use of sidebars incidentally, very helpful.
August 13th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
I hadn’t heard of Europa until you mentioned them in your other comment, but I’ll certainly be investigating them further.
Interesting point about the sense of place. Now you mention it, I didn’t have an especially strong sense of where the action was taking place, but maybe this serves to move the focus more fully onto the characters? I wonder also whether the made up country takes on its own existence as the reader progresses through the books.
Perhaps he took that approach simply to free himself up from having to get all the details of police and legal procedures right? (Well, in my land, it’s perfectly normal for X, Y, and Z to happen…)
Glad you like the sidebars. It’s nice to be able to go off at a tangent without breaking the flow of the main post.
August 13th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Crime series can be a bit of an act of faith. At risk of being expelled from the literary blogging world, I quite like Ian Rankin but the first two or three aren’t that great. You have to stick with it a bit before he really hits his stride.
The difficulty is, that’s a big ask given you may read two or three and see no improvement at all.
How skilful is the characterisation do you think here? Do you think he manages a strong focus on them?
Re the third para, you may well be right, but that would be a motive that personally I would be less sympathetic to, puritan that I am.
August 13th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I’ve always felt I should give Ian Rankin a proper try. I picked one of them up last year (I can’t remember which one) but couldn’t get into it. I will try again, though, another day, with another book. Is there one you’d recommend?
The characterisation in The Mind’s Eye is interesting but a little fuzzy. For example, he’ll often switch to a new character at the start of a chapter, but without naming them, so you have to work out who’s being discussed from the context. This creates a slight blurring between the identities of the characters which I’m assuming is deliberate, but is also slightly annoying.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I’d suggest the sixth one, Mortal Causes, which contains a fair bit about Scottish sectarianism.
Rankin is in my view a much better writer if you try to read him with a mental Scottish accent, if that makes any sense. Pronounced internally in that accent, the language flows better and is more natural. Pronounced internally with an English accent, he is I think a weaker writer. Probably not a huge surprise that, given he is a Scottish writer writing about Scotland, but I found it made a difference.
I think Mortal Causes is his best I’ve read, I think some consider it the best overall (which may I suppose make it a poor first choice in some respects), so if you don’t take to it I don’t see you taking to Rankin at all.
That characterisation thing is interesting, Lawrence Norfolk did that in The Pope’s Rhincerous (a massively overwritten book in my view) and I found it very jarring, so I think I’ll probably give TME a miss for now.