The Snowman

Author: Jo Nesbo

---

I can't remember why I bought this book... perhaps the cover patch that proclaimed "The Next Stieg Larsson". In the long run it is a book that will not disappoint those who want an over-the-top crime drama with lots of sex, but I found it wanting on a number of levels.

The detective Harry Hole (pronounced Heu-leh) appears in several of Nesbo's books. In this lengthy yarn Harry Hole is now considered a maverick by his superiors... someone who had gained considerable media attention when he successfully nailed a serial killer. Years have passed, and Hole now has a reputation for being an alcoholic and for an obsession with seeing serial killers where none exist.

Inevitably events start to point towards the existence of an intelligent, calculating serial killer who has been killing for years undetected. Nesbo creates a perfect flurry of misdirection... in fact a great deal of the book consists of deliberately setting up possible conclusions to the hunt (at least one is announced to the media) only to have Hole realise at the last moment that it cannot be the solution. The reader is fairly confident about this as well as a third of the book or more is still to be read. The misdirection uses several devices. One character is far more closely connected to the crimes than anyone realises, other parts of the story are told with deliberately missing information or context to encourage the reader to presume they are reading about a crime when in fact the events are harmless or unconnected. The story is told with several lurches into the past, and when this is combined with the difficulty I experienced keeping track of unfamiliar Nordic names, I found myself literally loosing the plot at times.

The characters do have their interesting moments. I thought some of the dialogue between Hole and his new assistant Katrine was intelligently handled, but this was rather spoiled by later developments affecting Katrine. I can't decide whether it was a bonus or a problem that several elements of the main plot and misdirection were based on psychiatric issues, in particular issues connected with rare diseases. The connection between a particular disease and the serial killer's modus operandi was actually intriguing, but is not revealed until the end of the book.

The sexual interaction of various characters is a strong secondary focus of the book. The sub-theme is set early as one character quotes a statistic that only 80% of children are actually fathered by the mother's married partner... so there are a number of secondary stories of unfaithfulness. I was relieved that the sexual variations encompassed were not especially shocking.... one of the reasons I have decided not to read the third of Larsson's books is the particularly vile sex crimes he describes in detail. Still, I had a sense that the author placed too much trust in sexual encounters and crime drama to hold his audience, when more attention to character and character growth might have allowed me to tolerate the heavy handed misdirections.

This is great read for someone who demands sex and sensation from a crime story... and the story is ultimately simply about the pursuit of a criminal by a detective. If you long for genuinely unexpected twists (as opposed to blatant cross trails) and for characters with a rich and intriguing life of their own, then other sources will need to be perused.

Andrew Lack

Room

Author: Emma Donoghue

---

How can you write about the most horrific of situations without triggering instant reactions from your readers? I'm not saying our personal reactions of horror at the situation presented are not right and proper, I'm just saying for an author it means you cannot get your reader to focus on the part of the story you may want them to.

Emma Donoghue has made a really interesting decision... to tell the story of a terrible crime from the point of view of an innocent child. This is not a decision to magnify the terror by involving a child. In fact, the story is narrated by a five-year-old from start to finish... who at times is scared but who largely is not the one directly victimised, is remains relatively unclear about what is actually going on.

In the long run what makes this a fascinating book is that the child himself has been bought up entirely inside a single small room. His mother has done everything she can to create a loving environment, and despite her own terrible circumstance, surrounds him with games, exercise and learning (mostly from the television). Consequently the boy has come to believe the world consists only of the room, his mother, and the stranger who sometimes comes in at night. Things on TV he believes are not real, and the "Outside" is something like outer space.

So this is simultaneously a book about altered states, about seeing reality from an unusual perspective, and about a gripping story of escape. The author has avoided the temptation to make the youngster a superhero. He is a normal five year old with fears, vacillations and a limited capacity for understanding. His bravery extends only up to the moment when he imagines he will hurt a finger. I thought the scenes where his mother was trying to hide her adult understanding of their danger while persuading the boy to help in an escape were powerful indeed.

Just as the story is set up so the reader focuses on the people, not the crime, so the compass of the book is about much more than a crime or adventure story. Rather than a simple "happy ending" the book spends a good deal of time looking at the internal and external consequences of rescue. It is hard to explain more without giving away too much!

This is a delightful book about a dark subject, but the message is about healing and recovery, and the power of a parent's sacrificial love to create safety for a child. The book is populated by believable and fallible adults, and a very believable young boy caught up in a whirlpool of adult events. Even as I write this review, I am thinking about dipping back in to re-read sections, so appealing and vivid is the creation of the young narrator.

Oh, and the title? The boy does not know "beds" and "rooms" so he personifies each object in his tiny world... "Bed", "Rug", "Table" and "Wardrobe" and of course "Room".

Andrew Lack