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There are no punishments and no rewards, there are only consequences. – Karin Alvtegen Karin Alvtegen is described rather blandly in Wikipedia as a “crime writer” whose “psychological thrillers are generally set in Sweden.” It’s not an entirely inaccurate description but it also does her a disservice. I think we have a much better writer here than just a crime writer. Of course there are good and bad writers engaged at every level but as I worked my way through this novel I found two names creeping into my thoughts, neither of whom would readily jump to your mind when discussing crime fiction: Harold Pinter and John Fowles, two literary giants in their own chosen fields. And the two works that came to mind were, obviously, Pinter’s play, Betrayal, and Fowles’ first novel, The Collector. Betrayal is not the first novel by Alvtegen that I’ve been exposed to. Of the five currently available in English I’ve read and reviewed Shadow and Missing in that order – I’ve yet to tackle Guilt and Shame – and I gave them perfectly respectable reviews but I wasn’t especially hankering to read another so much so that when my little collection of review copies started to mount up I considered passing on it and moving onto weightier stuff but I’m rather glad I didn’t now because this was a different beast entirely. For starters the ‘crime’ under the microscope here is not murder and it is rare and refreshing for a crime novelist to look at some of the other crimes if betrayal can even be classified as a full-bodied crime; certainly most European countries have decriminalised adultery. That doesn’t mean this book is without any felony – there are several including assault, invasion of privacy, defamation, illegal entry – but the word ‘crime’ itself only appears three times and even there it’s talking about how betrayal is not a crime. Betrayal was nominated for the Glass Key Award for the best Nordic crime novel in 2004 and has since become a bestseller across Europe but what this book does to good effect is use the format of the crime novel to attempt to dissect the nature of betrayal. The Collector would not be considered a crime novel but it most certainly is and if this book were marketed differently it could slip onto the contemporary fiction shelves and hold its own, but I doubt it would have been read by a fraction of the people who have read it otherwise. Let’s look at our suspects and victims, the betrayers and the betrayed, if, indeed, they can be separated so easily. There are two strands to this book that gradually become intertwined: in the opening two chapters we are introduced to Eva Wirenström-Berg and her husband Henrick, a stay-at-home writer; they have been married for fifteen years, live in a nice house in Stockholm and have a six-year old son, Axel. The next chapter we get to meet Jonas, a twenty-five-year-old postman, who is sitting in a private room in a hospital where his girlfriend, Anna, has been lying in a coma for two years and five months following a mysterious swimming accident. None of the couples have ever met and know nothing about each other’s existences. Things are not going well with the married couple. Jonas, on the other hand, is devoted to Anna – he even obtains permission to spend one night a week with her – but she’s not recovering and it looks like it will only be a matter of time before he loses her completely. It’s not hard to work out the first betrayal. It’s the classic one: husband looks for a bit on the side because his wife isn’t fun anymore. Even before Eva corroborates what she suspects, it’s obvious. Eva, predictably, never sees it coming. She’s too preoccupied with her own job, running the house and taking care of their boy with super efficiency: Always so fast. Everything finished and ready before he even managed to see that it needed to be done. Always ready to solve every problem, even those that were none of her concern, before he even had a chance to think about it. Like an impatient steam locomotive she charged ahead, trying to make everything right. But it was not possible to fix everything. The more he tried to demonstrate how distant he felt, the more zealously she made sure it wouldn’t be noticed. And with each day that passed he had grown more conscious that it really didn’t matter what he did. She didn’t need him anymore

Maybe she never had. He was merely something that had been hooked onto the locomotive for the journey. Half of Henrick’s life has gone – pfft! – and the final leg is not shaping up the way he might have hoped. He’s not simply being a doom monger though. His fears are grounded in the real world. He looks at his parents’ marriage and shudders: They sat there in Katrineholm in their house that was all paid off. Everything finished and settled. One evening after another, side by side in their two well-used TV recliners. All conversation had long since stopped. All consideration, all expectation, all respect, everything had slowly but surely died a natural death years ago from lack of nourishment. They only thing that was left was a mutual reproach for all they had missed, all that had been lost to them. When he thinks about them he never uses the word ‘betrayal’ but he’s thinking it and the noteworthy thing is that they have both let down the other. No doubt they made plans when they were younger, talked about taking trips – Katrineholm is at the junction of two major rail routes (so easy just to jump on a train) – or they might have bought a summer cabin and yet they can’t even be bothered to get in their car and drive the hundred kilometres to Stockholm (about 62 miles) to visit their grandson on his birthday. That is the future Henrick sees for him and his wife. When pressed by his wife he admits to having felt this way for about a year, not that he’s especially forthcoming, and the only explanation he can give for his cooling off towards her is: We don’t have fun anymore

