The Ethics of Forgiveness in The Storyteller

In the Epilogue of That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden (2013), I wrote that “not a single SS officer arrested after the war demonstrated any remorse.” I had not yet encountered a perpetrator seeking forgiveness from a victim until I read The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (1969, 1997) by the late concentration camp survivor and Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. He recounts that, while in the camps, he was once assigned to hear the death-bed confession of a SS officer in the hope that he, a Jew, would offer the dying man absolution. Although the young man appeared to show remorse over the crimes in which he had participated in the East, he was also self-centered, as he repeatedly indicated that he was too young to die, and more offensively, he contended that Jews died quickly, whereas, he was suffering a slow death. Wiesenthal offered compassion by holding his hand and by listening, but he remained silent throughout this ordeal. He left without saying a word. That meeting unsettled him and disturbed his equilibrium when he debated with camp inmates the morality of forgiving this man. Two years later, his companions are all dead but that encounter with the SS officer continued to preoccupy him and invaded his dreams as he talked about it again. After the war, he visited the young man’s mother to hear her story about her “good son” who would never have committed the crimes that she had heard about. He decided not to compound the woman’s sufferings by disabusing her of her ideas. Wiesenthal came to the conclusion that the only individuals who could offer forgiveness were those who had directly suffered from a perpetrator’s actions. He also noted that twenty five years later at the Stuttgart trials only one of the accused acknowledged his crimes and showed contrition; the rest challenged what the victims said and, according to Wiesenthal, only regretted that there were survivors to testify against them.

Wiesenthal’s book came to my attention when I read The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult (Emily Bestler Books, 2013), who begins her acknowledgments by indicating that his book was the genesis for her exploration of the moral and philosophical conundrums he raised if the same request was made decades later by a perpetrator to a Jew. Picoult, a prolific writer, is a novelist of twenty books who focuses on the family by addressing current controversial issues, among them: gay relationships, the dissolution of professional and personal boundaries when one’s child is a victim of sexual abuse, the dilemmas posed by contentious medical procedures and school shootings. The Storyteller may be her most ambitious and layered work. The novel begins with a dark fairy tale, reminiscent of a story told by the Grimm brothers or Hans Christian Anderson. A young woman falls in love with a vampire-like creature called the upior who terrorizes the town and may have killed the girl’s father. This tale is woven in and out throughout and we are not certain of its significance until later in the novel when it becomes clear that this allegory was written by a Holocaust survivor, Minka, the grandmother of a young woman, Sage Singer, whose viewpoint anchors the present-day account.

The Legacy of Fascism: Jo Nesbo’s Redbreast

Given that the English translation of the second novel in the Harry Hole series, The Cockroaches, will be released sometime in 2013, it seems appropriate to wait to review the entire series. In the meantime, because of its specific theme, I offer a few reflections on Nesbo’s Redbreast (Random House, 2006)

Readers of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) will recall that some of the elder members of the dysfunctional Vanger family retained pronounced Nazi sympathies and that the family business once had strong ties with Nazi Germany. In Redbreast, Jo Nesbo investigates the role played by Nazism in Norway in World War II and its ripple effects down to the Millennium present. In particular Nesbo sets out to challenge the national myth that according to one character the Norwegian population was “fighting shoulder to shoulder against Nazism.” Nesbo achieves this feat of dispelling the national self-image through multiple switches in time, place and points of view.

This story has personal resonance for Nesbo, a former stock broker and still part time lead singer in a rock group. Before his parents met each other, his father had been among the seven thousand Norwegians who volunteered to fight alongside the Nazis against the Communists on the Eastern Front. His mother remained in Norway throughout the war and was a member of the national resistance. When his father returned home, he was branded as a traitor and spent three years in prison.

The Perils of a Double Life in the Spy Thrillers of Charles Cumming

Author Charles Cumming.

What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?

– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. 

The good spies are invariably introspective and thoughtful.

