“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: CELL 8 by Roslund & Hellström

I don’t know about you, but whenever I get in the mood for a good old-fashioned sermon, I amble on down to my local church. It doesn’t happen that often, I have to say, for a variety of reasons, the main one being that I generally like to make up my own mind on the big issues.
That’s not really an option in CELL 8, the new title from the Swedish writing duo, Roslund   & Hellström, whose THREE SECONDS was a runaway success last year. CELL 8 opens, in a section titled ‘Then’, with a man called John on Death Row. John’s friend, Marv, is about to be executed. The story then opens up into a section titled ‘Now’, in which singer called John, working on a ferry headed for Stockholm, viciously assaults a ferry passenger whom he sees sexually groping a fellow passenger.
  The novel then introduces Ewert Grens, a Stockholm police detective who investigates the potentially fatal assault on the ferry passenger. It is quickly established that John Schwarz, the man responsible for assaulting the passenger, is an American living in Sweden on a false passport. It is further discovered that Schwarz is in fact John Meyer, a man who died some years previously of a heart attack while on Death Row in Ohio.
  The hows and whys are explored during the rest of the novel, although plot is secondary to theme in CELL 8, which is an extreme example of a certain kind of contemporary crime fiction, wherein which a story is grafted onto the bare bones of a polemic. In essence, Roslund and Hellstrom have constructed a lecture on the evils of the death penalty, and the even worse evil of Sweden conspiring to send a murderer to Death Row, and dressed it up as a novel.
  It’s a prescriptive kind of fiction, the kind beloved of a certain kind of middle-class writer and reader, and one in which no one is left in no doubt as to where the authors stand vis-à-vis the high moral ground. According to Roslund & Hellstrom, the death penalty is A Very Bad Thing, regardless of the kind of criminal sentenced to death.
  It’s disappointing, for example, that the authors go out of their way to assert the innocence of John Meyer, so that the reader is never given the opportunity to question their position. CELL 8 would have been a much more interesting read, and the characters far more complex, had the Swedish police detectives found themselves in a position whereby they were resisting the extradition of a recidivist child rapist-murderer, for example. It might also have been more interesting had one of the Swedish characters broken ranks to voice an opinion other than the standard liberal line, but again, all four characters are resolute in their opposition.
  In fact, there is very little conflict at play here. The authors presume that the reader is as fully supportive of a ban on the death penalty as they are, and proceed to sneer at anyone who might think otherwise. The real villain of the piece is the father of the murdered girl, Edward Finnigan, who is demonised for wanting to see the killer of his daughter put to death. So convinced are Roslund and Hellstrom of their moral position, that they go so far as to equate the Swedish authorities’ deportation of Schwarz / Meyer to Russia with sending him to Guantanamo Bay, in the same breath referencing unofficial Swedish collusion with the Nazis during WWII.
  The fact that the two main characters in the novel aren’t particularly interesting doesn’t help matters much. Despite his colourful background, John Schwarz / Meyer is a very limp and passive character, who, suffering from claustrophobia, simply folds under the pressure of being consigned to a cell by the Swedes, and promptly tells them everything they need to know.
  Far more important to Roslund & Hellström is the character of Ewert Grens, who leads the Swedish investigation, and is their voice of liberal reasoning. Unfortunately, Grens is the kind of detective we’ve met far too often in the crime novel. He is a loner who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and treats both his superiors and his own team with contempt. In fact, he considers virtually everyone else on the planet to be an idiot. Despite the fact that Grens is ostensibly overburdened with a workload, he is most irritable when he is interrupted from listening to his favourite music in his office, to which on occasion he can be found dancing to, alone. Grens, presumably, is intended to be a quirky, rule-breaking maverick, but he comes across as petulant, unprofessional and, given his lack of empathy for the rest of the human race bar his wife, who lives semi-comatose in a nursing home, utterly unsuited for his job. Ewert Grens is probably the least convincing character I’ve read in a novel in years.
  These things might be forgivable if the plot was sufficiently interesting that characterisation isn’t an issue. Again, and while the story moves along quickly enough, it grows ever more implausible as it gains pace. Once the authors confirm that Schwarz and Meyer are the same man, they replace that mystery with a measure of narrative tension by claiming that the USA will consider it a major diplomatic incident if Sweden doesn’t hand over Schwarz / Meyer in a matter of days, as opposed to the months and even years such things take in real life.
  Even if you do buy into that scenario, however, the latter stages of the novel are - literally - laughably preposterous. I won’t give away any spoilers, but had the Tooth Fairy turned up to play a part, it would be scarcely less believable.
  In essence, CELL 8 is a lecture on how the world would be a much better place if only we all conformed to the authors’ principles. The novel is overly concerned with how we should live, whereas good crime fiction - or any kind of novel, for that matter - is concerned with the messiness of how we really live, for good or ill, and mostly ill.
  It’s ironic, in fact, that Roslund and Hellström go out of their way to mock Edward Finnigan’s recital of the Biblical dictum of an eye for eye. It may be a liberal polemic against the death penalty, but CELL 8 is no less fuelled by an overweening sense of righteous moral certainty than the Old Testament itself. - Declan Burke

