Intimate and gruelling

Most films about people undergoing a slow death have an inevitable sentimentality about them. It’s a feeling I resist and then fall for – like eating too much chocolate. Not so Stopped on Track, a new German film. It’s about a man, Frank, who is diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour. It's gruelling and true. It combines all the wretchedness, tedium and sadness that accompanies a slow death. And I think the audience feels these three qualities in equal measure, with a couple of light moments thrown in. Very powerful. Great acting. I did not feel emotionally manipulated, just very sad. And a bit bored at times – which felt appropriate.

I felt there was some irony at the expense of the health profession. Their capacity to do anything in the face of his dying and the terrible burden this placed on his family seemed limited in the extreme, and their words felt kind but hollow. I doubt that this was the intention of the director, Andreas Dresen, who also made Cloud Nine – a film I really liked at MIFF a couple of years ago. In this film, he used a mix of professional actors and these real-life health professionals, and much of the dialogue was improvised as the filming took place.

The Eye for Film critic said: “It's seamlessly delivered; it just doesn't seem to have much to say.” I felt that this was missing the point – it is about a journey – the most universal of journeys and one that we often resist seeing up close and slow. The Telegraph critic got it:

”For this is a film about adaptation and coping. It’s a record of a journey as difficult as any polar expedition; counselors offer Simone and her husband’s family sketchy maps of the new, fraught world in which they now find themselves, but essentially they have to draw on their deepest reserves of love, pity and resourcefulness."

The film begins in a hospital waiting room. Frank ans his wife Simone are called into the doctor's surgery where he shows them slides of Frank's brain and tells them what has been found. The scene is quiet and sparse. They are shocked. Simone cries silently and Frank looks like he has been run over by a bus ('stopped in track, in fact). There is a lengthy silence, eventually filled by the doctor with information about potential life span. It is very well handled - no music, no embellishment - just sparse and empty. One other aspect that I liked was that over the course of the film, Frank used a mobile phone to records short bursts about himself and to capture his family reacting to him. This mini film within a film not only gave us insights into how he was feeling but mimicked, for me, the fragments of memory that you retain of someone who has died. This is an intimate and authentic film.

Crime fiction: creating order out of chaos - or disrupting order

I wouldn’t usually use the word “hegemonic” in conversation but I feel the need to up the ante on my crime fiction spree (which has come to a temporary end). I have been mulling over the genre after finishing The Phantom and wandering around the Internet looking at theories.

David Schmid, writing about the ways in which space (usually city space) is used in crime fiction, has developed some interesting questions: His essay is worth reading. We come to know some cities intimately through crime fiction. Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh. Shane Maloney’s inner-city Melbourne. Peter Temple’s depiction of the same space. Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles. James Ellroy’s LA. Sarah Paretsky’s Chicago. The fictional town of Santa Teresa, (aka Santa Barbara) California created by Sue Grafton. And Jo Nesbo’s Oslo. In The Phantom, I felt that I needed to Google images of that city and of a new development in that city on the waterfront called Tjuvholmen which gets a brief mention in the novel (what propelled me to Google the latter is that he described it as resembling a nipple on the waterfront).

“is the genre characterized primarily by closure, the neat tying up of loose ends, or by open-endedness and ambiguity? Is crime fiction best described as being characterized by individualized approaches to both the causes and solutions to crime, or does it imagine and put into play more collective, structural analyses of these issues? Finally, does crime fiction have the potential to produce radical, counter-hegemonic critiques of the ways in which power is mobilized in capitalist, racist, and patriarchal social formations, or is it instead an essentially conservative, bourgeois genre that supports the status quo?”

Most of the detective fiction I read is set in urban inner city landscapes – I think this is true of most contemporary detective fiction (the honourable exception is Temple’s wonderful book about country life The Broken Shore). The Harry Hole character has so thoroughly possessed Oslo that I find it impossible to imagine without him. I’m sure that if I visited, I would be searching for the Plata where drugs are sold (not for the drugs), the Salvation Army hostel, Hotel Leon and looking for the large ski ramp which features prominently in The Snowman. The very new opera house that merges into the harbour would be another place to visit. He’s no foodie, Nesbo, so cafes and restaurants would not be part of my walking tour. And I’d want to get behind the immediate city up into the area that overlooks the harbour, where wealthy people live. Speaking at the Adelaide Writers Festival, Nesbo said he wanted to create a “Gotham City version of Oslo – a little bit darker, a little bit larger”. He said that Oslo used to be a kind of “innocent village” but drugs, which are the central theme of The Phantom, have always been bad. It is a changed city in the last fifteen years with the advent of human trafficking and increasingly obvious drug problems.

