Northern exposure
The coldest reaches of the Northern Hemisphere seem to inspire the darkest, bloodiest crime novels. It’s probably no wonder when you think what it must be like to live much of your existence in an environment so bleak and unforgiving it could kill you within minutes of stepping out of your front door.
Not to mention living half your life in almost utter darkness when the sun doesn’t even get above the horizon does to your psyche. When there’s not much else to do but huddle against the elements that are out to kill you, you might as well unleash your imagination into the darkest depths of hell.
So you know you’re in for a gory treat when you see all those diacritical marks above the vowels — even the title of The Girl Without Skin holds the promise of gore galore. It certainly starts off well — not to mention visually engaging: a mummified corpse is found in the ice and all are agog: Is it an ancient Norseman? What secrets is this long-dead person about to reveal? There are flayings by ulo (a knife used to gut seals) — and not just one. There are missing little girls and a family massacre and a girl with a tattoo.
As the archaeologically significant find of an “iceman” quickly turns into a bloody murder of red-streaked ice and scattered innards, journalist Matt Cave loses the scoop of his lifetime but unwittingly becomes involved in the intergenerational mayhem of incest, murder and revenge.
An almost compulsory feature of the Nordic crime genre is politics; the delicately poised future of quarrelling nations seems to hinge on hiding the bad-boy behaviour of oncewas-murderer now leader of the nation. Along comes a heavily tattooed, recently released young murderess, jailed for but innocent of the murder of her father, mother and two sisters. (No spoiler there: the heroine is always wrongly accused. You know it.)
That The Girl Without Skin has been translated from the original language is clear in the loss of nuance or the detail that doesn’t quite seem to translate between Nordic and Kiwi English. But that lack of translation is something to love for us Kiwis, equally but differently isolated down here in the South Pacific. That people out there think and behave (no, I’m not talking about gutting one’s enemies) so differently to us is exciting.
You pick up a crime novel expecting the unexpected. But the denouement in The Girl Without Skin is so unexpected it’s a little disappointing. The lack of an “ah!” moment as the clues fall into place and the murderer is unveiled leaves me cold. It’s as if author Mads Peder Nordbo revelled in the guts of the story but then needed to quickly tie up the loose ends.