Elegy for the Sons of Asgard

Robert Ferguson: Scandinavians

The Wall Street Journal, August 2, 2017

Baltic Sea, Stockholm-Helsinki, August 1980 © Andrew Stuttaford

Robert Ferguson’s “Scandinavians” is not a book for the beach, but it might well fit the bill on a distant northern shore, with the fog rolling in and memories of long ships stirring. Discursive, meandering, sometimes beautifully written, it presents a historical narrative punctuated by reminiscences, conversations retold, snatches of autobiography, fragments of biography and stories added, one suspects, solely for their strangeness.

Oslo, Norway, May 17, 2009 © Andrew Stuttaford

We learn, for instance, about Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702), scientist, engineer, architect, musician and botanist. “Of all [the] claims for Rudbeck’s polymathic genius,” Mr. Ferguson writes, “none can compare in its scope, its vision, its ingenuity and its sheer weirdness” with his discovery that Atlantis had been located in Sweden and that Swedish was “the proto-language from which Greek, Latin and Hebrew all derived.” Rudbeck devised, Mr. Ferguson suggests, “a golden past worthy of Sweden’s golden present”—in the 17th century, the country was a European superpower. The stormaktstiden (the great power era) didn’t last long, nor did Rudbeck’s reputation. Even so, nowadays he is remembered sympathetically in Sweden for his account of the country’s origins, a saga “in which facts, dreams, myth and waking life, historical personages, biblical and mythological figures merge and flow and part in a mesmerizing drift.”

Stockholm, Sweden, December 2010 © Andrew Stuttaford

Mr. Ferguson, whose earlier books include a history of the Vikings, as well as biographies of Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun, is a rather more reliable source. A Briton, he first traveled to Scandinavia at the tail end of the 1960s with a friend (“He looked like Withnail and I looked like I”). Despite an unglamorous stint in Copenhagen (Withnail was eventually deported for trying to shoplift some cheese), Mr. Ferguson fell for the place. He obtained a degree in Scandinavian studies and, not long after, took up a Norwegian government scholarship to study in that country for a year. It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that he’s still in Norway today.

Arlanda Airport, Stockholm, Sweden, June 2011

The book’s subtitle (“In Search of the Soul of the North”) makes “Scandinavians” sound more daunting than it is. If there is a search going on, the author is in no hurry to find what he is looking for. Instead we are left with an idea—no more than that—of these lands and the three taciturn tribes that make up the bulk of their population. To an outsider, Norwegians, Swedes and Danes seem to be cast from the same mold, but—as I know well from three decades of working alongside them—that is far from the case. Mr. Ferguson touches on this, but too lightly.

Over southern Norway, March 2015 © Andrew Stuttaford

The history that he retells—Vikings, wars, monarchs, writers, philosophers—is an overview, operating both as necessary background and an invitation to dig more deeply. The grand old gods make their inevitable appearance and so does the tale of their demotion, a transition commemorated in 10th-century Denmark by a massive stone that features the earliest known depiction of Jesus in Scandinavian art, a “fierce-eyed warrior ready to jump down from his cross and do battle with the demons of heathendom.” As Mr. Ferguson observes (and as the first missionaries to these unpromising territories understood), “the suffering Christ had no natural appeal among those who formerly worshipped masters of violence like Odin and Thor.”

Oslo, Norway, May 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

Even once they had dispensed with those roughnecks from Asgard, it took a while for the Swedes, Danes and Norwegians to succumb to that whole “love thy neighbor” thing. The Kalmar Union of 1397 among the three countries lasted barely more than a century: Sweden broke away, although the Norwegians sank into what they cheerfully refer to as their “400-year night” under the Danes. Meanwhile, the Swedes sliced away at Denmark’s domain over the years, finally annexing Norway in 1814.

Hotorget, Stockholm, Sweden, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

Only nine decades later, Norway split off from Sweden. This history, differing patterns of economic development and subsequent events, not least sharply contrasting experiences of World War II, helps explain some of the distinctions among Denmark, Norway and Sweden today. Nevertheless all three adopted strikingly egalitarian forms of social democracy bolstered by an insistence on self-effacement in the interests, as Mr. Ferguson puts it, “of the greater good of social harmony.” In more recent years, this emphasis on conformity has become, paradoxically, a threat to the harmony it was designed to protect.

Husby, Stockholm, Sweden, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

These societies are now undergoing possibly their most consequential transformation in centuries, “immigration on a scale unprecedented in the recorded history of the region.” Yet particularly in Sweden—a country marked, in Mr. Ferguson’s dismayingly accurate opinion, by “an almost pathological fear of socially conservative views and a demonization of those who hold them”—the inflow has been, in the main and for too long, waved through with too little of the debate it deserved. The situation is somewhat different in Norway and Denmark, but Sweden’s democracy has been damaged by the treatment of those disinclined to join the elite’s passionate embrace of “globalized culture.” Add in the effects of the immigration itself, and it’s easy to imagine a future in which the past will be sorely missed.

