Reading crime. Norway v Australia

I’m an erratic reader of crime fiction. Mostly, I like to read it at Christmas – where I suspect it works at sublimating my desire to murder my family. Right now I’m in the middle of a Norwegian crime spree courtesy of Jo Nesbo. What I like about his books is what I like about most detective novels – the character of the sleuth or anti-hero detective. In many ways, the plot is less relevant though I like things to make sense, to add up. I like to think about “whodunit” but this is secondary to the anti-hero’s journey.


In The Leopard, Harry Hole (pronounced ‘Hooler’), the detective, is holed up in Hong Kong at the beginning of the story. He’s in a bad way; bashed up by a triad over gambling debts and a cosy little relationship with an opium pipe. In a way, I wanted him to stay there. Kowloon is vivid in my head, after my recent visit there and it seemed like the perfect destination for a man like Hole – so rife with possibilities. But he is bundled onto a plane by a young Norwegian female detective who inevitably provides some other ‘rife with possibilities’ moments.


The novel actually begins with a torture scene. I was thinking quite a lot of things while reading it. How often this genre starts with this kind of scene – the reader is placed immediately in a scene of great danger – portrayed either exclusively through the panicked eyes of the victim, or the paranoid nastiness of the killer. The scene is often so strange and disconnected from the subsequent narrative, which usually defaults to something way more domestic, that I usually forget that I have read it. It’s never my favourite part of the book, even though I suspect that the writer will have laboured over making it gripping. The opening scene of this novel is graphic and horrible. I felt voyeuristic reading it (as I did with a couple of other violent scenes in the novel). In searching for a novel kind of torture, I think that Nesbo has stretched too far. It’s likely that the whole thriller/detective genre has run out of realistically gruesome new ways to die. One reviewer, Patrick Anderson, wrote of this scene:

“The novel opens with a four-page exercise in horror. A young woman — captive, confused, desperate — is in the grip of a fiendish instrument of torture. As we watch, this device inflicts a terrible death on her. This is a brilliant scene, in its way, but it’s also stunningly sadistic, both in terms of what the killer is doing to the woman and what the author is doing to the reader.”

However much of the novel is devoted to Harry and his struggle with officialdom, with the politics operating between two institutions fighting for jurisdiction over murders in Norway. These, for me, are the most satisfying parts of the novel, just as, in a drama series like The Wire, the political machinations, treachery and power plays provide the gripping underpinning of the drama. The parts that I don’t like are the most dramatic: an avalanche, a volcano, a trip into Colonel Kurtz territory in the darkest Congo. I just don’t buy the melodrama of these events. But I’ll wear them because I’m a Harry fan and I do like a good murder. Anderson, the aforementioned reviewer, was not as kind, but I did enjoy the way he described The Leopard:

“Now, alas, I must report that ‘The Leopard’ is a bloated, near-total disaster. Reading it, I came to imagine myself trapped in a vast, fetid swamp from which I might never emerge."

The reviewer in The Independent, Paul Binding, writes about the ways in which family genes and upbringing become a theme in ‘The Leopard’.

“Nesbø's insight into inherited conflict – of which this novel affords a disturbing double instance – must emanate from his own declared family background. His father fought for the Germans in the Second World War, his mother for the Resistance, this duality being the emotional foundation of The Redbreast.


Nesbø's imaginative preoccupation with division, above all in the individual, makes him a distinctively Norwegian writer. His mentors – Ibsen, Hamsun - have magisterially contrasted the wild with the harmonious, the lover or explorer with the conscientious citizen, the stern moralist with the easy-going hedonist. This distinguishes him from the Swedes Mankell and Larsson, to whom he is so often compared.”

