The Policeman in the Ill-Fitting Uniform; or, How to write crime fiction after Utøya
This article is the second in a series guest edited by Bruce Robbins. Some years into the fashion, Nordic noir remains something of a mystery. Known for its pronounced left-wing tendencies and an uncompromisingly critical view of the Scandinavian welfare state, the genre has won huge audiences in a global climate of neoliberalism and among fiction, film, and television audiences abroad that do not seem to share the social and political assumptions of the region. But perhaps we have been too hasty in identifying those assumptions and their meaning in the countries of origin. The essays gathered here, from inside and outside Scandinavia, try to consider this enormously successful cultural export with fresh eyes, reflecting anew on why Nordic noir should have emerged where and when it did and on the gender and eco-political concerns as well as the concern with the welfare state that have animated its cross-cultural creativity.
In the opening scene of Anne Holt's crime novel, Skyggedød (2012; What the Dark Clouds Hide), the fifth and final instalment in the series about forensic psychologist and ex-FBI profiler Inger Johanne Vik and her husband detective Yngvar Stubø, Inger Johanne is faced with a "macabre tableau".1 She arrives at her school friends' Ellen and Jon's home in the affluent Oslo neighbourhood of Grefsen to help prepare for a class reunion, but instead she finds Ellen grief-stricken in the sofa, screaming with agony and clutching her lifeless eight-year-old boy, Sander, in her arms. Distressed, the father Jon mutters frantically to himself: "it's all my fault ... I should have taken better care." It appears to Inger Johanne that a terrible, unforeseen accident has befallen this seemingly well-functioning, affluent and idyllic family. Sander, a child we learn has a history of erratic behaviour and an ADHD diagnosis, must simply have fallen from the stepladder, which appears strangely out of place in the living room festooned with wild flowers for the evening's party.
It is a scene of utter despair and confusion - a pastoral and social idyll disturbed. In her bewildered state, Inger Johanne senses trembling under her feet as if from a distant earth quake. She desperately tries to reach the police for help, but is cut off. Then she sees, out of the villa's panorama windows, a column of smoke rising above the city centre. It is July 22 2011, and the family tragedy is from then on cast in the shadow of an unfolding Norwegian tragedy: the right-wing extremist Anders Breivik's attacks on the government quarters in Oslo and his cold-blooded mass murder of 69 young Social Democrats gathered on the island of Utøya for their yearly summer camp.
Throughout the crime novel the national tragedy remains a distant tremor. The two catastrophes seem only connected by coincidence. However, the opening scene hints at the possibility that the family tragedy may be read as a small-scale model of the larger national tragedy, which, in 2012 when the novel was first published in Norway, still demanded a great deal of collective soul searching. We are led to suspect that the novel will investigate how an affluent and presumably idyllic family, and by extension a small wealthy welfare state, could have allowed such catastrophes to happen. In other words, if both incidents are not to be blamed on mental disorders or monstrous individuals alone, who should have taken better care to avoid the deaths of innocent children on that fatal day?
A connection between the horrific yet pastoral tableau depicted in Holt's novel and the larger national catastrophe is clearer if we take a detour to another Norwegian crime writer's response to the attacks and to the common trope of the fallen welfare state in Scandinavian crime writing. A few days after the attacks Jo Nesbø wrote: "until Friday, we thought of our country as a virgin - unsullied by the ills of society."2 His now "foreign" country to which "no road leads back" was the country of his idyllic childhood: the country of the affluent, egalitarian, safe and trusting post-war welfare society.
The trope is a familiar one to readers of Scandinavian crime fiction: an idealised harmonious welfare society in the process of succumbing to globalising forces and moral decay. Think Henning Mankell's Swedish "every-man" detective Kurt Wallander, whose body and mind gradually deteriorate throughout the 1990s in step with the corrosion of his Swedish welfare utopia due to border-crossing crime and internal moral corruption.
In Mankell's novels as in Nesbø's account of a post-22/7 Norway as a "sullied virgin," the fallen welfare state produces nostalgia for a time to which there is no return. "We live," Wallander says in Faceless Killers (1991), "as if we were in mourning for a lost paradise ... but those days have irretrievably vanished, and nor is it certain that they were as idyllic as we remember them."3
Such reflexive welfare nostalgia has become a commonplace in Scandinavian crime fiction trading on anxieties shared by the political right and left alike.4 On the left the inherent weaknesses of the fundamentally capitalist welfare state are seen as exposed by its inability to counter racism and foster real solidarity with disenfranchised groups; to the right the Social-Democratic welfare state has been held responsible for the erosion of social and cultural homogeneity by, for instance, inviting immigrants and asylum seekers to share in the welfare.