What telephone plan to sign up with, which electrical company would be more advantageous, where to invest the pension money, which school was the best, which family doctor, the lowest interest on the mortgage. And they all affected her little world: what was best and most beneficial for her and her family. Endless decisions to make, and you still never knew if you had made the right ones. One thing she is not thinking about is having an affair, but the neither is Jonas. Jonas is also not having fun. He also had expectations, had made plans. Now he only has wants: He wanted only one thing. Only one. That she would wake up and touch him. Take hold of him. And afterwards she would hold him tight and tell him that he never had to be alone again. That he didn’t have to be afraid anymore

It came sneaking up, lying in wait for him, at first only as a diffuse need to create symmetry and restore balance. And later, when the gravity of her injuries had become more and more obvious, the pressure to perform the complicated rituals had intensified to an inescapable compulsion. The only way to neutralise the threat was to give in. If he didn’t obey the impulses properly, something horrible would happen. What, he didn’t know, only that the fear and pain grew intolerable if he tried to fight back. Jonas has Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). The concept of neutralisation is a common one with sufferers although it takes many forms. They may, for instance, respond by thinking “good thoughts”, asking for reassurance from others or washing their hands: When the neutralising strategy reduces the anxiety level of the individual it is reinforcing: it is more likely to be repeated in the future. The act is repeated so often that it becomes an obsession or compulsion. When the neutralising strategy seems effective it confirms the idea that the intrusive thought was dangerous or morally reprehensible and in need of elimination. This is the behavioural aspect of the disorder. – Keiron Walsh, ‘Obsessive Compulsive Disorder’, A-Level Psychology Jonas is a hand washer but he also believes that touching things again can neutralise things: He looked at the door handle that he had just touched. Damn it. He touched it again to neutralise it, but that didn’t help. Jonas is also a betrayer. He was not unfaithful to Anna, no, he betrayed his mother. He was thirteen years when it started: Just tell her I have to work late tonight. Damn it, Jonas, you know that this woman . . . well, shit, she gives a hell of a good ride. Thirteen years old and his father’s loyal conspirator. The truth, whatever and wherever it was, had to be kept secret from his mother at all costs. To protect her. Year in and year out. In time, as is always the case, the mother finds out and she rightly recognises that her husband is not alone is his duplicity. She never speaks to her son from that day on until his eighteenth birthday: Nine words his mother had said to him after the betrayal was revealed. Nine words. […] I don’t want you to live here anymore

U tags

I tags

There are no punishments and no rewards, there are only consequences. – Karin Alvtegen

just

Betrayal

The Collector

Shadow

Missing

Guilt

Shame

if

any

not

When he thinks about them he never uses the word ‘betrayal’ but he’s thinking it and the noteworthy thing is that they have both

reinforcing

Just tell her I have to work late tonight. Damn it, Jonas, you know that this woman . . . well, shit, she gives a hell of a good ride.

I don’t want you to live here anymore.

