So I have this weird preference in that I’ll only read male crime writers from the first half of last century and earlier, but female crime writers from the 1960s onwards. I’ll happily read Conan Doyle, Chandler, Hammett, but avoid Christie, Sayers and Allingham. I’ll happily read Paretsky, Grafton, McDermid, Cody, pretty much any crime novel from the 1970s onwards by a female author, but I’ve no desire to read Rankin, Child, Connelly, not even male Scandinavian noir authors such as Mankell, Nesbø or Nesser.
But it was the fact Fatal Isles (2018, Sweden), by female author Maria Adolfsson, was set in an invented island nation in the North Sea, called Doggerland, which actually caught my attention (after the 99p price point had also caught my attention, that is). It wasn’t until I’d started reading the book I discovered it had originally been published in Swedish, as Felsteg, “false step”. I probably should have tried reading it in Swedish — I may still do so — but reading the book in English proved an interesting exercise anyway… although perhaps not for the reasons the author or translator intended.
Karen Eiken Hornby is a detective in the CID of the police force of Dunker, the capital of Doggerland. The novel opens with her waking up in bed with her boss, after Oistra, an annual, and very drunken, oyster festival. Sort of a bit like Valborg, or Midsommar. That day, said boss’s ex-wife is discovered beaten to death — and Hornby is the closest thing he has to an alibi, and even then she can hardly admit it. She is, however, put in charge of the investigation, as he has to recuse himself.
Fatal Isles is a fairly straightforward police procedural/crime novel, of a type the Scandinavians, and the Brits, have been churning out for decades. What makes the novel more interesting than most of its type is its setting: Doggerland. This invented country consists of three islands midway between Denmark and England, and its culture is a mix of English, Dutch and Danish/Swedish.
It’s not that, the intersection of those different cultures, which is the most interesting aspect of Fatal Isles, however, but rather the way the translator has interpreted, and represented, cultural elements unfamiliar to them, perhaps because they’re obvious to a resident of Sweden but not to a visitor. There are also weird Englishisms in the novel — the opposite effect in reverse.
The book mentions a yellow ferry — in Sweden ferries are painted yellow, but not in the UK. No one in the book uses cash — Sweden has been essentially cashless for almost a decade; this is not true of the UK. Doggerland has pubs, with suitably pubbish names, like the Hare and Crow. There are indeed English pubs in Sweden, including a well-known national chain called The Bishops Arms (Swedish doesn’t use apostrophes).
Apartment buildings in Doggerland have bicycle rooms— which is not true of UK apartment buildings, but is common in Sweden. There is a reference to a “recycling igloo”, and while in Sweden pretty much all apartment buildings have a miljöstation or återvinningsrum for recycling paper, glass, metal, plastic, etc, they contain wheelie-bins, not igloo-shaped skips— that’s an English thing. A number of characters in Fatal Isles use chewing tobacco, but snus, a Swedish thing, is not chewed, it’s a Fisherman’s Friend-sized teabag-like thing full of tobacco which is lodged against the gums — you can see Sofia Helin’s character do this repeatedly in Bron (The Bridge).
Adolfsson clearly wanted to create a society influenced by UK society just as much as it was influenced by Sweden, and to a lesser extent the Netherlands and Germany. But the end result seems almost entirely Swedish… which has then been partly interpreted by a British translator, who was perhaps not wholly familiar with Swedish society, and so only “translated” those elements that seemed familiar to them…
It’s that intersection of, well, cultural blindspots I found most interesting about Fatal Isles. The things the translator felt they needed to “reposition” to be understandable to a UK audience, and the things they left alone because they didn’t understand the cultural significance of that particular piece of background detail… I have the advantage, of course, of knowledge of both cultures (and, more than that, an outsider’s view of both cultures), but to be fair I don’t think Felsteg, as it was originally published, was intended for anything other than a Swedish audience.
Having said that, Adolfsson makes a good fist of her invented island country. The main island, on which most of the story takes place, may come across as a somewhat smaller version of any modern Swedish city with a healthy tourist industry, but the other two islands hint at historical Swedish models that are entirely foreign to a UK reader. I hope they are explored further in later books.
It’s a shame the crime which underlies the novel’s plot is perhaps a little too much of its type, and the characters are all flawed in much the same way as characters in other Scandinavian noir novels. Hornby is fleeing a tragedy. The motive behind the murder lies in the victim’s past — which also ties into the history of the other characters involved in the investigation. It’s slickly done, but we’ve seen it all before. In its favour, its central crime is not so implausibly contrived as those in Scandinavian noir television series, such as Bron.
Doggerland comes across as an interesting place in which to set a series of crime novels. Other crime series — Sue Grafton’s “Alphabet” series, Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski’s novels — rely on their central character for their appeal. Hornby is not strong enough for that, so setting has to serve that role in Fatal Isles and its sequels.
I doubt I’ll bother with the sequels, but I’m tempted to give Felsteg a go so I can compare it with Fatal Isles.
