Wednesday, December 6, 2017

The Shadow District (Book) (2017)

The Shadow District, by Arnaldur Indridason
Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb
New York, NY: Minotaur Books, 2017
Originally published in Iceland with the title Skuggasund in 2013

List of main characters:
Stephan Thorson/Stefán Thórdarson
Flóvent
Ingiborg Ísleifsdóttir
Konrád
Rósamunda
Hrund, the woman from the north

The Shadow District: Murder, Folktales, Women’s Issues

I’m repeating the copy on the inside front cover flap of The Shadow District for two reasons: (1) It sums up the plot rather well, and (2) I found the “missing link” the most compelling feature of this new book from Arnaldur Indridason, although the term is not used in the novel that I can recall. In any case, here is the inside front cover copy:
THE PAST: In wartime Reykjavik, Iceland, a young woman is found strangled in “the Shadow District,” a rough and dangerous area of the city. An Icelandic detective and a member of the American military police are on the trail of a brutal killer.
THE PRESENT: A ninety-year-old man is discovered dead on his bed, smothered with his own pillow. Konrád, a former detective now bored with retirement, finds newspaper cuttings in the dead man’s home about the World War II Shadow District murder. It’s a crime that Konrád remembers, having grown up in the same neighborhood.
A MISSING LINK: Why, after all this time, would an old crime resurface? Did the police arrest the wrong man? Will Konrád’s link to the past help him solve the case and finally lay the ghosts of World War II Reykjavik to rest?

I read The Shadow District in three or four days because I was completely absorbed by the narrative, which skillfully interweaves the two stories, one from the past, during World War II, and one from the present. But a day or two after I finished reading the novel, I found myself thinking about the so-called missing link more and more. The missing link comes in the form of a folktale: The man who rapes two women tells them both that they can blame the huldufólk, “or ‘hidden people,’ as the elves were known (page 40),” for his crimes. These clues from the killer are revealed in roundabout ways, but two detectives working on the past case and one working on the present case use these clues to pursue their respective investigations.

The English translation reveals simple, clear prose about heartbreaking stories. The author lets the characters reveal plot details in their own time. A total of three investigators, two from the past and one from the present, are honest and hardworking: They are simply trying to get at the truth.
Flóvent saw the instant recognition. Saw from the way the hope died in their eyes that she [Rósamunda] was their missing daughter. (page 62)
I thought these last two lines, the last paragraph, from Chapter 10, told from the point of view of one of the investigators from the past, summed up the mood of the novel: the despair over the loss of a child and the sympathy and compassion that the investigators felt in finding justice for the parents of the victim.

The tension builds, not so much because of a sense of violence to come but because the narrative follows the uncovering of secrets and clues in both plot threads that are obviously connected across time. The Shadow District is more than a story about two related murder investigations, however. It’s a story about social upheaval as a result of World War II, the societal changes that some welcomed and others feared, and the ways that women dealt with these changes while being blamed for them.

Very early in the novel, in Chapter 2, Indridason explains for readers what living in Reykjavik, Iceland, was like after the start of World War II:
. . . At the beginning of the war Reykjavik had had a population of forty thousand, but since then tens of thousands of servicemen had poured into the town. Liaisons between soldiers and Icelandic women were inevitable with the arrival of the Tommies [British soldiers], and they rapidly increased in number when the Tommies were succeeded by the Yanks, who, with smarter uniforms, more money and better manners, were almost like film stars to the locals. Language was no barrier—the language of romance was universal. But such was the resulting moral panic that a committee was set up to deal with this scandalous state of affairs which came to be known, in all its manifestations, as the Situation. (pages 7–8)
World War II brought social upheaval for the citizens of Reykjavik, as one might expect. The influx of so many foreign soldiers turned everything upside down, and women were able to take advantage of the changes in many ways. They found new romantic partners, and they found employment in the war industries. The economic freedom that came with steady work and a steady paycheck meant that women had more choices, and some men in Iceland, and the killer in particular, resented the changes.

(This blog post about the novel The Shadow District contains spoilers.)

