A psychological jigsaw, Scandi-style
Afirst novel from the bottomless pit of Scandi (Swedish, in this case) chiller writers: a teacher drops his 17-yearold daughter at a bus stop and she’s never seen again. Her disappearance obsesses media, police and public — for a while. Then the next sensation comes and her father, Lelle, is left to search alone.
He does so for three years, mostly in the summer holidays when an Arctic sun means endless light. He drives every road, kept awake by coffee and cigarettes, talking to his Lina as if she’s there. His marriage has foundered; his job is neglected.
Then a teenage girl comes to his town with
her erratic mother. Meja yearns to escape, to seek freedom and a future. She’s convinced she’s found it in the person of slim, sensitive, silagesmelling Carl-Johan, from a nearby survivalist commune. Boy, has she got things wrong.
Meanwhile, a different girl has vanished, blonde, slim, the image of Lina. Not long after that, Meja (who’s in Lelle’s astonishingly tolerant maths class) goes missing as well.
Scandi noir? Actually, it’s got a more varied palette than that. There’s the deep green of spruce forests, the grey of dreary or obsessed lives, the silver and blue of lambent summer nights. And there’s the tint of multiple red herrings.
Compared with Ian McEwan’s masterly The Child in Time, where agonising grief builds from the plot’s restraint and dreadful calm, Jackson’s narrative explains, directs, takes you by the neck and shoves your face into things.
Lelle makes a powerful protagonist, driven and emotionally disintegrating, searching derelict houses, running over reindeer, screaming at a friend who sits in his daughter’s chair. Flicking between bereft man and vulnerable girl, with some scenes reading like an icky Mills & Boon, the story ploughs towards a final, protracted confrontation where rifle, shovel and iron bar are wielded and psychology lurches all over the place.