Stockholm, Sweden, February 2011 © Andrew Stuttaford

Decades ago Mr. Ferguson set out to live “in what was essentially a nineteenth-century dream of Norway,” and when he arrived there this was in a certain sense possible. Norway, Sweden and Denmark were—particularly before cheap travel, the internet and all the rest—both physically and mentally somewhat remote from the European “mainland.” But since then, Mr. Ferguson writes, there has been a “slow-motion tsunami of change,” and the author has “felt an increasing desire to look back” before these societies “change out of all recognition.” This book may be an introduction to the Scandinavians, but it is also an elegy.

Note: Appeared in the August 3, 2017, print edition as 'Northern Lights.'

Stockholm, Sweden, December 2009 © Andrew Stuttaford

Young Lisbeth

Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

National Review, October 14, 2010 (November 1, 2010 issue)

Stockholm, December, 2009  © Andrew Stuttaford

I got Dan Brown, I really did. The history was bunk, the prose was Lego, and yet there was something there — that maddening, tantalizing what’s-going-to-happen-next — that kept me turning, turning, turning the pages deep into the night. By contrast, the success of Stieg Larsson, the Swedish thriller writer, who would — had he not died tragically young (only 50) in 2004, leaving just three (completed) novels behind — now be seen as a challenger to the impious Mr. Brown, leaves me more than a little amazed.

Collectively known as the Millennium trilogy, those three books have together sold over 30 million copies worldwide and quite a few bytes beside: Larsson is the first author to be downloaded over a million times on Kindle. Each installment has been made into a movie in Sweden. The first two films (I haven’t seen the third) were characterized by fine acting, land-of-Bergman pacing, and, of course, land-of-Bergman language, a tough sell anywhere much south of Malmo. Sure enough, a Hollywood remake is on the way, complete with James Bond, well, Daniel Craig, as Mikael “Kalle” Blomkvist, Larsson’s journalist-hero, and, for that matter, Larsson’s fantasy Larsson.

Craig was a smart choice: Borrowed glamour is better than none. Blomkvist may, in his painstakingly proper, pragmatically Scandinavian way, be something of a Lothario, but he’s also a middle-aged, excruciatingly priggish leftist, steeped in the shopworn pieties and bottomless paranoia of a certain strain of northern European political correctness. A bracing suggestion of 007 will be just what this tatty scribbler needs.

Mercifully, Hollywood’s filmmakers will probably follow the lead of their Swedish predecessors and dilute the “progressive” preaching that drones on throughout the Millennium saga, most loudly in the shape of a septic feminism fueled more by an apparent dislike of men than anything else. As a teenager, Larsson is said to have witnessed the gang-rape of a girl by some of his friends, a horror that he failed both to stop and to report. The form his feminism takes is thus a very public atonement. It’s not subtle — the Swedish title of the first novel is Man som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women), and its narrative is festooned with factoids designed to show just how hateful men can be. In all three novels his (almost invariably male) villains are brutish, sexist pigs, include abusers of prostitutes amongst their sleazy ranks, and, all too often, are in pursuit of underage entertainment.

Intriguingly, Larsson’s heroine and Blomkvist’s sometime lover, Lisbeth Salander, a busily bisexual 25-year-old hacker, is less than five feet tall, “doll-like,” and, until some breast-augmentation surgery in the second book comes to the rescue, “flat-chested, as if she had never reached puberty.” Make of that, Dr. Freud, what you will.

The more conventionally left-wing opinions that flavor the book are less bothersome and more predictable. The precincts of Schwedenkrimi (a subset of literature extensive enough to boast its own German compound noun) are a thoroughly Social Democratic (or worse) place. The genre’s pioneers (Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, co-authors of an enjoyable series of books between 1965 and 1975) were Stockholm-style soixante-huitards. Their most prominent successor, Henning Mankell (best known internationally for his marvelous Inspector Wallander), is another red-flag man, and a veteran of the embattled Gaza flotilla earlier this year. Under the circumstances, Larsson, an erstwhile Trotskyite who, like the fictional Blomkvist, spent much of his career working for a small leftist periodical, fits right in.

If Larsson’s politics are an irritant, his prose is a catastrophe. Nordic crime fiction tends to be written in a matter-of-fact way, but at his worst, Larsson is just a matter of lists:

She was back in Soder by 5.00 p.m. and had time for a quick visit to Axelsson’s Home Electronics, where she bought a nineteen-inch TV and a radio. Just before closing time she slipped into a store on Hornsgatan and bought a vacuum cleaner. At Mariahallen market she bought a mop, dishwashing liquid, a bucket, some detergent, hand soap, toothbrushes, and a giant package of toilet paper.

No, the translator is not to blame.