Finally, the other thing that the opening scene made me think about was the absence of torture from Australian detective novels. I need to say that I have not read really widely of the entire genre but within my experience, we kill quite quickly and efficiently for reasons other than straight-out sadism (I’m recalling a quite bizarre and stupid scene from Peter Temple’s otherwise very fine novel The Broken Shore as an exception.) Perhaps I am wrong – happy to be corrected. Our sadistic murderers tend to be more of the Wolf Creek mode – their place is in the outback or Bangalo State Forest. Our detectives are slightly less anti-hero – Cliff Hardy, Murray Whelan, Jack Irish – more Diver Dan than Harry Hole. If Paul Binding is right, that Nesbo is preoccupied with ‘division’ in the individual; that is a trait less obvious in Australian protagonists – who tend to be outsiders, but intact outsiders without the self-destructive aspects of a character like Hole. I will keep thinking about this.

Alone in the world

I’ve been thinking about therapy and its literary and filmic representations lately. Purely by coincidence, I saw the films One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest and Men’s Group within a 24 hour period. Both films are broadly about men in trouble, though this is perhaps where the similarity ends.
I think I saw One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest last in 1976. It was quite shocking. Literally of course but that’s a pretty lame joke. I remembered the shocking aftermath of Nicholson’s treatment but not the way the film ended. I don’t know how prevalent lobotomies are any more. I saw it at a time when shock treatment was very controversial as was the institutionalisation of people. I saw it in the free-wheeling 70’s where the mood of rebellion against authority was very strong. I am betting that I saw it just as Whitlam had been kicked out of office and we in Australia were battling against the early, nasty impact of the Fraser government, the razor gang and, interestingly, the first incarnation of John Howard.

Filmsite.org describes it as

“one of the greatest American films of all time - a $4.4 million dollar effort directed by Czech Milos Forman. Its allegorical theme is set in the world of an authentic mental hospital (Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Oregon), a place of rebellion exhibited by a energetic, flamboyant, wise-guy anti-hero against the Establishment, institutional authority and status-quo attitudes (personified by the patients' supervisory nurse). [Forman himself noted that the asylum was a metaphor for the Soviet Union (embodied as Nurse Ratched) and the desire to escape.”

The film holds up but looks quite different to me now. I have a greater appreciation of where Milos Forman was coming from. He says in the support material for the film that he felt like he had been living in an asylum for 20 years in the Czech Republic. Most of the filming was done in the mental hospital; the actors would come in the morning and rehearse then just hang around getting themselves into the feel of the institution in the afternoon.

I see Nurse Ratched differently though. In some ways, I think she is treated unfairly – this is a film where the only women are whores or nurses and maybe this is how some of these dysfunctional men perceive women in general but it seems a little unfair that Ratched carries the entire can. The doctor, who is a real psychiatrist, is not demonised in the way that Ratched is, though it’s he who is responsible for what finally happens to Nicholson. A nurse, in reality wouldn’t have had that sort of power, even though Ratched is depicted as conducting the therapy sessions by herself. And in the first instance, the Nicholson character is incarcerated in prison because he has had sex with a 15 year old girl; it’s a construct that a director wouldn’t use now if he was looking for audience sympathy for the main character. There is some unpleasant gender stuff lurking in the dark recesses of this film but it is really about dysfunction, abuse of authority and agency.

Critic, Roger Ebert said it “is a film so good in so many of its parts that there's a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story really should carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are those moments of brilliance.” He and I both liked the small scenes of rebellion inside the ward and the depictions of the ways in which people collude with authority; the scenes showing just how hard it is to take stock, stand up for yourself.

Following my at-home screening of Cuckoo’s Nest, I went to see Men’s Group. I was very disappointed in this film. I had high hopes of this film representing my personal experiences of a women’s group on the big screen; the value of doing the work and the toughness of the experience. And it began promisingly with the very first meeting of the 5 men. This meeting was filled with the confusion and difficulty of making contact with other people; it felt authentic in the strange embarrassment of the session. Their consultant who says, at the outset ”This is not therapy. It’s simply a space to be safe and talk about things.” And this was the truth of the work that he does and that they are up to doing. The consultant seemed unable to work at any depth with the men in the room. They were there for the regular variety of issues that people (men?) face; loneliness, fathering problems, father problems, relationship issues, just generally being disconnected. And why they turned up again after the futility of that first session, I don’t know.

