Annika's back! Red Wolf, Liza Marklund

Gripping crime fiction, set in Sweden and featuring an intrepid, heart-on-her sleeve reporter. What could be better than the return of Liza Marklund's Annika Bengtzon? Lots of material for Scoop! Journalists in Fiction (including a fairly serious ethical lapse by Annika), interesting politics - the plot is driven by a Maoist cell who blew up an air force fighter in plausible act of domestic terrorism - but also some engaging glimpses of the real Sweden.

Marklund grew up in Norrbotten, in a small village called Pålmark, near Luleå:

She glanced up: Skurholmen left, Hertsön straight on, Svartostaden right. She caught sight of another sign - Frasse's Hamburgers - and felt her blood sugar plummet. When the lights turned green she swung off the road, parked by the petrol station and went in. She bought a cheeseburger with onions and ate it ravenously, taking in her surroundings: the smell of frying, the painted fibre glass walls, the plastic rubber plant in the corner, the Star Wars pinball machine, the shabby wood and chrome furniture.

 This is the real Sweden , she thought. Central Stockholm is a little nature reserve. We have no idea what goes on out here in the wilderness.

In an illuminating essay at the end of Red Wolf, Marklund reveals that the locals didn't take kindly to such descriptions. "They said I had portrayed the people as provincial, the landscape as bare and tundra-like, and they definitely didn't agree with me describing the location as cold and dark....

".. in their eyes I had slandered my hometown... but the truth is I love Norbotten and its people."

Although I might skip the cheeseburger, Liza made me more keen than ever to travel North. 

 

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Comments

[Maxine]

Oh what a pity, I did not get that essay in my (proof) copy of the book! (which I think excellent as a genre novel.)
In similar vein, Johan Theroin wrote a photo-essay which is in the end of the (UK) paperback edition of Echoes of the Dead - not in the proof edition I read. I actually bought the paperback for those photos.

[Philip]

It's only five pages. Liza says she had spent several years wondering how to set a novel in the north... to show (its) unique isolation and majestic strangeness. She rates Red Wolf as her best novel at the time.

In the mid-80s she had a two-room apartment oin Lovskatan, Luleå, and all night long trains would rumble past on their way to the imposing, powerful Swedish Steel plant. She would take her young daughter Annika in her pushchair for long walks along the railway line to see it.

The idea for Red Wolf came from when she was editing a newspaper called Metro Weekend, which closed when culture minister Marita Ulskvog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marita_Ulvskog) introduced a regulation which ended the distribution model. Liza wanted to know why she had done something so undemocratic...