Now to go back to Schmid’s original questions, I think the appeal of Nesbo’s novels is that there is limited closure; the criminal is usually brought to some kind of justice but the underlying issues in the novels; police corruption, drug usage in the community, homelessness, continue largely unabated. The individual efforts of Hole and his diminishing band of friends make a small dent but the status quo continues. There is an ongoing critique of society (not dissimilar to the work of Stieg Larsson) but little changes; power is entrenched. We are given a picture of a society which on the surface looks orderly and managed but one where crime flourishes in bubbles underneath. As readers, I think the appeal is in the failure of the individual to do more than bring another individual to some kind of rough justice. We recognize this failure as being authentic but commend the doggedness of the individual (in this case Hole) for persisting. It is his defining quality. As he says at one stage “I am a policeman.” (In this case the sentence is ironic; he is no longer works in this role and has returned reluctantly to Oslo.) The hero’s journey is flawed and likely to end with a degree of ambiguity. Some loose ends.


At the Adelaide Writers Festival, Nesbo said that his writing relates strongly to the American tradition of crime writing – which came in part from the history of pioneers, the Western and the archetype of the outsider. Often the protagonists have been cast out of an organisation or marginalised within it but they refuse to bow down, they are heroic to us for that reason, despite the their anarchic tendencies. Harry is emblematic of this tradition; he is still a believer in the system but ambivalent about the way in which it was operating. Nesbo said that he is working within the tradition of James Ellroy: something is rotten in the state of Norway, despite the truth of its stereotype (“as a happy socialist democracy”). He went on to say one more interesting thing. He said that money, as a motivation for crime, was almost unbelievable in Norway. Before the advent of the oil industry, Norway was very poor – so crime novels focused on money as a motivator. Contemporary novels focus more heavily on the quirks of human nature. He gave Ibsen’s interest in secrets in families and concealed emotions as an example of what he is interested in exploring, using crime as a vehicle.


Writing about the genre of crime fiction, Regis Behe quotes William Edwards, an associate professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco. Edwards uses crime novels in his classes. Behe also quotes Sarah Weinman, a crime fiction writer who says: So perhaps the crime fiction that we are happiest with is that which gives us enough of a resolution to feel safe within a general context of authentic and credible disorder. The state has been preserved – but to what extent is it worth preserving? I think this is where the Hole character has got to in his thinking – which might explain the very interesting treatment he receives in this novel.

"Heroes are symbols of how a nation wishes others to see it. The hero represents triumph and affirms the goodness in the nation… But crime novels seem to more easily tap into the current angst. In a post-9/11 world, the crime novel reminds us of our vulnerabilities in an uncertain world… In the post-9/11 world, Edwards says, the crime novel simultaneously reminds us of our shortcomings while positioning "heroes" as defenders, "the nation's counterbalance force."

Behe also quotes Sarah Weinman, a crime fiction writer who says:

“the genre's appeal stems from the primal urge to "create order out of chaos, to find a resolution in the face of violent situations. This doesn't mean that crime novels have to follow conventional patterns -- and many of the best in recent years certainly do not -- but whatever conflicts are presented are, for the most part, resolved”.

So perhaps the crime fiction that we are happiest with is that which gives us enough of a resolution to feel safe within a general context of authentic and credible disorder. The state has been preserved – but to what extent is it worth preserving? I think this is where the Hole character has got to in his thinking – which might explain the very interesting treatment he receives in this novel.

The common archetypes of human existence

In 1979, I was completing a Diploma in Education. The Method Lecturer for English bounced into the room about a month into the year and wrote “common archetypes of human existence” on the board. He asked us to suggest what these were. My memory is that we all kind of looked around the room hopelessly but I may be projecting my own ignorance onto everyone. He went on to talk about Jung and of the place of archetypes in literature.