11 comments:

Maxine Clarke said...

Most of the review is fair (I've read this book and my review is waiting to come out at Euro Crime) though it seems you haven't read the previous books (eg you call Anni Gerns's wife instead of colleague/partner).

But Declan, why in a pertinent and on-topic review, have you taken a gratuitous swipe at "the middle classes", with no evidence. I suppose I must be middle class by your definition, but I certainly hate being the reading recipient of moral lecture (I also hated the very similar The Chamber by John Grisham). And you accuse the middle class authors of liking writing moral lectures, hardly! Here for example, one of the RH authors is an ex-convict ex-criminal, hardly middle class! And the other is a journalist like you.)

Similary, many authors whom I have met at festivals and so on seem pretty middle class, and do not write moral lectures in their crime novels.

Your critique of the book is spot-on, though you give away almost the whole so-called story. Pity that the unsubstantiated swipe against many readers and authors spoilt it.

Declan Burke said...

Hi Maxine -

To be fair, what I've said is "the kind beloved of a certain kind of middle-class writer and reader".

And there is 'a certain kind' of writer whose concerns are exclusively those of the middle-class, and the same goes for readers. I'm talking about those who like to write and read prescriptive fiction in order to have their opinion of the world confirmed, rather than challenged.

I'd imagine that most writers and readers of crime fiction are either middle-class, or aspiring to it, myself included. And you're right: most writers don't write prescriptive fiction, which is why I thought it was worth mentioning here.

Cheers, Dec

seana graham said...

I see that you aren't angling for the Nobel Prize anytime soon.

Although that middle-class stood out for me too, I appreciate the clarification and take your larger point. It would have been better to take a more difficult scenario if you're going to write a novel shaming the death penalty.

Strangely, though, I have a feeling this isn't going to hurt Roslund and Hellström's sales any...

Declan Burke said...

Hi Seana -

Well, there's nothing like preaching to the choir if you want to be popular, certainly.

If the novel is about sparking a debate about the death penalty, surely a story in favour of it (or a strong character advocating it) would prompt more of a reaction?

Cheers, Dec

Declan Burke said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
seana graham said...

Of course, it's a much more open question in the U.S. where it's still the law and in fact the majority of Americans support it. Predictably, I do not, but my mom did, and she rather enjoyed exasperating her daughters and the liberal church congregation she belonged to with her stance.She would have been a good model for the opposing view character, actually, because you could never have made her out to be a villain.

Maxine Clarke said...

Am I blind or has the "middle class" bit gone?! I was going to reply to your reply but my memory isn't that great.

seana graham said...

No, it's still there, Maxine. Which is good, because we wouldn't want to play the role of censors, would we?

Karlsson might come after us.

Glenna said...

Declan, I'm disappointed to hear this since I've been looking forward to Cell 8 after reading Box 21 and 3 Seconds. It sounds to be too ordinary to be honest.

seana graham said...

Give it a go, Glenna. Maybe you'll disagree.

I'll read your review.

Glenna said...

Seana, thanks. That is, assuming I get around to writing one, which lately, isn't the case.