In Norway the mass murder was committed by a self-styled vigilante who directed his attacks at the centre-left government and the heart of the Social-Democratic party, which he blamed for its promotion of a multicultural and feminised society. The much-praised communal response led by then Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg was to counter fear and violence with togetherness and tolerance. However, the continuing portrayal in the media of Breivik as a lone monstrous fanatic and the ascent of the neoliberal Progress Party to political power in 2013 have been seen on the left as precluding any real examination of more mainstream prejudices that may have helped shape Breivik's distorted worldview.5 The terror attacks demonstrated, in the words of Norwegian Aslak Sire Myhre, that "the heart of darkness lies buried deep within ourselves."6
However, a series of books have recently emphasised the shortcomings of the Norwegian welfare state in failing to prevent the formation of a fanatic mass murderer. In Aage Borchgrevink's A Norwegian Tragedy, Breivik is depicted as "the consumer society's prodigal son, a loser in the capitalist battleground."7 However, the most important lesson to be drawn from the tragedy, according to Borchgrevink, is about child welfare and family services: "Without knowing where the holes in the safety net of our society are," he insists, "they are difficult to mend".8 Åsne Seierstad's One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway diagnoses Breivik's pathological relationship with his mother and his family's decent down the social ladder in the 1980s when, according to Seierstad, the last Norwegian Prime Minister who believed in state governance of the economy was brought down by the "wind from the Right that blew in over Norway from the US and Britain." The neoliberal welfare state created a situation where a single mother with a difficult child who needed the welfare state was left to her own devices.9
These accounts of the Norwegian tragedy suggest that it extends further back in time than 22/7. They also suggest that the mass murder could have been prevented if only the welfare state had lived up to its ideal of protecting a child against its own family. This may seem a wholly ludicrous assertion viewed from outside Scandinavia, but the argument conforms to the statist individualism so ingrained in the Nordic model of welfare.10 While not to be misunderstood as anti-family, the Nordic welfare state is characterised by the dominance of the state over the family when it comes to guaranteeing social security, individual liberties and freedom. The Norwegian tragedy, then, reveals a range of failures incriminating an already fallen welfare state, and, it is suggested, we proceed at our peril with minimizing the role of the welfare state as the protector of neglected children.
Returning to Skyggedød, we may surmise that the interrupted family idyll has wider social implications and that it takes a disruption of some magnitude to lay bare the systemic failures. Breivik's sinister impersonation of a policeman (the hitherto trusted representative of the state) roaming Utøya in a homemade uniform worn in order to get close to his victims, has in the novel a counterpart in the rookie policeman, Henrik Holme. He is on several occasions described as wearing an ill-fitting uniform. While the regular police are overpowered by the national tragedy, Holme has not yet grown into his uniform and is, counter-intuitively, the ideal state representative to take over where the welfare state has failed in the past.
Holme's investigation into Sander's death is haphazard and amateurish. He conducts the investigation against the will of his superiors with the conviction that however accidental Sander's death may seem - however unlikely it may be that a prosperous family could have committed foul play - a proper investigation, by the book, needs to be carried out. He is a policeman who makes up for what he might be lacking in experience with his conviction of proper unprejudiced and incorruptible police work, which makes him, according to a saying ascribed to Jon's late father of questionable moral habitus, the most dangerous animal in the forest.
The usual detectives in Holt's series, Inger Johanne and Yngvar, are off the case for most of this novel. Inger Johanne will not allow herself to believe that her grieving friends could have anything to do with Sander's death even if she senses that something is not quite as it should be. All too soon any trace of Sander is erased from the family home and Jon has gone straight back to work leaving Ellen at home alone with her grief. However, Inger Johanne's thoughts return again and again to Ellen's dramatic change of character: from the successful, desirable and independent woman with her own dental practice she once knew, Ellen has become a stereotypical neurotic suburban housewife following her marriage to Jon.