Okay, okay, okay. So, has she woken up and told him she was unfaithful? No. Has he encountered someone from her past who has knowledge of some dalliance? No, not that either. Nothing has changed apart from a meeting with the psychologist: I’m here to help you, even if it doesn’t feel that way. Anna is dying and you must accept that. And you must accept that it’s not your fault, that you did the best you could. No one can ask any more of a person. For some reason this sends Jonas over the edge. He becomes furious with the psychologist. She assumes it is because he refuses to accept the inevitable but that’s not it: Something burst inside him. He turned his head and looked at Anna. She betrayed him. She lay there so innocent in her unconsciousness, but she had apparently not forgotten how to betray him. Once again she intended to leave him, alone. After all he had done for her. Damn it. He couldn’t trust her even now. Even now she wouldn’t do as he wished. Things could have gone worse than they do. At least Eva has the sense to give a false name and so when Jonas wakes up in the morning all he knows is that he has slept with a woman called ‘Linda’ and nothing more. And, in the real world, that’s probably where the two strands would have headed off in their own directions and never met again. But that’s not what happens here. Now anyone who has read a goodly number of Ruth Rendells will not be overly surprised by how the plot pans out and the last two-thirds of the book don’t hold any tremendous surprises but what kept my interest is that none of the protagonists are any less than fully-fledged characters, not a fleck of cardboard anywhere in sight. Everyone behaves in a believable way based on what they know or – more importantly – what they surmise: not all clues lead to the evidence one might expect. Betrayals of all kinds are explored, both real and imaginary and don’t jump to the conclusion that it’s Jonas that gets it wrong; that would be too easy – yes, blame the crazy guy – because they’re all inside emotional straightjackets. Let me illustrate: Jonas likes to count things – pages, steps, distances – but there is an instance where all three main players make the same observation. With Jonas, it’s nine words (“I don’t want you to live here anymore

Karin Alvtegen-Lundberg was born on June 8th, 1965 in Huskvarna, Sweden. In addition to writing novels – Missing

I've read that there are two types of literature: one that takes the reader away from the mundanities of everyday life on a journey of imagination; the other that probes the complexities of human psyche and experience in such a deep way that it makes the reader view his or her own life in a different way. I think there might be a more important reason: validation. We all think we're alone, that no one understands us, and in many ways that is true, we are all one of those islands Donne talked about. In the film, Shadowlands

Big Brother

It’s not a matter of copying – I never changed my mode of dressing to imitate pop stars – so much as looking for characters who were going through the same kind of stuff as I was and reacting in a similar fashion. Probably the first of these would be Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar

Billy Liar on the Moon

did

sort of

Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War

Billy Liar

appreciation

gratitude.

Left

(Note to self: too many uses of the word ‘probably’ – fix that.)

need

would become dependent on the praise of others. I think when an artist becomes too concerned about pleasing his fans he’s done for. Dylan went electric and that was that: some bitched and ditched his LPs, others moaned but were eventually won round; as for the rest they would probably have followed him to hell and back no matter what he did. How many times do you need to get your parking validated? Every time you park the car? Does that mean that every time I write a poem I’m looking for it to be validated? Well I show my wife everything I write and I pay attention to her criticisms which are rare but if I really believed in a piece of writing no one would make me change a word. Is this a valid way to behave? I believe so. Because someone out there will read what I’ve written one day and they will connect with it, it will be the validation that someone needed to keep being who they are. The Internet provides all of with an opportunity to provide and receive instant validation. And all it takes is one person. Imagine getting up on a podium and delivering a speech and while you’re trying your best they’re throwing rotten fruit at you and jeering but out of sheer willpower you have your say and staged off before they run out of fruit and start looking for more substantial things to throw. You clean yourself off in the loo and wait for the crowd to disperse in case someone suggests a lynching but as you slink from the shadows and try to make it to your car a stranger approaches and says, “Excuse me. I’d just like to say how much I appreciated what you had to say today.” Can you imagine how you would feel? That it was all

as if he was writing to me

You can’t live if you can’t accept what you are, and you can’t accept what you are if you can’t say what you do. The power of naming, as old as Adam. – Glen Duncan,

The Wolf Man. A

Werewolf of London

The Wolf Man

Dracula

The Gates

An American Werewolf in London

Underworld

House of Dracula

Twilight

True Blood

The Radleys

they’ve become. A film like Ginger Snaps

wulf

Being Human

has

human

stay

Werewolves get to have sex and we don’t.

were

life

maaah!