Now I think of this kind of ignorance as startling – so much of my world view is informed through a psychoanalytic lens and way of operating. I was thinking this as I was watching A Dangerous Method – how different the perspective on life might be without the work of Freud and Jung. A small part of this film alerts us to the revolutionary nature of their work. As reviewer Julie Rigg says “The idea that sexuality was at the core of many psychiatric disorders was like a bombshell in this conventional society: intellectually exciting but also risky.”

So the director Cronenberg explores the birth of psychoanalysis through the intellectual and personal relationships of Jung and his patient, and lover Sabina Spielrein and through the relationship between Freud and Jung – which began with great promise and curdled in less than a decade. Like this relationship, the film begins with much promise but doesn’t quite work. I think this is for two reasons. Firstly, the film tries to cover too much territory. Is it about the personal or about the ideas behind psychotherapy? If about the personal – what is the focus: fidelity, sex, adultery, Freud’s father/son relationship with Jung, competition, anti-Semitism, free love, betrayal – what? It touches on all these things. If it’s about the basic concepts of psychoanalysis, is it about the role of sex, the theory of the unconscious, the place of mythology, the collective unconscious or how to progress these understandings into broader society? We get a smattering of all these things but not enough of any to be satisfied.


Secondly, I found it hard to see inside the façade of Jung to get a sense of what he was really like. Perhaps this is historically accurate; maybe he was a closed book. The only time we see him in an unguarded moment is when he is so excited at meeting Freud that he forgets all social graces. It makes hard to really understand the gist of his relationship with Spielrein which forms a key part of the film and to make any kind of judgement about the changing relationship with Freud. For example, does he spank Spielrein as her doctor or her lover? (And why do I use the word “spank” instead of “hit” or “smack”?)


I’m not sure if this opaqueness of character stems from the way that he is played by Fassbinder, an excellent actor usually, or by some uncertainty on Cronenberg’s part about Jung’s actual character and motivations, or by a very historically real repressed public persona.


I found the final scenes poignant and moving. They showed what the film could have been about.

Elles

Elles is the second film I’ve seen this month that focuses, in part, on prostitution. It would be misleading to see this as the sole focus. It’s a subject that’s always going to grab attention but I think the film is really about something else. The main character (Anne) is wonderfully played by Juliette Binoche – I can’t imagine anyone else doing it so well. A middle class journalist, she is writing an article about students who turn to prostitution as a means of getting through uni. The two women that she meets in the course of interviewing for the article present an unexpected view of their work. The Juliet Binoche character is intrigued by both their perspectives and what it throws up about her own life.


There are few reviews of this film yet but mostly I think the reviewers have got it wrong. Read these two snippets:

“While Szumowska and her co-writer, Tine Byrckel, hammer home their arguably offensive theory that well-to-do femmes are acting as hookers in the kitchen and at the keyboard, they seem far less clear on what they want to say about actual harlotry. Scenes of the journalist's collegiate interview subjects satisfying male clients to earn tuition money are lit and shot like perfume commercials, even as the sex in some cases turns disturbingly brutal.” (from Variety)

and (from The Guardian):

“Juliette Binoche gives it her considerable all in this otherwise dubious film, which purports to investigate the moral and emotional price of teenage prostitution…Presumably the idea is to explore the emotional disconnect required to function as one of those can't-be-too-thin French bourgeoises.

I think what the film is about is not the metaphor of prostitution, but of compromise. The Anne character is not economically reliant on anyone. She does not need to prostitute herself, as the students feel they need to do (One compares the work favourably with working in a fastfood restaurant). She could have a viable and interesting life as a working journalist living by herself. The compromise comes in wanting a relationship, in having children, in wanting to work, in being a daughter, in being part of a middle–class mileau. Parts of herself are suppressed in this process – just as parts might also blossom. (A friend of mine said recently of her time as the mother of two very young children: “I feel like I lost myself for about five years.”) I think that’s where the film maker, Malgoska Szumowska is heading. Much of what we see of Anne’s life is unpleasant; her sons are providing little joy and her husband is disconnected and angry. She is frustrated. Not a pretty picture. One effective scene is when she visits her ailing father in hospital. She picks up his foot to give him a foot massage. Lots of feelings went through my head. What a loving thing this is to do. How horrible old men’s feet can be. How difficult it would be for me to massage my own fathers feet. The importance of touch. Its disappearance in life as you age.