– Charles Cumming.

Lying and duplicity are essential traits if a spy is to practice his tradecraft of espionage. As a result, he could be like Alec Milius, the central character of the Scottish writer, Charles Cumming’s debut novel, A Spy by Nature (2001) and his later book, The Spanish Game (2006). Milius is a self-absorbed opportunist whose motivation, rather than being ideological, is financial gain and the “kick and the buzz” from the adrenalin that flows from being in the game. Similarly, the self-serving CIA agent, Miles Coolidge, in Typhoon (2008) disregards official CIA policy by organizing clandestine terrorist attacks in order to destabilize China on the eve of the Beijing Olympics. Yet one of the many virtues of reading a Cumming’s thriller is his multifaceted depiction of intelligent agents. Take, for example, Joe Lennox, the British agent operating under deep cover in Hong Kong in Typhoon. Despite his criticism of Bush and Blair for the fiasco in Iraq, Lennox is a patriot who believes in Queen and Country and the importance of safeguarding Western values. Thomas Kell, who has been sacked from SIS (MI6) because of a torture scandal in Kabul and the protagonist of Cumming’s most recent novel, A Foreign Country (St. Martin’s Press, 2012), is equally a complex figure. Like all of Cumming’s spies, Kell cannot conceive of an alternative to working in the secret world. Nonetheless, he is disturbed by his own passive complicity in the aggressive CIA interrogation of a terrorist suspect and his willingness to agree to the outsourcing of torture so that others could do the dirty work. When given another opportunity to interrogate a kidnapper who knows the whereabouts of an innocent man whose life is at stake, Kell redeems himself. He conducts an interview à la the real life former FBI officer, Ali Soufan, who managed to achieve astonishing intelligence results by “rapport building” and treating the terrorist suspect with respect rather than resorting to aggressive methods that Soufan considered were often counterproductive. Kell’s interrogation similarly achieves desirable results and demonstrates that agents can do their work without trashing the principles that some of them profess to believe in. He is simultaneously critical of leftists who demonstrate “their own unimpeachable moral conduct, at the expense of the very people who were striving to keep them safe in their beds.”

Working in the shadows where duplicity is a way of life does carry a high price, particularly for those who do not possess a moral compass. In Spy by Nature that focuses on industrial espionage, Alec Milius is given his first assignment at a British oil company to establish a personal relationship with two American CIA officers working undercover at a rival oil company and feed them disinformation about the Caspian Sea area. They in turn try to turn him into a double agent with the lure of a huge amount of money. Because of his greed, he recklessly overplays his hand by participating in a sting operation against the CIA. Disastrous results ensue not only because he earns the enmity of both agencies – he becomes the convenient scapegoat for SIS when British relations with the “Cousins” become strained – but he likely caused three civilian deaths, one of them is his former fiancé. He also has no qualms about risking the life of his only friend, Saul Ricken, by entrusting his secrets to him as a guarantee against CIA retaliation. 

Subterranean Mysteries: Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache Procedurals

Some feeling that had once between human and natural had twisted. Become grotesque. Had turned sour and corrosive until its container had eaten away. Until the human barely existed.

– Louise Penny, The Cruellest Month.

Louise Penny is a master at articulating and exploring corrosive emotions – jealously, bitterness, hatred and revenge – as well as joy and grief. The resolution of a murder by Chief Inspector of Homicide, Armand Gamache and his team, which she expertly accomplishes, is what garners to Penny legions of readers. What I find most compelling about her work is not discovering the identity of the murderer but how she explores the range of emotions in the character of the empathetic Gamache. She goes even further in examining the emotional dynamics between him, his team and his superiors, and the captivating denizens of the hamlet of Three Pines in the Quebec Eastern Townships. They feature in all of Penny’s eight novels except her most recent, The Beautiful Mystery (Minotaur, 2012).