America’s Next Top Model

lust

Hope

Love Remains

Weathercock

SFX

[I]t’s perhaps no coincidence that Jake’s surname recalls Charles Marlowe, Joseph Conrad’s narrator in Heart Of Darkness

love

Jane Eyre

That

read

Wolfen

The Howling

Bad Moon

The Company of Wolves

I was a Teenage Werewolf

Wolf

Blood and Chocolate, An American Werewolf in Paris

Silver Bullet

Teen Wolf

The Last Werewolf

The Independent

The Book Show

*** Glen Duncan was born in Bolton in 1965. His family is Anglo-Indian and he’s the only one of his three siblings to not be born in India. (There’s an interesting article by him in The New York Times

His first novel, Hope

I, Lucifer

Death of an Ordinary Man

The Bloodstone Papers

A Day and A Night and A Day

The Last Werewolf.

Times Literary Supplement

The Guardian

,

The Telegraph

LIFE

The same two words, albeit in reverse order, sum it all up:

Home nursing

Nursing home

Dictionary of Me

The Complete Knowledge of Sally Fry

my

had

a

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

that

Okay, here’s the thing. She gets it all wrong. I started at the beginning – luckily her name begins with an A and so ‘Amy’ gets to be the first entry – but after a wee bit I started to look up words and the first one I went for was ‘nice.’ Regular readers of this blog will probably realise that the two adjectives I employ the most are ‘nice’ and ‘interesting’ but Amy didn’t have an entry for ‘nice.’ She did have this one: NICE WORDS Soap

pond

I

Okay

So tell me: What’s infinity, even or odd?

Mom, infinity is an 8 on its side, so it is an even number.

If you think this book might feel a bit like Erma Bombeck then you’re probably not that far off the mark. The clue is in the title and in the book’s foreword: I was not abused, abandoned, or locked up as a child. My parents were not alcoholics, nor were they ever divorced or dead. We did not live in poverty, or in misery, or in an exotic country. I am not a misunderstood genius, a former child celebrity, or the child of a celebrity. I am not a drug addict, sex addict, food addict, or recovered anything. If I indeed had a past life, I have no recollection of who I was. I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story. Think about it. That’s most people. And, like most people, Amy Krouse Rosenthal reads books although not so many write them. Anyway this is part of what she wrote in her book under ‘book’: BOOK To get a true sense of [a] book, I have to spend a minute inside. I’ll glance at the first couple of pages, then flip to the middle, see if the language matches me somehow. It’s like dating, only with sentences. Some sentences, no matter how well-dressed or nice, just don’t do it for me. Others I click with instantly. It could be something as simple yet weirdly potent as a single word choice (tangerine). We’re meant to be, that sentence and me. And when it happens, you just know. I knew

a, e, g,

s

k, v,

x

See also:

y.

y

I was also touched by the two police artist’s sketches of her that are in the book, one where her father provided the artist with the description and the second where her husband did. These appear under the entry for ‘identity’: I loved her entry for ‘love’: LOVE If you really love someone, you want to know what they ate for lunch or dinner without you. Hi, sweetie, how was your day, what did you have for lunch?

How was your trip, did the meeting go well, what did you do for dinner?

how was the party, how was the restaurant beforehand?

Encyclopædia Britannica

The Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Encyclopædia Galactica

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

say

Amy Krouse Rosenthal is an author of adult and children’s books. She is the host of the radio show Writers’ Block Party

Cookies

Duck! Rabbit!

The OK Book

Spoon

The Wonder Book

The Beckoning of Lovely

The Mother’s Guide to the Meaning of Life

Post Partum Cards: A Handy Set of Postcards for New, Barely Conscious Moms

The New York Times

Hallmark Magazine

Parenting

O: The Oprah Magazine

McSweeney's

[W]hat one learns when young haunts one longest – AS Byatt, 1991 lecture

Possession

Ragnarök.

