Ari Thor Arason is a
trainee policeman who on an impulse accepts a posting in
Siglufjordur, in the far north of Iceland. He leaves his medical
student girlfriend behind in Reykjavik, and arrives in the small and
isolated village, once busy with the fishing industry but now just a
sleepy bywater, where he is told 'nothing ever happens'. Of course,
within weeks there are two corpses – one a famous writer found dead
at the foot of the stairs of the local theatre on the eve of an
amateur production, the other a woman living with the man playing the
lead in that production, discovered almost naked, bleeding red into
the newly-fallen snow.
Ragnar Jonasson's novel
is very much a traditional murder mystery, closer to Yrsa Sigurdardottir than
Arnaldur Indridason, which gains much from the isolated setting, in
which a whole town is trapped, in effect, by the snow. Amateur
dramatics and murder in an isolated setting make it sound very Agatha
Christie, but as with Sigurdardottir it's the nature of the people in
their isolated society, a world of extremes of light and darkness,
that perhaps makes difficult the shadings of gray. It's a tangled
web, with each character's back story suggesting more knots, and the
past is woven deeply into it: thefts and murders, abuses and illicit
loves: sometimes it seems as if no one in this Icelandic milieu
possesses a life free of serious damage. And that includes Ari Thor,
whose relationship with his girlfriend seems unlikely to survive the
great distance, both real and metaphoric, between them.
Ari Thor is an oddly
unfinished character, which may suit his relatively naiveté, but it
stands in sharp contrast to the more telling bits of exposition the
various suspects and victims receive. There's a fascinating dynamic
between him and his boss, Tomas, whose live and let live
attitude sometimes seems to take on a more sinister connotation, and
sometimes seems almost comic: casting him in the film version is an
amusing exercise.
In some ways, because
Ari Thor 'solves' both deaths, but doesn't get a full measure of
justice, this becomes the story of his adjustment to a world much
different from the 'big city' of Reykjavik; an adjustment which was
at the heart of Indridason's Erlendur series too. The novel's end leaves
that story unfinished....
Snow Blind by Ragnar
Jonasson
translated by Quentin
Bates
Orenda Books £8.99
ISBN 9781910633038
No comments :
Post a Comment