Philip Marchand
‘He is, at times, reduced to arguing with strangers late at night on the Internet’
You can count on one thing most Nor t h American reviewers will say about Philip Teir’s novel The Winter War. They will say that it’s proof there’s more to Scandinavian fiction than crime writing.
Which is true. All the more credit to Teir, described in the book’s jacket copy as a “Finland-Swede,” currently resident with his wife and two children in Helsinki. This Finland-Swede can indeed craft a compelling narrative without having to produce a corpse in the first chapter.
His protagonist, Max Paul, is, like the author, a FinlandSwede. The breed seems to be a psychological type known only to Scandinavians — at one point a character comments, “Arguing about a summer cottage? How typically Finland-Swedish is it going to get?” Arguments about summer cottages aside, Paul, a sociologist teaching at a university in Finland, could well be a prime suspect in a murder investigation, for a number of reasons. In his heyday he was a well-known figure in Finnish media, a frequent guest on talk television, known to journalists as the “sex professor,” after having published a study of Finnish sexual practices. It was not the most enviable label but Max, now almost 60, nonetheless misses his notoriety — at times he’s reduced to arguing with strangers late at night on the Internet. So much does he miss his fame that he quickly agrees when an attractive freelance journalist, Laura Lempela, some 30 years his junior, asks for an interview.
The reader quickly gets the feeling that this interview is about more than just the latest trends in Finnish sociology. You can practically feel the pages of the reporter’s notebook curling up with the heat of passion. The interview is also a distraction from his problems — his heavydrinking spouse Katriina, who feels neglected by him, his magnum opus, a scholarly biography of the 19th century Finnish philosopher Edvard Westermarck, which shows no sign of being completed despite the urgings of his publisher. Laura certainly can take a man’s mind off all this. But her motivation, aside from sex, is somewhat of a mystery. If this were indeed a crime novel, Laura Lempela would probably be dead by now, carrying her secret to the grave.
But Teir has set himself a different problem than that of a crime novelist, which is to make his readers care for a rather boring set of characters. Katriina, for example, drowns her sorrows not just in glasses of wine but in a powerful desire for a new, renovated kitchen. Many of the characters would resent being called bourgeois, but the temptations of the bourgeois universe — getting rid of an ugly, old sofa, re-painting the walls so they are “modern and white” — are very much at play.
Two strains of the narrative bring the novel to life. One is Max’s affair with Laura. The other involves Max’s daughter Eva, the younger of their two daughters, and her sojourn at an art school in London. Her instructor, a man named Malik, turns out to be a vehement apostle of contemporary art. From the outset he lays down the law to his pupils. “There are certain words that I never want to hear in my classroom,” he states. “‘Beauty’ is one of them. ‘Sublime’ is another. ‘Masterpiece’ is a third. They are words used by people who think of art in an emotional way.” At another point, in true futurist mode, he proclaims that “a traffic jam is more beautiful than a f--king symphony orchestra.”
Instead of tooling around with easel paintings or clay statues, Malik’s students are mainly engrossed in critique of each other’s work. Underlying all this ferocious criticism is a constant referencing to the corruption of the art world and the role of money in creating art. There is a poignant moment in this narrative when one of Malik’s students named Russ happens on to a print of Vermeer. Despite Malik’s insistence that his students are not there to “paint some f--king Renaissance masterpiece,” Russ is awestruck by the Vermeer. He realizes that no one now could replicate the achievement. “It’s like the only instance in human history when evolution unquestionably moved backward,” he comments.
In its portrayal of a lively male charlatan, as well as a hapless female character, in its attempt to capture the mundane domestic in its transcendent details, and to transform that mundane domestic into a source of feeling, Teir’s work strongly resembles the prose of John Updike. It is true, however, that there is no such carefully described exterior of physical appearance in Teir as there is in Updike, no artful evocation of states of mind through clothing and gesture. The energy generated by the characters comes mostly from intellectuals such as Max Paul trying to summarize their rise and fall over the decades — trying to explain to Laura, for example, the meaning of the sixties and its revolutionary fervour, and the dramatic falling off in the early ’80s of such zealotry. “When the Marxist boom gradually subsided in the early eighties — and then the Berlin Wall came down — we found ourselves at a crossroads,” Max comments. “A number of sociologists turned their attention to manners and customs, or etiquette. In other words, how we use a knife and fork.”
Laura asks Max, “Is the field of sociology no longer sexy?” and Max thinks about it. Max hoped it still was, Teir writes, but he ends on a true Updike note with the forlorn reflection, “Above all, he hoped that he was still sexy.”
The sense faithfully conveyed is that of a malaise greater than the individual’s, of a fall into routine. By contrast there is some idealism and energy displayed in Occupy Movement in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Teir does not ridicule the movement, instead it is favourably compared with a meeting of middle managers, portrayed here as an occasion of soulcrushing boredom and status reinforcement.
Under these circumstances, the discovery of a murdered man might almost come as a relief.