TROUBLE TALE:
A novel about a troubled father-son relationship leaves a lingering aftertaste, writes Steve Walker.
A novel about a father-son relationship leaves a lingering aftertaste.
THE MURDER of Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, in 1980 traumatised not just the nation but the whole of northern Europe. Sweden, that beacon of liberalism and tolerance, now lay in the ashes of political extremism and urban terrorism. The crime remains unsolved.
How could such a grotesque event occur in such a peaceloving country?
What possible social forces could have produced it?
Danish novelist, Jonas T Bengtsson, explores a possibility. If violence, deception and abuse are woven into a family relationship, is it not feasible that they manifest themselves in a wider social – or, rather, antisocial – context?
A Fairy Tale sees Bengtsson move from the narrow confines of a much-lauded Danish debut to a broader international stage. This, his third novel, has already been translated into 10 languages and won awards.
It is a taut, bleak and troubling tale. Not unlike Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, with which it is unfairly compared, or, more tellingly, J.M. Coetzee’s recent The Childhood of Jesus, it centres on a father and son relationship. The book is split into two effective halves, each of which end with a chilling and stunning event.
It is this bond that links and parallels both of these outcomes.
Father and son are unnamed. They live a peripatetic life in Sweden, on the fringes of society. Their rootless existence is one of petty theft and deception. Dad teaches son to steal and to justify it to himself as simply ‘‘taking what you need’’.
Father also schools his son, in a rather haphazard way. Geography reveals to him maps with ‘‘black areas. Places whose secrets nobody knew’’, which hints at the dark secret in their own relationship, and in the father’s with his own father. It seems as if sinister mystery is genetic.
Religion is exposed as the hypocritical teachings of a violent and vengeful God. As the father says, people ‘‘really shouldn’t step inside a church without a lifejacket’’.
Father at times tells his son a dark fairy story. In it, a king and his prince fight a battle for good against a dimly-defined White Queen, who is the embodiment of evil. The tale suggests a mission, whose nature and purpose is unclear – a bit like the father’s complaints against society.
It is the murder of Palme that propels the two to Copenhagen. The father tells his son: ‘‘The bastards finally got him . . . I think we’re going to have to move again.’’
Six years later, in Denmark, the son lives the double life of a Turkish artist and of a Swedish teenager trying to find his identity in an uncaring, even hostile society.
It is the nature of the ties that bind father and son that excite Bengtsson. What values are passed on, what attitudes instilled? In this relationship, it is the rootless indifference to conventional mores, the casual approach to suffering that filter down.
There is a coldness about the son that is haunting. The novel is told only from his perspective, as he struggles to make sense of the world. His limited vision is reflected in tight, spare sentences that reveal little emotional warmth at all.
It is always a pleasure to discover new and exciting authors.
This novel will leave a lingering aftertaste, a troubling sense that there is more missing than is revealed here.