The Redbreast

I will confess that it took me a long time to get into Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole series. I started reading the first one a couple months ago and had to abandon it, because it is set in Australia and Hole’s perspective on the place seemed jarring to me. I kept thinking, I speak English, I could just read a novel about Australia by an Australian! Why do I need a Norwegian middleman? It called up the trouble I used to have trying to see foreign movies in France. When you are watching a Taiwanese movie with French subtitles, you start to feel you have added unnecessary layers to the experience.

A similar problem with the second book: it is set in Thailand.

But ah, the third. The third sounded promising. The Redbreast. This one is set entirely in Norway and Russia—and moves back and forth between the recent past (circa 1999) and World War II.

Although the topic was more compelling, I still found the book hard going at first. The thing about Harry Hole is that he’s an anti-hero: he’s an alcoholic who causes chaos around him. The introduction to the character, in the early chapters of the first book, involves him saying ignorant things about indigenous Australians to an indigenous Australian and asking an investigation witness out on a date. I wondered how much of this was a deliberate choice of the author, and how much of it was his own ignorance or sexism bleeding through? The cultural remove added to the uncertainty. In the Norwegian setting, the specific contours of the character did resolve, but only slowly.

In addition to our anti-hero protagonist, The Redbreast is populated with multiple anti-hero suspects. We are introduced to a squad of soldiers who volunteered for a Norwegian contingent of the Waffen-SS, most of whom survive into the novel’s present. Although one is a murderer in 1999, the men as a group are not presented as villains, even as they fight alongside the Germans in SS uniforms. On the contrary. As John Mullan observes:

By presenting the World War II sections from the soldiers’ point of view, Nesbø turns up the discomfort dial to the point where it can only be deliberate. He obviously intends a critique of Norway’s myths about itself, and the convenient forgetfulness that emerged in the wake of the war. Though the nation honors its Resistance, and likes to think of its citizens as victims of the Nazi regime who chafed under occupation and did what they could to bring it to an end, the truth is murkier. The existence of thousands of volunteers who fought for Germany tell a competing tale.

The theme of the resistance myth and the troubling reality of collaboration reminded me of Tony Judt’s work on war and memory. Judt pointed out that “most of occupied Europe either collaborated with the occupying forces (a minority) or accepted with resignation and equanimity the presence and activities of the German forces (a majority).” Judt claims that the idea of widespread resistance was a comforting myth:

To me, Judt’s interpretation doesn’t account for the dynamic quality of German control and the ways that increasing demands on occupied peoples dismantled the kind of resignation and equanimity he was talking about. For instance, the tens of thousands of maquis who took to the hills of southern France trying to evade tightening German labor laws. Or the Danish workers who conducted major strikes to protest harsh conditions, starting a growing spiral of civil disturbance and retaliation. It seems clear, though, that Judt does have some argument. Painful memories of collaboration got buried in favor of more psychologically pleasing glorifications of resistance. Nesbø’s novel offered a challenge to Norwegians, forcing them to consider what really happened during the war. He was forced to confront this buried past himself, when his father sat him down and confessed that he’d fought for the Germans on the Eastern front. The novel borrows heavily from his father’s past.

The Redbreast brings up the myths surrounding the war indirectly, through its treatment of the band of soldiers. It also brings up wartime delusions directly, in the voice of those characters. One reflects:

Despite the careful handling of the soldier characters, the novel does express condemnation of their superiors’ worldview through its portrayal of more recent converts. A neo-Nazi ends up killing the most sympathetic character in the book. Part of Hole’s job involves keeping a lid on skinhead activity in Oslo. Although he can usually find ways to relate to unlikely people, he has a great deal of contempt for the right-wingers he encounters in the course of the story. I assume some of the difference in the portrayal of wartime soldiers and contemporary Nazi thugs is that the former were making their decisions under duress, while the latter are freely choosing their path. Nesbø’s father opted to go to the Eastern front as a way to avoid prison, which he was only facing because of the occupation.

Hole emerges as more of a decent sort than he initially appears. In the beginning of the novel, he is attempting to remain sober, and only falls off the wagon after a traumatic event. Despite his many shortcomings, he is good at his job—more dogged about it than his more ordinary colleagues, we assume, because their outside lives are more full. We see the intensity of his one real friendship, which succeeds in humanizing him. However, it still took me a while to understand why other readers relate to the character, or even how well he worked as an anti-hero. At first, I was most carried along by the novel’s take on Norwegian history. Perhaps the shadow of the first book lingered over this one, or I got a bit lost in the confusion of some of the early action, but it took until about a third of the way through for my interest to really catch. The plot eventually clicked into place as its resemblance to Day of the Jackal became apparent. Hole was out to stop an assassin, and the story’s different parts began to cohere.

I kept writing on this site about films I’d seen rather than books I was reading for a month or two, because I was reading The Redbreast so slowly. I carried it with me to Iceland, but did not crack it open while I was there. Finally, finally, last weekend I got over whatever block I was having about it and then got hooked, finishing the rest of it quickly. I did not immediately understand why this series is so popular. Now, I get it.