In her debut novel, Still Life, Penny reveals a piece of information about Gamache that powerfully reverberates throughout the subsequent novels. He broke rank by investigating a senior officer in the Sûreté du Quebec who had ordered the murder of natives. The officer was convicted and he and his friends on the force are determined to destroy Gamache. Although Gamache has achieved an almost perfect record in solving homicides, he will never be promoted and has been excluded from the confidences of the top inner circle, something that Gamache fully understands given that actions have consequences. Nonetheless, he is a contented man, happily married and maintains a good relationship with his adult son and daughter. Penny hints in the first two novels that there may be agents de provocateurs in Gamache’s team who are working to undermine him. By the third novel, The Cruellest Month, I found the tension so gripping that I skipped ahead not to find out the identity of the killer but to those passages about how this subplot would play out. Then I was able to return my attention to murder investigation itself.

Bad Things Happen: Arnaldur Indridason’s Black Skies

Nothing comes without consequences - Charles Ferguson's 2010 Inside Job.

In a 2008 interview with the CBC’s Michael Enright, the Swedish novelist, Henning Mankell, commented that the vast majority of lawbreakers are not evil but that they get caught up in evil circumstances. I thought about Mankell’s musing while reading the Icelandic novelist, Arnaldur Indridason’s most recent police procedural (published in English) Black Skies (Harvill Secker, 2012) since greed, fear of public disgrace and revenge for a terrible injustice committed years earlier provide the motivation for the murders committed. In Arnaldur’s (in Iceland everyone is known by his first name) oeuvre, he is primarily concerned about domestic and social issues, and how the harsh Icelandic climate can affect people. Bad things happen when people make ill-considered decisions. He does feature psychopaths but they are frequently murdered, sometimes decades later, as a result of their incessant abuse of others.

From Jar City (2004) to Hypothermia (2009), Arnaldur’s brooding but resourceful loner, Erlander, is the senior member of the police investigation team. Burdened with guilt because of an incident in which he lost contact with his younger brother in a storm, compounded by having abandoned his wife and two young children years later, he tries in Silence of the Grave to explain to his almost comatose drug-addled daughter who has tracked him down after over twenty years that “he had been battling against that blizzard for all his life and all the passage of time did was to intensify it.” Yet in his professional life, Erlander draws upon that pain to crack open cases that were perpetrated years earlier in Silence and The Draining Lake or relive his personal tragedy in Voices so that he can salvage his daughter’s life in the present. He is assisted by the capable Elinborg, who successfully juggles her career with managing a family, and by Sigurdur Oli, a graduate of criminology from an American university, even though he is hampered by a stiff-necked personality with rigid attitudes. When Outrage begins with the murder of a young man with a rape drug in his possession, Erlander is on leave to wrestle with personal demons and the case is assigned to Elinborg, who is particularly astute in investigating cases of sexual abuse. At the same time that she is working on that investigation, Sigurdur Oli is at the centre of two cases that are the focus in Black Skies.

The Murder Gene: Defending Jacob, We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Good Father

There is a general belief that having a genetic predisposition for violent behaviour and growing up in an aggressive environment can be lethal. In the novels Defending Jacob by William Landay (Delacorte Books, 2012), We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver (Counterpoint 2003) and The Good Father by Noah Hawley (Double Day 2012), the second condition is absent yet horrific crimes are perpetrated. The mystery is not about the identity of the perpetrators – in two of them the reader is informed at the outset and in the third, early on he has a sneaking suspicion – but rather why these murders were committed, to what extent genes play a role and, perhaps most interesting, the response of the fathers when their sons are charged with murder.

