‘Golden Cage’ a psychological suspense story about vile people doing vile things
Camilla Läckberg has been dubbed “the Swedish Agatha Christie” for her phenomenal success and workhorse output, but Christie — who never, ever wrote about sex — would be aghast at the comparison, particularly given the lewd opening chapter of Läckberg’s latest novel, “The Golden Cage.”
A 30-something trophy wife named Faye Adelheim suspects she may be nearing her expiration date. So for weeks, Faye has been researching Jack’s sexual fantasies by accessing the history on his home computer. Armed with this intel, Faye readies herself in the couple’s luxurious Stockholm apartment for Jack’s return from a business trip.
Läckberg describes the temporarily satisfying results in dirty detail, but we readers already know this marriage can’t be saved, for Läckberg prefaces this sordid sizzler of an opening with a one-page introduction, referring to events that will take place much later in the novel. In that preface, Jack (referred to as Faye’s “ex-husband”), has just been arrested for the murder of the couple’s 7-year-old daughter.
Läckberg has made a career out of writing ingenious psychological suspense stories about vile people doing vile things. In her novels, the world is not “hygge” — that trendy Scandinavian term for cozy. “The Golden Cage” tells a nasty tale about entrenched male domination in a supposedly enlightened society; great wealth and the soul rot it can breed; and the payback — oh, the sweet, sick payback of a woman used and spurned, rising up from the discard pile.
Faye is the malicious centerpiece of this thriller that jumps around in time. A beautiful young woman from the small vacation town of Fjällbacka (where Läckberg herself was born), the teenage Faye arrives in Stockholm to study at the prestigious Stockholm School of Economics. There she meets and falls into an erotic relationship with the charismatic Jack Adelheim. While she’s still in school, Faye collaborates with Jack and his best friend in launching a telemarketing company called Compare that becomes fantastically lucrative. After her marriage to Jack, Faye willingly packs her brains into storage and transforms into a glitzy showpiece. Many years later — after a stunned Faye discovers Jack having sex with another woman and the couple divorces, she will found another, even more successful, company called Revenge.
Läckberg’s prose style (as translated by Neil Smith) is flat and direct. Readers aren’t taxed to unpack imagery or allusive language.
D.H. Lawrence Läckberg is not. Workmanlike titillation aside, the lure of “The Golden Cage” lies in the moral ambiguity of its heroine. There are hints embedded throughout the novel that Faye has perpetrated acts of violence in her childhood and youth, and she lies about her origins. What else may she be holding out on us?
Readers will find out the answer to that overarching question in the very last sentence of this novel. It’s one of those revelations that will make some of us say, “W-h-a-a-a?” I’m one of those readers. Unless I’ve missed some crucial clue, I can’t see how the ending of “The Golden Cage” makes sense. But if you read to the end, you’re probably not primarily concerned with rational satisfactions anyway.