Holme's investigation into Sander's case suggests a history of child abuse. His unorthodox interviews reveal that Sander was often bruised and had broken limbs without anyone suspecting foul play. His reading of other cases of violence against children leads him to suspect that the father should be his prime suspect. Jon is furthermore incriminated morally by being under investigation for insider trading as a partner in the public-relations agency CommuniCare - a name it recently took (ironically) to demonstrate its modern corporate ethics and care for the community. The name is an apt metaphor for the neoliberal forces undermining the universalistic welfare state (the company mostly cares for former politicians and celebrities). Additionally, the fact that Jon is revealed not to be Sander's biological father leads the grandmother to fear that he might be unjustly incriminated since recent media interest in cases of child abuse have focused on violent stepfathers.11 Jon is portrayed as a thoroughly immoral person and un-caring father: the representative of dubious corporate care, a white-collar criminal, and a child molester. The case seems perfectly clear, and Holt obviously relies on our preconception of masculine violence and illicit corporate care as detrimental to the wellbeing of the most vulnerable. The reader is here wholly on the side of Holme.
Holme's interviews with Sander's teachers seem finally to seal the case against Jon. Sander's regular teacher brushes away any suggestion of abuse; however, the case against Jon is strengthened by the assistant teacher who had for some time been suspicious. She also claims that the regular teacher would never admit to any suspicion of wrongdoing on the part of the family as she is a strong believer in the Social-Democratic welfare system in which no such thing could possibly occur in a well-functioning family. She suggests that the regular teacher, as a typical permissive liberal, would also claim that the terrorist was a product of an unthinkable failure in the social system and the result of tolerated racism. Her view is that evil individuals do exist, and she suspects this is the case with Jon. Mary Evans has defined a similar opposition of views as signifying a crucial difference between crime writing in Europe and the United States, "the latter context being one where the thesis of the 'bad' individual is more than likely to be offered as an explanation for criminal and indeed murderous behaviour."12
In the positions of the two school teachers, Holt, however, opposes two equally erroneous perceptions. The regular teacher, a state employee, appears blinded by the utopianism of the welfare state, which makes her unwilling to see and accept its possible flaws; Holme is angered by the fact that she does not seem to regret that Sander was abused, but rather that she might have revealed something incriminating the social system. Sander's assistant teacher, on the other hand, who we learn was paid for by Jon and Ellen (itself an expression of the caving of the universal welfare state to neoliberal forces), is unwilling to consider any extenuating circumstances and stands firm on a neoliberal belief in individual responsibility. In Holt's novel both positions prove misguided, as both fail to understand the real cause of Sander's death. It was not the father but the mother who abused and finally killed Sander. What Jon had meant by his rambling about his failure to care was that he failed to protect Sander against his own mother's fatal abuse.
Though Inger Johanne, in a final scene recalling a classic Agatha Christie novel, gathers the extended family and points out the guilty parties, Holt's novel is not a classic whodunit. While Ellen is ultimately the responsible individual, Inger Johanne has herself, just like Jon, the family, and social institutions, been a passive by-stander to an enfolding family tragedy, blinded by the deceptive idyllic surface, and to some degree she too has been a reluctant detective and a failed profiler.
In recalling Ellen's behavioural changes following her marriage, giving up her career, and going through successive miscarriages, she succeeds in presenting the material for what could be read as an Ibsenesque Doll's House story for the late welfare society. It is, as in Ibsen's famous play, a classic bourgeois family story with its secrets and silences and an obsession with social respectability. It is also in other ways a depiction of an anachronistic family belonging more firmly to the 1950s than to a modern Nordic welfare state in which more than 80% of Norwegian mothers with small children are employed.13 Ellen gave up her career as a self-employed dentist when she married Jon, and Inger Johanne suspects that her retreat into a secluded life as a housewife played at least a part in her change of personality making her unable to care for a physically and socially demanding child.
Ellen, more importantly, also shares with Nora a dark secret that she has kept from her husband. After several failed pregnancies, Ellen had taken it upon herself without Jon's knowledge to go through with an assisted conception in a Copenhagen clinic, where, unlike in Norway, such treatment was allowed without a husband's consent.14 Just as Nora could not obtain a loan without her husband's consent in Ibsen's day, forcing her to commit the crime of forgery, Ellen's "crime" is that she chose assisted conception without her husband's consent.