The Annotated Brothers Grimm

Asgard and the Gods

It is no wonder that when Canongate offered her the opportunity to be a part of their Myth Series, which has already featured reimaginings by the likes of Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman, she jumped at the opportunity, and her myth of choice: Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

Twilight of the Gods

Götterdämmerung

The Ring of the Nibelung

So, thanks to the likes of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, many of the players were familiar to me – Odin, Thor, Loki, Balder, Frigga, Tyr, Vidar and others (to give them their Marvel names) – but, as I said, I’d never actually read any versions of the actual legends and to be honest I didn’t really expect to do so this time either except to research this article – I imagined that Byatt would do the same of most of her fellow authors who have tackled the myths for Canongate or those who updated The Mabinogion

Sheffield is a dramatic city, built, like Rome, on seven hills. I was born there in 1939, on the eve of war, and our family was evacuated when I was only months old. … We lived in a semidetached Edwardian house with a cellar and an attic, in a neighbourhood called Nether Edge, only a couple of miles from the city centre. Nether Edge was indeed an edge: Sheffield is full of edges. … We didn’t move far. My father flew off with the RAF, and the rest of us spent the war years in another part of South Yorkshire, in a council house in Pontefract, a town famous not for heavy industry but for Liquorice Allsorts and Pontefract Cakes.[5] But back to the fiction. At some point, when she was a little older, her mother gives – or more than likely ‘lends’ – Byatt said in that same BBC interview – a book, “a solid volume, bound in green, and with an intriguing, rushing image on the cover, of Odin’s Wild Hunt on horseback tearing through a clouded sky amid jagged bolts of lightning, watched from the entrance to a dark underground cavern, by a dwarf in a cap, looking alarmed.” It was a book her – the thin girl’s and Byatt’s – mother had used “as a crib for exams in Old Icelandic and Ancient Norse.” That book was Asgard and the Gods

Sugar and Other Stories

Ragnarok

this

On Histories and Stories

I am a writer, and I have always seen myself primarily as a writer, though I taught English and American Literature full-time in University College London between 1972 and 1984, and have taught literature at various times to adult classes and to art students. I have never taught ‘creative writing’. I think I see teaching good reading as the best way of encouraging, and making possible, good writing.[11] As a child Byatt was severely handicapped by asthma, something I can relate to. If this is explicitly mentioned in Ragnarok

semi

Asgard and the Gods,

There are other things that are omitted from the narrative – her sister, significantly, for those who want to make more of the feud the press likes to talk about, (as recently as 13 July 2011 Margaret tells The Telegraph

The Peppered Moth

and

Pools formed in the pits where the branches forked; moss sprouted; bright tree-frogs swam in the pools, laid delicate eggs and gulped in jerking and spiralling wormlings. Birds sang at the twigs' ends and built nests of all kinds - clay cup, hairy bag, soft hay-lined bowl, hidden in holes in the bark. All over its surface the tree was scraped and scavenged, bored and gnawed, minced and mashed. or this bit talking about Loki’s daughter, Jörmungandr, who takes the form of a giant snake: She played a game of her own in lonely bays. She swam out to the smooth bulk of water, lay along the wave and rode in with it, muscles slack, floating like flotsam and jetsam. When the waves rose in a crest, the snake rose with it, liquid eyes glittering like the coins of sunlight on the surface, arching herself to swoop down with the white water full of air and light until snake and wave hissed on the sand together and rolled idle. or this section where Odin’s world and the real world blur: Odin was the god of the Wild Hunt. Or of the Raging Host. They rode out through the skies, horses and hounds, hunters and spectral armed men. They never tired and never halted; the horns howled on the wind, the hooves beat, they swirled in dangerous wheeling flocks like monstrous starlings. Odin’s horse, Sleipnir, had eight legs: his gallop was thundering. At night, in her blacked-out bedroom, the thin child heard sounds in the sky, a distant whine, a churning of propellers, thunder hanging overhead and then going past. You could open the book anywhere and find other eminently quotable passages and that’s basically what I did to find those three. The bottom line, though, is, if you have absolutely no interest in myths, this short book will feel like a long read and the best writing in the world wouldn’t be able to save it, but if you are interested or at least open to the possibility you might be pleasantly surprised. I was. The book ends with a short essay, ‘Thoughts on Myths’ which was reprinted in full in The Guardian

sylphs, undines

gnomes.”–

The Sunday Times

A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination

A.S. Byatt: Essays on the Short Fiction

The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories

Fabulous Orients: Fictions Of the East in England, 1662-1785

On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays

The God I Want

Theme Parks, Rainforests And Sprouting Wastelands: European essays on theory and performance in contemporary British fiction

4th July

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