The science of behavioral genetics is most explicitly raised in Defending Jacob when the fourteen year old son of the Assistant DA, Andy Barber, is accused of knifing a classmate to death. Although Andy is a successful lawyer, who with his wife, Laurie, and their son, Jacob, enjoys a comfortable suburban lifestyle until the son’s arrest, he harbours a secret that he has never told his family. His own father, whom he has not seen since he was a child is serving a life term for murder, and his grandfather and great-grandfather were violent men, both incarcerated for many years. With Jacob’s trial approaching and the possibility that his family history will be raised, he has no choice but to inform his family. They visit a scientist, who, while assuring them that “predisposition is not predestination,” solicits a DNA test from the three generations to determine whether their genes might be encoded for violence. Although Andy considers this “junk science,” he accedes to the request even though he insists that he has never been violent at any time in his life. That may or may not be true but in his understandable belief that Jacob is innocent, he will do anything to prove it. 

The Gothic Mode in That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden

On Thursday, March 7th, between 6 and 8pm, at Ben McNally Books 366 Bay St. (Richmond and Bay) in Toronto, Bob Douglas of Critics at Large launches the second volume of his study of the Gothic mode in history, That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden. Today we feature a specially prepared excerpt from the new volume.

When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul.

– Former CIA officer. Quoted by Jane Mayer

Gothic is a mode – perhaps the mode – of unofficial history. 

– Literature of Terror by David Punter.

Gothic texts frequently chart the trajectory of individuals who suppress or lack the capacity to empathize with others. Similarly, when individuals in the larger world succumb to an ideological virus, neither experience nor reality can disrupt their single-minded quest to achieve utopia. Their narrative often includes sanctioning the emotional humiliation and the physical assault upon people they consider non-persons. If intended victims are regarded as vermin or parasites that must be eliminated, moral restraints to cold-blooded violence are atrophied, if not abandoned. The Gothic mode employs filters – the demonization of the other, the double or a sinister duality, psychic vampirism, the obsession with bloodlines – to explore how individuals and groups inspired by an ideology or opportunism can lose their moral compass and descend into a gray if not dark zone. In Gothic fiction ethical codes “operate at best in distorted forms.” The same can be said of totalitarian states and the militant Islamists. In a chapter from The Dictators titled, “The Moral Universe of Dictatorship,” Richard Overy argues that the Nazis and the Stalinists adopted an extreme moral relativism that subsumed individual conscience into the collective will, one that was driven solely by ideological imperatives. Just as moral elites like the church and the law were co-opted or destroyed by Nazi and Soviet ideology, the original meaning of the Quran is lost, even repudiated by the actions of militant Islamists.

The Alternative World in Stephen Carter’s The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

One of the most popular leitmotifs of the what-if alternative historical novel focuses on delineating an imaginary world had the Nazis won the Second World War. Two outstanding examples are The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick set in 1962 America and Fatherland by Robert Harris set in 1964 Germany. In the former, most of America is living under fascist rule, most American Jews have been murdered and the main characters gladly embrace the new reality. (A compelling subplot is about a banned underground novel reputedly written by an individual in a fortified castle who writes an alternative history about the Nazis losing the war. Readers are entertained but consider it farfetched.) In the latter, the Nazis, who are in perpetual war with the hordes of Russia are preparing for the visit of the American President, Joseph Kennedy, and an agreement that would signal a rapprochement between the world’s pre-eminent powers.

Another leitmotif is how would America be different had the South won the Civil War. One gem for this alternative history is the 1953 publication of Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore. In the novel’s first sentence, the narrator states, “Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921.” It must be one of the strangest sentences in American fiction. But it makes sense when the novel is mainly set during the first half of the twentieth century. Moore’s conjured America is one of bleakness and of hopelessness with a hobbled economy and heightened social tensions. Confederate citizens rule over Northern subjects. Blacks, Asians and Jews are pressured to emigrate and indentured servitude prevails in the industrial centres. The major character, Hodge Backmaker, is fortunate to spend seven years living in a communal haven of creative people who would have been regarded as pariahs in the coarser society beyond its confines. As a history scholar specializing in the “War of Southrun Independence,” Hodge is given the opportunity to time travel to the site of the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the decisive battle that, in this alternative history, ensured southern victory. He is, however, warned that he must remain an observer. Inadvertently, he does become involved and with one altercation he wipes out his own personal history and changes the course of the war. Unlike the protagonist school teacher in Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (Simon & Schuster, 2011), who is able to retreat from 1963 America to the present, Ward’s time traveller cannot return to his former life living with his wife and fellow intellectuals. He is destined to live out his life in an America that resembles the historical reality of the late nineteenth century but one wherein he feels estranged and is regarded as an oddball eccentric.