You might think that the prostitution would not be pretty either. Szumowska tries to upset expectations here; the two women present their work as one that provides them with choices and as mostly benign. I was reminded very powerfully of Kate Holden’s account of her life as a prostitute Under my skin. I never quite believed that the things she described in that book did not have a substantial impact on her and I felt that with the accounts of the two girls in the film. I think Szumowska intends us to be sceptical observers; there are small cracks in the façade presented by the two girls.


Binoche is authentic and believable – it’s a very powerful film about being a woman.


Black & White & Sex is the other film I’ve seen recently that features sex workers. It’s a new Australian film by John Winter. This film is much more explicitly about the way we view prostitution though, like Elle, it wants to mess with our preconceptions about it. Winter said that he was inspired to make the film after going for a round of institutional funding in relation to another film script which featured a prostitute. The film fund reps were concerned that the portrayal of the sex worker was too upbeat – not “victim” enough. This inspired him to write the script for this, a film in which the sex worker character is played by eight different women (not dissimilar to the portrayal of Bob Dylan in the film I’m not there).


It begins with the feel of a play. Two characters on stage, almost entirely dialogue driven. I wasn’t sure it was going to work for a while, then the character of Angie got going. She reminded me of kids I’ve taught – like half-loved dogs, never quite reliable but yearning for contact. The film covers some great topics: intimacy, censorship, power, gender dynamics, love, control and trust. What happens is unexpected and interesting. It also looks good – shot in black and white, and using split screens where necessary to fragment the focus and force the viewer to make choices about what to look at. The use of eight actresses was clever; giving life to the idea that there are many facets and perceptions within the world of the sex worker; and that that person can embody universal desires and feelings but simultaneously be uniquely individual.


Need to conclude with this snippet from a review – just because I liked the imagery.

“The film industry, so the common wisdom goes, is chocked to the gills with carbon copy cinema, stuffed like a poisoned piñata with the bile and fluid of a zillion regurgitated ideas. Here is a bold, audacious and throbbingly original Australian film, particularly palatable for viewers partial to edgy, intimate and explorative interpersonal dramas.”

Julie Rigg, in commenting on this film, said: “My colleague Jason Di Rosso reckons that Australian directors are not very good at directing sex scenes. We lack a true erotic cinema. What do you think?”
He might be on to something, though I don’t think anyone would argue that the scenes in Black & White & Sex are meant to be sex scenes per se. I can’t think of any Australian films that have the kind of sensuality I’ve seen in some French films or some of Ang Lee’s work for example. The sex scenes in Elles looked real. Real doesn’t always mean erotic but it can. I think what Australians are good at is the flirty Diver Dan kind of schtick – but this is not erotic. There's something in the image of Australian men that refuses the erotic - it might be that you have to take women seriously and risk intimacy. This is at odds with the ways in which masculinity in Australia is traditionally presented on the screen. Maybe I will stop there.

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.

Who is on the margins?

In the last year, the total in my superannuation has decreased by $10,000, despite the fact that both myself and my employer regularly make deposits. It’s a bit disheartening. I’m looking forward to my gruel-led retirement. It’s probably due to the Greek debt crisis or the volatility on Wall Street or to something happening in one of Alan Kohler’s little graphs.  I write this in the context of having seen the film Margin Call on the weekend.  In the style of a thriller, it follows the events over 24 hours in the life of a large Wall Street trading firm. Their whizz kid rocket scientist (literally) discovers that they are way over-exposed on some assets that are dodgy. (Think back to the sub-prime mortgages that almost brought down most of the financial system in 2007/08). 

The film takes place almost entirely in the plush office block which houses this firm. Our exposure to the outside world is predominantly sexy New York at night – again and again we are treated the views of the Manhattan skyline. Therein lies my problem with this much acclaimed film. The inhabitants live in a bubble. An expensive bubble. They operate with NO reference to the ordinary world and the impact of their actions on my superannuation account. It lacks a moral perspective – and while this is related to the point the film is making, that the protagonists lack a moral centre – the concept of morality is only discussed in relation to their trading relationships. What will happen if they adopt a particular course of action – will anyone ever do business with them again? This is the only concern expressed by any of the participants.

