To Be Read...

The Angelic Camilla Läckberg

The Investigation, by Stanislaw Lem

The Investigation is a crime novel, set in London. Or maybe it isn't.

Certainly it concerns a police inquiry, but whether a crime has been committed is uncertain. And it does appear to be set in foggy London - the police work from Scotland Yard - but it is not necessarily a familar London. 

Lem is best known as a science fiction writer, the author of Solaris, and it is just possible that The Investigation is also science fiction in that it is apparently set in the future, but this is an assumption based on just one clue - it was published in 1959 but a character remarks that moonwalks are now common place. (Then again, the chief inspector has a small portrait of Queen Victoria on his office wall).

If this is a disorientating intro to a review, so be it; The Investigation is a disorientating book. For some reason, corpses in mortuaries are being moved, even dresed in odd clothes . In Shaltham a body turns over in its coffin, others disappear from the mortuary in Spitoon, and the dissecting room in Lovering medical school. A baffled police force calls in the baffling Dr Harvey Sciss. Sciss is  "standoffish, nasty, absolutely devoid of tact," a logician who favours a statistical method of investigation ... almost never before used.

As Lieutenant Gregory says: "In my opinion this is a lousy case. There's something about it... something peculiar. It's not that it's difficult, but there are details that don't fit... not for material reasons but because the only connecting links are all psychological nonsense. It all builds up to nothing and leads to a dead end."

I bought The Investigation after reading an excellent In the Spotlight essay by Margot Kinberg, and we went on to have intersting exchange about what I at first thought were idiosyncracies in Adele Milch's translation, but now think may well be deliberate.

The police travel in an Oldsmobile, others in a Buick. One of the officers has the rank of Lieutenant, and they routinely carry pistols, definitely not the case in my London of 1959. I rather like the way Lem seems to have seized on London for its fog and the resonance of Scotland Yard, without much carrying about realism.

I wasn't as thrilled by The Investigation as Margot, but it is well worth reading. How could you not enjoy a book set in Spitoon, Engender and Dipper, and one of the characters is called Sergeant Calls, which I take to be a JB Priestley joke?

Death and the Penguin, by Andrey Kurkov

Eastern European Challenge - 4/12 Ukraine ****

It is hard to mix menace and humour, but, then again it is hard to be a hack writer in Kiev, who is "unlucky with his muses" and whose only friend is a penguin.

Misha had appeared chez Viktor a year before, when the zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them. Viktor had gone along and returned with a king penguin. Abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely. But Misha had brought his own kind of loneliness and the result was now two complementary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than of amity.

Viktor is trapped in a rut between journalism and meagre scraps of prose. He writes short stories which he tries to sell to newspapers, but even Capital News declines his efforts.

"It might get in on a Friday," says the elderly assistant editor. "You know - for balance. If there's a glut of bad news, readers look for something neutral."

But two days later he is visited at home by the mysterious editor of Capital News. "This is highjly confidential. What we are after is a gifted obituarist, a master of the succenct. Snappy, pithy, way out stuffs the idea."

He is to write, anonymously, "obelisks" for the not yet dead. The trouble is, once he has written about them, highlighting certain prescribed incidents and qualities, they don't stay undead for very long.

The first hint of trouble comes with a visit from Misha (helpfully referred to as Misha-non-penguin), who orders an obituary and is prepared to pay "at least double what the priciest whore charges." Viktor is sucked into a world of gangsters, where life is cheap - and black and white Misha is hired to attend funerals as the ultimate status symbol mourner.

Kurkov talks of writing about life in a country which is younger than most of inhabitants, and the tensions and absurdities of nascent Ukraine lend themselves to the surreal, delivered with ample humour that shrouds something much darker.    

Short interview with Andrey Kurkov

Cycling Theorin's Öland

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For more photos of Öland, visit my OneStepBehind collection

The island of Öland is at the very heart of Johan Theorin's novels. Its geography, its history, its culture and mythology are woven into the narrative on many levels, not least through the character of the wise and humane Gerlof.

Much is made of the storms, the mist and fogs, and relentless winds that show Öland's bleak face, but it is also a beautiful summer island and an absolute delight for a cyclist. We stayed in Borgholm, the only big town on Öland, and by the end of August it already had the feeling of autumn: few visitors, quiet streets (but a huge number of crows blackening the sky as the sun went down).

First stop had to be Djupvik. Theorin's website tells us:

Stenvik is a made up village on the North-West coast of Öland and in real life it's very similar to Djupvik, which is located 20 kilometres north of Borgholm. Both Djupvik and Stenvik have a small shop, campsite, a long stone beach with a jetty and lots of boat houses. North of both Djupvik and Stenvik, there's an old quarry where one of the murders in Echoes from the Dead takes place.

We then visited Marnäs.

In my books, Marnäs, is the central place on north Öland and is located about 10 kilometres northeast of Stenvik on the east coast. In real life, the central place is called Löttorp and it's located much further north. Marnäs church (where Nils Kant is buried in Echoes from the Dead) has a real equivalent, it's called Föra church and it's located about 25 kilometres north of Borgholm. Here, my ölandish ancestor Gerlof Persson is buried - it's from him the family name of Gerlofsson comes and the fictional character Gerlof Davidsson.

Actually, Löttorp is one those pleasant but dull Swedish towns that scarcely make an impression on the visitor. It is not hard to see why Gerlof is desperate to leave his old people's home.

For the record, we cycled 95 miles, saw a snake, hundreds and hundreds of dragonflies, many buzzards, several deer ... and a herd(?) of camels!

August reading and geographical investigation

I appreciate a sense of place in fiction and a highlight of August was cycling tour of Johan Theorin's Öland (pix and post to follow). I also visited Carl Mørck's 'home', in Allerød, Denmark. 

As I was in Sweden, I finally got around to reading Lars Kepler's The Hypnotist, but I don't think I will be rushing out to buy the English translation of The Paganini Contract which is currently topping supermarket checkout displays.

My best read was Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's brilliant, moving novel set against the rise and fall of Biafra (review).

Finally getting to grips with the 2011 Eastern Europe Challenge, I turned to Nobel prize winner Hertha Muller's The Appointment and Andrey Kurkov's Death and the Penguin. Muller proved an easier read than I feared,, a chilling insight into Romania, which I intend to review when I have read Patrick McGuinness's Booker-shortlisted account of the fall of Ceausescu, The Last Hundred Days . Penguin is a surreal, funny, moving an chilling account of lonely hack Viktor whose only friend is Misha, a penguin evicted from the cash-strapped city zoo. Nothing is quite what it seems in Kurkov's Ukraine, and a job as an obituary writer for a newspaper has dangerous consequences.

I turned to Robert Edric's Cradle Song for a rather more literary thriller than some I have read of late. I knew Edric to be a fine writer but the unflinching forensic treatment of unpleasant material  - a paedophile ring and police corruption - was harrowing. One of the key characters is a damaged reporter who runs  a news agency in Hull, interesting for my Scoop! project, which somehow gave me fresh insights into the portrayl of jobs in fiction as I finally got round to reading Intuition, by Allegra Goodman (review).

One of the many reasons why journalists crop up so often in novels is that writers think they know how news works, and they can assume that most readers do too. Intuition is different in that it concerns the lives of rather dry research scientists, and striking a balance between background explanation and narrative flow presents a greater challenge.