author Stephen L. Carter

With the caveat that The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) is not about the south winning the Civil War, it does follow in the tradition of writing an alternative history. Its premise is that Lincoln recovered from his wounds inflicted by John Wilkes Booth but his vice president Andrew Johnson did not. Failing to become a martyr, Lincoln becomes politically vulnerable. Like his weaker successor, the historical Johnson, Carter’s Lincoln becomes the target for an impeachment trial led by the Radical Republicans who contend that the “tyrant” did not sufficiently protect the freedmen and that he intended to usurp the powers of Congress. As he did with his previous four novels, Carter combines a murder mystery, a spy thriller and a courtroom drama. Part of the trial itself adheres to the historical record of Johnson’s impeachment trial, and sometimes the novel feels weighted down by the rules of evidence and the minutia of the court proceedings that Carter as a Yale law professor intimately knows.

Kirk Wallander’s Last Hurrah: Henning Mankell’s The Troubled Man

"The genre is often misunderstood. It is not just about finding out whodunit, it is about understanding the world through the lens of crime and justice."

- Henning Mankell as reported by Alison Gzowski in The Globe and Mail, March 28, 2011.

Kurt Wallander is a forty-year-old police detective whose personal life is unravelling: his marriage is over; he is estranged from his daughter, Linda, and his visits to his curmudgeonly father, who has never forgiven him for joining the police force, are fraught with tension. Wallander drinks too much, a condition that puts his professional life in jeopardy. His mentor on the police force is dying. Moreover, he is convinced that Sweden is changing for the worse. It is becoming more violent: a group of youths set fire to a refugee camp, a Somali refugee is murdered and an elderly couple is tortured to death. Before the woman dies, she utters one word “foreigner.” Wallander believes that the official asylum policy is a mess as opportunists are conflated with bona fide refugees; the absence of any distinction makes it easier for nationalists and racists to tar all foreigners.

The foregoing is the gist of Faceless Killers, the first of ten Wallander novels (excluding those in which Wallander is a minor character) culminating in The Troubled Man (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) that has deservedly earned vast international critical acclaim and commercial sales. Besides his lucid writing, two reasons may explain why Henning Mankell, particularly his Wallander novels, is the most widely known Swedish writer since August Strindberg. As suggested above, Mankell believes that a once homogeneous society of civic minded citizens, who supported its once humanitarian ideals and progressive social policies, proud of being the moral conscience on the international stage, was disappearing before an increasingly multicultural society in which violent crime had connections with growing globalization and the seismic changes resulting from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. 

In The White Lioness, the murder of a Swedish woman is linked with killers who were former KGB officers, and South African apartheid supporters are using Wallander’s homeland as a base to prepare for an assassination of Nelson Mandela to incite a civil war in South Africa. Sweden is chosen because as the fascist Boer explains, it “is a neutral insignificant country...[where] the border controls are pretty casual.” (Some of the action occurs in South Africa which Mankell knows well since he divides his time between Sweden and Mozambique where he heads the national theatre.) In The Man Who Smiled, he investigates a powerful businessman, regarded as a pillar of the community, who may be involved in the transplant of body organs from individuals specifically killed for that purpose. No wonder in One Step Behind, Wallander muses: “Irrational violence was almost an accepted part of daily life these days….Bosnia had always seemed so far away, he thought. But maybe it was closer than they realized.” Mankell is superb in the manner with which he demythologizes Sweden, the benign liberal country.