The killer hijacks Icelandic folktales to defend his crimes against two women. Indridason, the author, makes the case, through the chief suspect, Jónatan (in the first murder investigation during World War II), for Icelandic folktales being the creation of women. They were handed down by women, from mother to daughter, as a way to deal with the harsh realities of their lives in Iceland. Jónatan is studying Icelandic and history, and he knows a lot about Icelandic folktales. He also has some insight into their utility for women. He discusses what he knows with Thorson and Flóvent, the two detectives investigating the case in the past:
“Yes. Of course. Not that I’m [Jónatan] familiar with the type of malevolence you’re referring to in tales of the huldufólk. After all, they’re mostly told by women, passed down from mother to daughter. That’s essentially how they’ve survived. And because they’ve been kept alive by women, they reflect a female view of the world, feature concerns close to their hearts. They tend to be stories about faithless lovers, childbearing, the exposure of infants.”
                “Exposure of infants?” queried Flóvent.
                “Some things don’t change much.”
                “What do you mean?” asked Thorson.
                Jónatan looked from one of them to the other, seeking to make himself understood. “The stories often describe the harsh lot of women. Such as giving birth to a child out of wedlock and being forced to dispose of it. Exposure of infants was the abortion of its day. Naturally it would have been a harrowing experience and huldufólk stories were a way of glossing over the harsh reality and easing the mental anguish. They offered an alternative world in which women have children with handsome, gentle men of the hidden race, who are the antithesis of their brutish human counterparts. The infants are left out in the open for their fathers to find, and grow up, cherished, among their father’s people, and may even return one day to the human world. In other words, the stories serve to alleviate a destressing experience.”
                “Handsome, gentle men?” repeated Thorson.
                “Like the Yanks,” said Jónatan.
                “Are they the new huldufólk?”
                “In a manner of speaking.”
                “How do you feel about that?” asked Thorson.
                                “Me? I don’t have an opinion.” (pages 231–232)
Jónatan’s knowledge and insight are exactly what bring him to the attention of Thorson and Flóvent. Only someone who knows a lot about Icelandic folklore would have used the information to convince two women to lie about what had happened to them.

If I have any complaint about The Shadow District, it’s that the novel and the stories about the various women in it are told almost always from the perspective of male characters. It’s not a major complaint because I found the compassion displayed by most of the male characters refreshing. But the women, especially the older women, are often portrayed as angry and cranky, with the men reacting as though their feelings are inappropriate. Here’s an example from the end of the novel, when the detective Konrád talks to his sister Beta about their father, who was a petty criminal and a domestic abuser:
                “It’s called domestic violence, Konrád. She [their mother] fled all the way east to Seydisfjördur. He only hung on to you to get even with her. That was typical. He was a nasty piece of work, Konrád. He drank, he was violent and got sucked into crime.”
                “I know all that, I was there, remember? It was ugly, and I’ve never forgiven him for what he did to Mum.”
                “Yet you’ve always tried to defend him! You’re always trying to find excuses for him. Like that Benjamín did, and his father before him.”
                “That’s not the same—”
                “Yes, it is,” said Beta. “You bloody men, you’re all the same. Too bloody spineless to face up to the truth.”
                                “Calm down,” said Konrád. (pages 340–341)
Beta has many good reasons for being angry with her father, and her brother Konrád doesn’t sound like he’s willing to take her seriously when he tells her to calm down. But this exchange comes at the end of the novel, which is promised to be the first in a series, presumably about the detective Konrád. Is it possible that Konrád will understand his sister’s point of view in future installments?

Will Indridason continue the themes introduced in this first book in the series? Will he continue to use folktales and allow female characters, instead of men, to interpret them for readers? The way that Indridason ends the novel is both a final wrap-up and perhaps a clue about where he intends to go next:
Deep in a remote cleft in the lava, too deep for the roar of the waterfall to reach, lies the realm of eternal cold and darkness. The cleft narrows as it deepens, its rugged walls sheer and perilous, its depths inaccessible even to raven and fox. The walls are over grown with ferns and mosses, down which water seeps from the nearby springs, transforming the fissure into a fairy-tale palace in frosty weather. At the bottom a cold silence reigns, which neither the moaning of the wind nor the crying of birds can break, ensuring that the palace’s only guest, the unfortunate elf maiden, never wakes from her long sleep. (page 344)
These last lines (which form both the last paragraph and the last chapter) bring readers back to the folktale theme—the missing link—that held my attention while reading The Shadow District and left me wondering once I finished. I want to read the next installment to see if any of my questions are answered.

The next book in the series, The Shadow Killer, will be published in March 2018 in English translation (click here for more information). Click here for more information at Wikipedia about the author Arnaldur Indridason.

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