At the end of Harry Hole's previous case, The Snowman, the alcholic Norwegian detective had expressed a desire to disappear and never be found again. He could hardly be blamed for this, as the final stages of that investigation had seemingly cost him any hope of a return to his former relationship with his ex-partner Rakel and her son Oleg, as well as costing him his right middle finger in a particularly violent clash with a deranged serial killer. Hole, therefore, disappeared from view.
By the opening of Nesbø's eighth novel starring Hole, his disappearance has taken him as far as Hong Kong. Apparently, he would have wanted to go further still, but was removed from his flight for his drunken behaviour and has found a home - of sorts - in the rabbit-warren that is Chungking Mansions (referred to as "Chungking Mansion" here) amid the petty criminals and drug addicts in that infamous building.
Such is the rather bleak opening of the novel known in English as The Leopard (published in translation in 2011, published in the original Norwegian in 2009). The title is slightly less than impressive in translation, as it refers to a throwaway line from one character that the leopard is particularly well-suited to stalking its prey. The Norwegian original is titled Panserhjerte, which translates roughly as "Armoured Heart" and is a reference both to constrictive pericarditis (which plays a minor role in the plot) and Hole's gradual development of such a thing.
Hole is being sought - and eventually returned to Oslo - by the young policewoman Kaja Solness as it appears that another serial killer is on the loose in the Norwegian capital. Two young women have died by drowning in their own blood, and shortly after the narrative begins a third is murdered in what can only be described as an excessively violent manner. Despite Hole's reluctance, he is persuaded back to Norway with the news that his father is dying.
On arrival in Oslo, it also emerges that Hole has landed in the middle of a territorial dispute between the Crime Squad, his normal division, and Kripos, an elite team designed to solve more complex and serious cases. In traditional Hole fashion, he weighs into this dispute by beating up one of the Kripos top brass and creating his own small unit within Crime Squad to investigate the murders anyway.
As the body-count climbs, the investigation extends to enlisting the help of Katrine Bratt, Hole's partner from the Snowman investigation, who provides some welcome comic relief, as well as a brief trip to Rwanda and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in search of an exotic torture device which appears to have been used. Cinematic though the African scenes are in The Leopard, Nesbø's facility in creating a convincing non-Norwegian setting is still slightly limited. His Africa is much more convincing than his Australia in an earlier Hole case (or even than the cutaway scenes in Australia here), but there's still an air of unreality about it - the proverbial brushstrokes are too broad and intense to hit the level of reality that his native Norway achieves here.
The plot - and particularly the killer's motive - is remarkably complex. Even though it becomes apparent early in the novel that what links the victims is a night at a remote mountain cabin, the exact details of why this would lead to brutal murders are obscure until very close to the end, and this tension is maintained at a very high level.
Nesbø is not above resorting to many of his favourite tricks, too. Supporting characters are introduced in deliberately ambiguous ways only to reveal their true purpose in the narrative much later, and there are a few instances where key information is (briefly) withheld from the reader in order to heighten the tension. While these tricks have been a hallmark of Nesbø's work from the outset, his skill in deploying them in both Snowman and Leopard is much closer to that of an experienced film director who knows that playing certain music can elicit particular reactions from the audience.
A word of warning about the plot, too. Where the killer in Snowman was almost entirely insane, the murderer here has a sense of almost icy rationality, as well as a strongly sadistic streak. The various acts of violence performed here - particularly as the novel reaches its climax - are most definitely not for the faint-hearted. It seems that Nesbø has even apologised for some of the more graphic moments, in fact, which may make some readers consider their choice.
Perhaps the biggest challenge that The Leopard faces is that it's the followup to The Snowman. While Nesbø had been a successful novelist in Scandinavia before that novel was translated, he was by this time very much "The next Stieg Larsson", according to much of the popular press. Just like the director trying to follow an Oscar-winning film, Leopard was always going to be judged in the light of its incredible predecessor.
By and large, it works. Hole is clearly carrying the scars of his previous case, and acquires more over the course of this one (both physical and mental) and his resignation from the police force at the end of the investigation is more than likely a small mercy. That said, he had resigned at the end of the previous case, too, so the question must be asked of what horrors he might encounter next. The long-running Rakel subplot is still present here, even if Rakel herself is not, and it's clear that her influence is felt in many aspects of Hole's life. The obligatory "damsel in distress" Hole finds himself entangled with is also presented sensibly and with clear motives for her actions.
That said, there are some negatives. As well as the earlier points regarding the African detour, there's a very long period during which an alibi isn't properly tested. Perhaps this might be the "seasoned crime-fiction reader" in me talking, but the "shock" that certain characters have on finding that a particular cast-iron alibi is nothing of the sort seemed artificial to me, especially as it had been all-but-explained some 100 pages earlier.
Additionally, the almost-byzantine complexity of the killer's plot feels like an exercise in what are often termed "plot tokens" (the almost-irrelevant things which allow the plot of a story to proceed) being collected. All is made clear at the end - unusually, through the simple method of the killer outlining what happened - but there were a number of steps the plot took which really seem irrelevant.
Lastly, The Leopard features the trick used in The Snowman of having multiple "semi-endings" where it genuinely appears that the solution has been reached (apart from the fact that the reader is left holding 200-odd pages of unread novel, sort of thing). Where the earlier novel deployed these with devastating effect, this one seemed content to let things calmly fizzle out, which rather spoils the emotional effect of realising that the unspeakably evil killer who's been arrested is actually not quite that.
Nonetheless, this is another highly-recommended instalment in Harry Hole's career. Even if lightning hasn't completely struck twice, it comes very close to having done so.
4.5 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment