Reykjavík is the northernmost capital city in the world, just a short distance south of the Arctic Circle. The country it governs - Iceland - is like nowhere else on the planet. This is an island with some 300,000 inhabitants, almost all of whom are direct descendants of the Vikings, and who speak a language closer to the Old Norse of legends and sagas than anything else spoken today. Even the landscape is seemingly from another planet - lava plains and thermal pools predominate, with the island featuring a seemingly endless collection of jagged fjords on its rugged coastline.
Iceland is, to put it mildly, a harsh and unforgiving place. It's also a place which doesn't appear often in the annals of history after the population converted en masse to Christianity around the year 1000 - until recent years when the entire country went bankrupt in one of the more spectacular offshoots of the Global Financial Crisis. It is also, despite being part of Scandinavia, much less on the "ScandiCrime" radar than it should be. While Sweden, Denmark and Norway have a seemingly-endless parade of authors to offer, Iceland's noir qualities seem overlooked with only a couple of exceptions.
One such exception is Arnaldur Indriðason, the author of the Detective Erlendur series, often referred to as the "Reykjavík Murder Mysteries".
Erlendur - Icelanders don't customarily have surnames so much as they have patronymics, so while Erlendur's full name is "Erlendur Sveinsson", that just simply means his father's name was Svein, so he's not "Detective Sveinsson" at all - is the head of a small team in the Reykjavík CID. While it's implied that the team consists of more than the three main characters, we're never really introduced to them, so we get to know a lot about Erlendur and rather a bit less about his younger partner Sigurður Óli and their colleague Elínborg.
Silence of the Grave (Icelandic: Grafarþögn) is chronologically the fourth of Erlendur's cases, but only the second translated into English. This is a common quirk when dealing with ScandiCrime. As many novelists don't necessarily "hit their stride" with their first or second novel, publishers in the Anglophone world are increasingly hesitant to translate anything but a sure-fire hit, and often the earlier novels go untranslated for some time (Norway's Jo Nesbø is another victim of this, having only recently seen his first two novels appear in English), until a fan-base can be shown to exist.
We begin in a typically Icelandic way, with a very spare and very dramatic opening. As translated, the opening line of this novel runs "He knew at once that it was a human bone, when he took it from the baby who was sitting on the floor chewing it." Indeed, the translation is really one of the stars of the show here. Icelanders by temperament are taciturn individuals given to a very dour sense of humour, and the late Bernard Scudder was a master at converting their turn of phrase into highly readable English without destroying the essential "Icelandic-ness" of the words.
As the scene develops, it is revealed that a skeleton has been discovered buried underground in a newly-developing area of Reykjavík. Erlendur and his team are dispatched to investigate further, and enlist the help of a young archaeologist, who provides a slightly under-utilised point of comic relief by his constant reminders that excavating the bones is a slow and painstaking process (the police, more used to fresher corpses, find this very difficult to deal with). After confirming that this isn't an unknown Viking-era burial - a surprisingly common discovery in Iceland - the team gets to work attempting to find out what's behind the grisly discovery.
Much of the novel is given over to Erlendur's own family life. In the earlier Jar City (Icelandic: Mýrin), we learned that he had been divorced from his wife Halldóra for many years and had two adult children with whom he had a very difficult relationship. The focus here is on his relationship with his daughter Eva Lind, who has spent much of her life dealing with drug addiction and repeated attempts to go clean. We also learn a little of Erlendur's childhood - a theme to which Arnaldur returns in later novels.
This is possibly a good thing, as it serves to break up the chapters focusing on the investigation. As the death is agreed to have occurred some decades ago, this is an investigation involving a lot of talking to middle-aged and elderly people who frequently have faulty memories of key events, which of course means that there is much less driving around chasing active criminals. Personally, I didn't at all find these interactions boring, as they play into a frequent Arnaldur theme - that secrets lurk beneath the surface in every family or workplace, and that they often have unexpected consequences years later.
Another plot strand is a narrative regarding a young woman in WW2-era Reykjavík. The history of Iceland during the war is somewhat unusual, in that it took advantage of the Nazi occupation of Denmark to declare independence and neutrality, only to be occupied by the UK and US armies in succession, with American influence continuing into the modern day (Reykjavík is home to what is often regarded as the "world's best hot dog stand", and I can attest to its incredible qualities). This was overlaid onto what was at that point still a relatively rural environment - Reykjavík is described by one character as "really just a big town then" - creating a profound social change the likes of which the rest of Europe never really experienced. Going too far into this narrative is to give part of the game away, but I will say that it's a relatively disturbing one at times.
Thankfully, this gloom is balanced out by some enjoyably comic scenes featuring Sigurður Óli and his partner Bergþóra, who is keen to get married and start a family, while he has perhaps some other ideas.
The conclusion to the investigation ties up most of the loose ends, although there are some issues raised from the memories of the various people interviewed that never quite get resolved. In a sense, this simply mirrors real life, where family secrets can be raked over without any real resolution. This can, however, be a minor disappointment when it appears that everything "should" be tied up in the way that most crime novels are.
Arnaldur is in many ways quite a "literary" crime writer. While crimes are committed, investigated and resolved in his novels, a lot of this structure is really an apparatus on which he hangs an interrogation of his own society.
Scandinavian though Iceland may well be, its history and development have been quite different to the social-democratic norms on the mainland. Immigration has been lower, and thus multiculturalism has never really become as dominant a force as in cosmopolitan Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The hard-bitten realities of what realistically remained a predominantly rural society until the post-war "Cod Wars" and the sudden increase in wealth they brought mean that it's only been the last few generations of Icelanders who have really had the same experiences as many others have.
Of course, Arnaldur is far from the only crime novelist to do this. Historically, even Wilkie Collins used The Moonstone to make social commentary, and more recently the obvious touch-stone is the late Stieg Larsson and his first novel - famously titled in Swedish Män som hatar kvinnor ("Men who hate women") before its translation to English as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Detectives, ultimately, investigate crimes in the societies in which they live, and most crimes do speak about the societies in which they're committed.
All of this is by way of indicating that Silence of the Grave and the other Erlendur novels aren't your standard-issue crime thrillers. They're written to make you think, and perhaps to look at the world in a different way. Not exactly your standard rainy-day escapism that you might think of when the topic of "crime fiction" comes up".
A very strong recommendation. Five stars.
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