In the tradition of Nordic Naturalism the secret of the past has come to haunt the present, and it is still in Holt's novel the unequal bonds of marriage in terms of gender that sow the seeds of the family's destruction. However, there is a twenty-first century twist. Ellen is no Nora. She has no door to slam but instead reacts violently and fatally towards her own child. Where Nora had to choose her own freedom from the encroaching walls of her doll's house at a time when the welfare state did not guarantee the individual's autonomy, Ellen's twenty-first century pathology must be seen in the context of a failed system of care: Jon's neoliberal care for the symptoms rather than their structural causes; his care for Sander rather than for Ellen.
Skyggedød is an example of Scandinavian crime writing exploring what Evans has described as "what happens to social relationships in an age of prosperity," or, we may add, what happens to care and responsibility in a Nordic welfare state turned neoliberal. While the connection between the family tragedy and the national catastrophe is, perhaps, kept in the shadows of the narrative, the societal vacuum left by the attacks, the broken social trust so monstrously figured in the fake policeman on Utøya, may still enable a new policeman to grow into his ill-fitting uniform and restore social trust for those who need it the most.
Dr Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen is Senior Lecturer in Scandinavian Literature at UCL. He has edited books on world literature and Nordic book history and published articles on Henry James, Hans Christian Andersen, and the cultures of Nordic welfare societies. He is currently writing a monograph on Scandinavian Crime Fiction to be published with Bloomsbury Press.
ALSO IN THIS SERIES:
Bruce Robbins, "The Detective is Suspended: Nordic Noir and the Welfare State"
Anne-Marie Mai, "Eco-Crime: Scandinavian Literature Takes on the Environmental Crisis."
Yvonne Leffler, "Lisbeth Salander as Pippi Longstocking."
Peter Simonsen, "'A Shadow Had Descended': Alzheimer's in Henning Mankell's The Troubled Man."
- Anne Holt, Skyggedød. Oslo: Piratforlaget, 2012. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.[⤒]
- Jo Nesbø's article was printed in both The New York Times and The Guardian. Jo Nesbø, "The Past is a Foreign Country." The New York Times, July 26, 2012.[⤒]
- Henning Mankell, Faceless Killers. Transl. by Steven T. Murray. London: Vintage, 2011. pp. 246-47.[⤒]
- See Michael Tapper's Swedish Cops (Bristol: Intellect, 2014) for a discussion of how Swedish police procedurals from Sjöwall and Wahlöö to Henning Mankell was initially written by left-leaning writers but their critique of the Swedish welfare state made them equally popular among readers and critics on the right.[⤒]
- Charlotte McDonald-Gibson, "Norway's Far Right May Come to Power Despite Memory of Anders Breivik's Killing Spree." Time, Aug. 19, 2013.[⤒]
- Aslak Sira Myhre, "Norway attacks: Norway's tragedy must shake Europe into acting on extremism." The Guardian, July 24, 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jul/24/norway-tragedy-extremism-europe.[⤒]
- Aage Borchgrevink, A Norwegian Tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and the Massacre on Utøya. Transl. by Guy Puzey. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. p. 13.[⤒]
- ibid, viii.[⤒]
- Åsne Seierstad, One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway. Transl. by Sarah Death. London: Virago, 2015.[⤒]
- For a discussion of the Nordic welfare state as promoting statist individualism, see Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, "Pippi Longstocking: The Autonomous Child and the Moral Logic of the Swedish Welfare State," in Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olof Wallenstein, eds. Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State. London: Black Dog, 2010.[⤒]
- In the afterword to the novel, Anne Holt writes that it is based on a well-known case of child abuse in Norway.[⤒]
- Mary Evans, Imagination of Evil: Detective Fiction and the Modern World. New York and London: Continuum, 2009. p. 146.[⤒]
- Sigbjørn Johnsen, "Women in work: The Norwegian experience." OECD Observer, No 293, Nov. 2012, http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/3898/Women_in_work:_The_Norwegian_experience.html#sthash.Jr3lT5Jr.dpuf.[⤒]
- While the Nordic welfare states share many characteristics in Norway the family has traditionally been supported more than in the other states as a provider of social care. However, a more general shift in Nordic welfare policies towards marketization of social services has demanded a "stronger integration of informal care of family members into the entire system of services" in all of the Nordic countries to different degrees. See Aila-Leena Matthies, ed. Nordic civic society organisations and the future of welfare services: A model for Europe? Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2006.[⤒]