Ghosts and the Past: James Lee Burke's Creole Belle

The past is never dead. It's not even past. – William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951).

In the epilogue of Crusader’s Cross, the tough but sympathetic Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux, muses that “age brings few gifts, but one of them is the acceptance that the past is the past.” This comforting illusion belies James Lee Burke’s oeuvre in the hard-boiled Robicheaux novels set in the Louisiana bayous near New Orleans. This series is characterized by its vivid evocation of the region and its culture, deeply flawed individuals and institutions on both sides of the law, its gritty patois and philosophical reflections. From the first instalment  The Neon Rain, to his eighteenth and most recent, Creole Belle (Simon & Schuster, 2012), the past, both his personal and the country’s troubled history, not only informs his world view but fuels his daily reliance on instinct and his dogged pursuit of the purveyors of evil. The post-traumatic stress that Robicheaux experienced after Vietnam shadows every novel. The past revisits him through memory, dreams and spectral appearances that conflate his perception, real and imagined, and often serve his search for clarity. In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, while investigating a murder spree of butchered young women, which in Robicheaux’s mind is connected to a 1957 murder of a black man, he converses in dream-like scenes with the ghost of General John Bell Hood, a battlefield officer during the Civil War who admits that he served “a repellent cause.” The officer serves as a spiritual mentor to advise Robicheaux that violence outside the law may only be justified if loved ones are endangered and to remind him that racially-motivated crimes are rooted in the catastrophic failure of Reconstruction.

Nuanced Noir: The Killing (The Danish Version)

Recently, an article in The New Yorker profiled the popularity of Danish television in the UK. They focused particularly on three programs: Borgen, a political thriller; The Bridge, a police procedural; and The Killing, a show that is both a political thriller and a police procedural. But The Killing also adds a third element which is domestic drama. The author, Lauren Collins, collectively describes them as “a minutely detailed diorama of urban life” comparable to The Wire. With respect to The Killing, the only Danish program that I have seen, the analogy seems apt given its multiple narratives, its town-hall corruption and its exploration of social tensions.

The popularity of The Killing (or Forbrydelsen) in the UK is undeniable. Over the course of the first season broadcast in the fall of 2011, audience ratings doubled. When the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall during their Scandinavian tour in March 2012 arrived in Copenhagen, the Duchess expressed a wish to visit the set of The Killing where she was received by both the cast and crew. Given that the American remake of the program, relocated to Seattle that resulted in at best mixed reviews (I have not seen this version), is the first season of the original series good enough to invest twenty hours of your time? I think a case can be made that The Killing is exceptional television and that viewers are richly rewarded.

Lars Kepler & the Swedish Procedural

Lars Kepler (aka Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandre Coelho)

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Bob Douglas, to our group.

Swedish mysteries/thrillers are currently enjoying exceptional popularity with international audiences. The trend began in the 1960s and 70s with the ten-novel Report of a Crime series by the husband and wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö who used the crime genre to undertake a forensic examination of the dream of social democracy in Swedish society. Henning Mankell, who has publicly acknowledged his debt to Sjöwall and Wahlöö, continued in that vein during the 1990s with his Kurt Wallander novels whereby he revealed Sweden to be increasingly racist, xenophobic and intolerant of immigrants. Building on his experience as a crusading journalist who exposed far right organizations in Swedish society, Stieg Larsson brought this tradition to fruition with his Millennium trilogy that laid bare the corrupt underpinnings of government agencies. In the process, he introduced a new type of character into crime fiction: a damaged, brutalized young woman with no social skills but who possessed extraordinary computer skills and knew how to exact revenge on those who perpetrated violence against women. Despite some turgid writing, much inferior to that of Mankell, he achieved vast commercial success with his three mass-market blockbuster thrillers that led to Swedish film adaptations and a superior American remake of the first novel. One result of the Larsson phenomenon is that other writers have abandoned the social criticism and returned to the police procedural with an eye to producing a book that can be adapted for an international audience.