Not long ago I heaped high praise on Norwegian author Karin Fossum’s police novel, Don’t Look Back. I’m sorry to say that the book I read as a follow-up, The Water’s Edge
In this book, Inspector Sejer, a police detective in a town in the Oslo area, along with his assistant, Skarre, investigate the rape and murder of a small boy, found dead in a wooded area near a lake.
What makes this novel bad (in my view), and bad in a particularly Norwegian way, is what I might call the author’s considerateness. She’s considerate of everyone—victims, grieving parents, pedophiles, and policemen. She goes into everyone’s thoughts and lets them make their own cases. I approve of this to an extent—I like a villain to be three-dimensional—as long as the author remembers which side he or she is on. Fossum is willing to condemn murder, of course, but when a pedophile character complains that society just hasn’t advanced enough to embrace his particular philia, as it is now embracing homosexuality, no really strong counterargument is given. (Or so it seemed to me.) This injects a genuine creepiness into the whole enterprise.
The problem is aggravated by the fact that Fossum seems to have lost control of her characters. Sejer and Skarre, who came off as well-realized personalities in Don’t Look Back, have gotten all muddled. In their conversations, they seem to switch attitudes toward the legal system back and forth for no discernible reason.
And over all stands the fact (in which the policemen seem to take some pride) that Norway isn’t barbaric like the United States, and compassionately puts all criminals, even child murderers, back on the streets after a maximum of 21 years.
The point of it all would appear to be that we’re all equally guilty, but some of us have better luck than others. I accept that theologically (to an extent; I believe in degrees of guilt and sanctification), but in terms of the law it frankly offends me.
So consider my endorsement of Karin Fossum’s work withdrawn for the time being.
