Book Review: The Mist by Ragnar Jónasson
Artwork by Sophie Kenelm
Joe Kenelm reviews the latest instalment of the Hidden Iceland series.
Reykjavík-based police detective Hulda Hermannsdóttir is investigating a double murder in a remote farmhouse, inland from Iceland’s inhospitable East coast. Hulda and her more provincial colleague, Jens, a representative of the local force, visit a second farmhouse, the only other building for miles and one of the few places the murderer could be holed up: it is the height of winter, and Hulda and Jens have found an abandoned car some way down the valley. The house looks uninhabited; but, Jens remembers, it has a cellar. While Hulda looks around the rest of the house, he goes to search it. He soon returns. “The cellar was locked,” he first relays, so he “took the liberty” of forcing the door. Never fear though, as Jens assures Hulda, “I’ll see that it’s repaired later.” She has to remind him of the matter in hand: “Did you find anything?”
This moment in The Mist – the final instalment of Ragnar Jónasson’s very popular and critically-acclaimed Hidden Iceland series – is fairly typical of Nordic crime fiction. Christopher Taylor picks out a moment from a Finnish police procedural, Matti-Yrjänä Joensuu’s The Priest of Evil: the protagonist, chasing a pigeon-blood-drinking serial killer through a tunnel under Helsinki, pulls out his gun, but pauses to consider the situation from a health and safety angle. “He recalled that this communal tunnel was used for almost everything: water and drainage, heating, electricity, telephone cables. It also occurred to him that he ought to be wearing a hard hat, as the rock-faces hadn’t been secured with concrete.” These are socially-responsible concerns, even if they do drain a bit of the dramatic momentum.
The Mist is split between three main narrative perspectives. It is Christmas time, and Hulda and her husband Jón are having trouble with their teenage daughter. Silent and morose, she refuses to partake in the festivities, instead spending her time shut up in her room. On the other side of the country, Erla and Einar, farmers in Iceland’s barren interior – “a vanishing way of life” – receive an unexpected (and, for this time of year, unprecedented) visitor, who’s story does not quite hold up. Unnur, meanwhile, is travelling the country on her gap year. She is writing a book, soaking up all the experiences she can and looking to meet diverse people; after all, “it was essential to mix with all types if she was going to be a writer.” Jónasson weaves a surprising and broadly compelling narrative, as these storylines variously inform and converge on one another.
His characters are drawn in broad, unflinching strokes. The opening chapter stresses that Hulda will “never get over her guilt”, for what, we’re not yet sure; a little later, we are informed in equally implacable prose that Erla “had never dreamt of becoming a farmer’s wife in the wild Icelandic highlands, but when she met Einar he had swept her off her feet.” Much like the cast, these sentences are tough and practical. Hulda is “determined” that by the time she gets to her mother’s age, “she and Jón would be debt free and sufficiently well off to be able to give up work at a reasonable age and make the most of their retirement.” Again, Erla and Einar’s goal, “now, as ever, was to keep their heads above water, keep the farm going, and in the black, if possible.” Perhaps from translation – perhaps not – the writing can fall a little flat. Erla, horrified that her daughter has not yet turned up for the traditional Christmas Eve celebrations, fears that she has come to harm in her isolated house; she is also sickened that their suspect visitor has not left as promised. In sheer agitation, she opens the door and steps out into the snow. “What on earth were you thinking, Erla?” her husband exclaims. The answer is oddly diminutive: “it was safe to say that she had got out of bed on the wrong side.”
At the same time, tensions inhere under the crust of Jónasson’s stern writing that have us looking again at expressed certainties and wondering about the complexities (and capabilities) of his characters – or, as Hulda would have it, “what was going on behind closed doors.” For all that seems to be revealed, there is much that is not. Towards the start of the novel, Erla looks out of her farmhouse window and smiles “wryly”: “this was no place for people”, she admits, but quickly qualifies, “not at this time of year.” It is not an ungenerous assessment. “That’s not to imply”, we are told elsewhere, “that she was ungrateful or discontented with the farm or its location, not really”. But her hesitant register might suggest otherwise, as might her subsequent revelation that “all talk of claustrophobia was forbidden on the farm”. It is followed by a not-so-subtle interjection that, all the same, speaks to the tautness of her attitude: “Suffocating…”
This is not only the nature of Hulda’s work, “a game played out in the grey border lands between day and night”, but (as Hulda’s imagery suggests) the snow-covered country itself. Taylor remarks that crime writers in countries with “smaller, more homogeneous populations” face a problem. Another Icelandic police detective, Erlendur, the hero of a series of crime novels by Arnaldur Indridason, “never expects to be called out to anything more dramatic than ‘a pathetic Icelandic murder’”. As Hulda’s husband points out, “we live in the most peaceful country in the world.” By swathing his story in a compact layer of prose that conceals deep psychological complexity, Jónasson depicts horrendous crime in his “peaceful country” very convincingly.
But there isn’t always a lurking corpse. Like Jens’ promise to mend the door – the killer is not in the cellar, by the way – sometimes it is a case of pragmatic, forgiving Nordic sentiment. Late on in The Mist, Hulda makes a vow to herself to rescue a missing girl. The disappearance speaks to Hulda in a very personal way, so this is a significant moment in the detective’s own psychological drama: “Hulda had to save her.” “Or”, she reconsiders practically, “at least do her level best.”