For all that, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo passed the Dan Brown test. Easily. There was something about the mystery that forms its dark core — a classic locked (more or less) room whodunit complete with truly hideous family secrets — that pulled me in. Even so, by themselves neither the dreadful doings of the decadent Vanger clan nor the occasional glimpses of hauntingly wintry landscape would have been quite enough to do the trick. Throw in a brilliant investigator compared with whom old cocaine-and-Stradivarius Sherlock is Andy Griffith, however, and airport bookstores’ Stieg-crammed shelves begin to make sense.

Heavily pierced and tattooed, Larsson’s surly, taciturn, and thoroughly antisocial Salander is a pattern-finding genius with a preternatural gift for hacking more typical of those modem-heavy movies that littered the dawn of the Internet age. She is also, Blomkvist realizes, someone who almost certainly plays for Dr. Asperger’s team. Oh yes, did I mention that Lisbeth is handy with a gun and good in a brawl? Absence of empathy, a surfeit of strangeness, and a comic-book collection of skills make her an ideal subject for Larsson’s surface-dwelling talents, yet somehow this plodding Swede also manages the remarkable achievement of persuading his readers to care about someone who would not, could not, give a damn about them. 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a decent, self-contained story. If Larsson had stopped there, all would have been well. Unfortunately, he didn’t. The remaining two books are in fact one (they are separated by an abrupt break of Dickensian shamelessness) and they should have been none. Despite a MacGuffin involving sex trafficking (a suitably modish variety of XY villainy, and much in the Swedish headlines when Larsson was writing), The Girl Who Played with Fire is really all about Salander, the eponymous Girl. She shifts from being puzzle-master to puzzle, a transition that Larsson fumbles and, in the course of the final part of the trilogy, drops.

Part of what made Salander so interesting in the first place was the depth of her detachment, an idea that cannot survive her transformation in the second and third books into tough-grrl cliche, a lethal and seemingly indestructible combination of avenging angel, Modesty Blaise (an endearingly enduring heroine throughout Scandinavia), and, as underlined by a few sly hints in the text, Pippi Longstocking. Larsson had become so infatuated with his own creation (he had plans for ten books about her) that he came to believe that Salander, and the baroque background he dreamt up for her, would be enough to bring his readers along for the balance of the trilogy. Millions of the misguided have proved Larsson right, but your reviewer sticks to his opinion: Salander’s legend was allowed to overwhelm the story — and it wrecked it.

Mind you, as baroque backgrounds go, Salander’s is a doozy. It ranges far from the obligatory wretched childhood, venturing into territory that the borrowed 007 could easily call his own, all the while retaining an aura of suspicion and resentment that has a lot to do with the author, and not much with the plot. To read Larsson is to be given the impression of a Sweden where a handful of dedicated comrades struggle for their vision of justice against the overwhelming power of the Man. Given how much of Sweden’s ancient Social Democratic consensus still lingers on (notwithstanding any impression left by the recent election results), that is still, unfortunately, something of a stretch.

Nevertheless, Larsson sometimes allows a glimpse of a more authentic Sweden to slip through, something that will add to the interest in his writing to those living outside that remote Nordic bastion. Some of it — the leniency of the criminal justice system when compared with the American model — ought to take nobody aback, but other aspects will be more surprising. Henrik Vanger, an aged and ailing industrial titan, is allowed to come across as a sympathetic figure, a reminder that in Sweden — home, after all, of the powerful Wallenberg dynasty — social democracy has traditionally come with a notably corporatist tinge. It is the “yuppies” (itself a tellingly dated term), assertive, individualistic, and disruptive of time-honored Swedish ways, to whom both Larsson and Blomkvist object. The grandees who had run the companies that actually made things were fine: The “twenty-point stags of the old school” knew their place in the old consensual nation — even if it was close to the top of the tree.

Some may be taken aback by how ethnically diverse Larsson’s Stockholm turns out to be. In part, this is simply a reflection of the facts on the ground (nearly a fifth of the Swedish population is either foreign-born or a child of two foreign-born parents), but in part this glorious northern mosaic was also clearly an attempt by Larsson, much of whose journalistic career was spent in the anti-racist trenches, to remind his Swedish readers that their Folkhem had changed (in this case, the implication is that it’s for the better), a theme frequently echoed by other Nordic detective writers: A muttered racial slur is a good sign that a murderer has arrived on the scene.

But for a more evocative sense of Scandinavian locations alongside Scandinavian mayhem, there are better places to go. Wallander’s atmospheric Ystad is one obvious starting point, as is Jo Nesbø's sharply drawn Oslo, but I’d rather start with The Darkest Room, the sophomore novel by Johan Theorin: a spooky, beautifully written tale of a manor house on a half-deserted Baltic island that is the setting for the most exciting snowstorm I have read in years.

And Trotsky is nowhere to be seen.