It gave me plenty of time during the film to think about the kinds of successful renderings of therapy on film. The best one for me is the fractious and flirtatious relationship of Dr Jennifer Melfi and Tony (or Anthony, as she likes to call him) Soprano. It is my favourite part of this series. Other people might reference the Analyse This/That films but they are much more about other things than therapy. Pyschotherapist, Irvin Yalom has done so much to render therapy an accessible and interesting thing in fiction and in his books about his practice. I’ve been profoundly influenced by his work. In Love’s Executioner he talks about 4 fundamental things that we need to come to terms with as humans. The first is obviously death. Another is our fundamental aloneness – not loneliness but aloneness. I can’t remember what the other two are but these two are big for me. Here is a little of an interview with him in Salon:

Q: “Most of us feel we do not want to think about death. But you assert that confronting death is a key to living a full, authentic, happy life. I wonder if you could describe in personal terms what living authentically means to you?”

A: “Certainly as I've grown older, I've been thinking a lot more about the end of my life, which may not be too far away. My father and his brothers all died relatively young because of heart conditions. So I think, Well, life is finite. I don't have unlimited years left, and I want to know what is more central to me and my life right now.

Above all, I don't want to do anything that feels repetitious. And I tell myself that I don't want to belong to any more committees or teach anymore, because the field is becoming drugs, pharmacotherapy. The next generation of therapists isn't going to be trained for psychotherapy because the insurance companies aren't going to be paying for it any longer.

What feels most central for me is being creative and looking at the way in which I have creative talents and gifts that I haven't used. I basically see myself as a storyteller engaged in ideas that have to do with an existential, deeper approach to life. I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of these gifts being unused.”

It reminded me of going to hear David Tacey and John Carroll talk about Jung at Readings. One of them said that in this secular society, we use stories to make meaning out of life. This statement sounds so painfully obvious but when I heard it, it resonated so much - this is the compelling thing about stories, in the absence of that large meta-narrative about God, we need some others. (The blog Thinking Shift has some writing about this topic.)

I think that when it comes down to it, this is why I felt so cross with Men’s Group. The film fluttered across the surface of the stories of these men; all of whom had deep and painful histories. The film-maker, Michael Joy, said “Within my own life I ended up needing some people outside of family and friends to talk to and I found myself going to a men's group this one evening and heard these guys' stories and just realised that there was a story there that had to be told.” Joy needed to hang around and do the stories justice. He needed to attend the men’s group for months to see what deep and painful issues were raised and worked through. If they were worked through. Or to read a little Yalom and see what universal truths can come from the process of therapy whne you stay with the pain of the person you are working with, when you linger.

So out of it all, when I talked about it with Naomi, my FFFF, we decided that there was merit in showing the fact that the 5 men were facing similar issues (as opposed to making a film about any one one of these characters seperately). Loneliness. Disconnection. Inarticulateness. Aggression. How to be a father. How to love a father. How to manage that sense of being alone in the world. These are the stuff of important stories; they make meaning for everyone. But while there is great merit in trying to work with these themes, the film did a pretty crap job of it.

It did, however, spawn this funny piece of dialogue between Margaret and David (At the Movies):

MARGARET: Getting away from that, I mean it’s interesting for me, having that sort of rawness of blokes’ emotions. How do you, as a man, react to that?

DAVID: I found it - I think I’m the sort of person who keeps my emotions in check.

MARGARET: Yeah.

DAVID: And so I don’t entirely recognise that, but I was impressed by the way the actors handled it and the way it developed during the course of the film. I would never go to a group session like the one in the film. Never.

MARGARET: I can imagine. No, but because, you know, I think that’s true of a lot of men. They’re too contained and they are in the beginning of this film.

DAVID: You’re looking...

MARGARET: It’s not easy to expose yourself.

DAVID: You’re looking at a very contained man, Margaret.

MARGARET: Oh, I know that, David.

DAVID: In case you didn’t know after all these years.