I expect that the film maker thought that people would apply their own knowledge of the global financial meltdown and the wider context. I’m not sure that this is good enough. The Time Out reviewer said it well:

”Missing, however, are the outsider eye and moral perspective of, for example, John Lanchester’s writing about the crisis. 'Margin Call’ presents Wall Street on its own terms even in meltdown – not uncritically but claustrophobically, like a Mob movie indifferent to victims of crime. It’s unclear whether the picture realises how bitter a taste this leaves.”

I loved that metaphor of The Mob film, though even in The Sopranos, a narrative layer deals with Tony’s grumbling conscience via the psychotherapist’s chair. This film uses the device of a dying dog as a humanising plot feature but it doesn’t give the Kevin Spacey character a lot to work with. Phillippa Hawker picks up the same issue, that of morality, but has a different view of it:

“The film takes place within a bubble; we have to contemplate the consequences of the company's actions for ourselves - and that's actually the most unnerving aspect of all.”

What we now know though, post GFC, is that this unethical and greedy sector has the world by the balls and they will be bailed out again and again because they are too big to fail. I loved The Big Short, a book about the GFC by Michael Lewis, because of the slow burn of anger and because of the breadth of it. This film is a bit too much in love with the accoutrements of power and influence. The scenes of New York, the smooth silent expensive offices and cars, the fact that no one has a rumpled suit or shirt, even at 5 in the morning. Maybe I wanted at least one person to talk about the roll-on effect – for the average punter, for the global markets, for Greek pensioners and battlers in Detroit and Jill Wilson’s superannuation fund…

Known and unknown territory

OK – he’s a recovering alcoholic with an ex-partner and an indifferent relationship with authority. He likes to do things his way, often without telling anyone else. He goes on his instincts. He is not good looking but always ends up in bed with someone attractive. Cop story – you bet.
It’s a cop story set in Norway. What do I know about Norway?  Fjords and a massacre in 2011 of 69 young people from the left side of politics by a lone gunman. That’s about all. Since reading Jo Nesbo’s book The Snowman, I’ve learnt a little more.

Wikipedia says of Norway: “Key domestic issues include immigration and integration of ethnic minorities, maintaining the country's extensive social safety net with an aging population, and preserving economic competitiveness. … Although having rejected European Union membership in two referenda, Norway maintains close ties with the union and its member countries, as well as with the United States. Norway remains one of the biggest financial contributors to the United Nations, and participates with UN forces in international missions, notably in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Sudan and Libya. … Norway has extensive reserves of petroleum, natural gas, minerals, lumber, seafood, fresh water, and hydropower. … The country maintains a Nordic welfare model with universal health care, subsidized higher education, and a comprehensive social security system. From 2001 to 2006, and then again from 2009 through 2011, Norway has had the highest human development index ranking in the world.”

We find out a little of the larger Norwegian context in The Snowman but not a lot. It’s mainly a story of cop after serial killer. It’s well written and gripping but doesn’t quite have the scale of societal focus that Stieg Larrsen has in his books, for example.  One reviewer wrote “Like all great cop plots, the Harry Hole series depends on an expectation that the enemy will as likely come from within, and above, as he will from the world outside.” I liked the slight glimpse into the politics of the police department. I also liked Nesbo’s ruminations on relationships and sex – which percolate through the character of Harry Hole (pronounced ‘Hooler’).

One reviewer, Wendy Lesser,  speculated as to why Scandinavian thrillers are “so much better than anyone else”? I’m not sure this is true – there are a few LA based writers who could give this region a  run for their money – but it is intriguing reading about this area of the world.

Lesser says:

“In the right hands, the mystery novel becomes not only a thrilling cat-and-mouse game between a fiendishly clever murderer and a doggedly persistent detective, but also a commentary on the wider society that spawns, polices, and punishes murder. It is this wider view—the social view—at which the Scandinavians excel.”

Then she says

“Perhaps we can attribute this in part to the small size of these far northern countries, their relatively homogenous populations, their stable cultural traditions—a setting, in short, in which murders (and especially serial murders) stand out starkly and beg for analysis.”

 She speculates on the place of the long, dark winter in the attraction – though this to me seems more a reason for Scandinavians to read than to be read. The most interesting thing she writes is about the politics of these countries – that just possibly

“this wider focus is connected to the firmly if mildly socialist perspective of even the most conservative Scandinavian governments, a view in which individual behavior contributes to or detracts from the public welfare.”

I like reading about this little-known (to me) country that is played out within the generic global formula of a thriller. Unknown territory within the known.