The Father!

Our book today is what the good folks over at BookTube refer to as a “chunker”: it’s a 600-page brick of a thing called The Father, by the team of Anders Roslund and Stefan Thunberg writing under the name Anton Svensson. This is an English-language translation by Elizabeth Clark Wessel (it’s an eye-catching hardcover from Quercus), and it’ll introduce a lot of readers to a story that made the headlines in Sweden in the 1990s: a series of increasingly daring bank robberies carried out by a father and three of his well-trained and well-armed sons (nicknamed “the Military League” for their no-nonsense hardware). Stefan Thunberg was the brother who didn’t participate in the crimes, and here he teams up with Swedish journalist and crime writer Roslund to dramatize the events of the crime campaign from an insider’s perspective, concentrating as much on the family dynamic as the planning details of the crimes.

The authors work a kind of magic in the book that’s evident even in translation; the combination of reporting and novel-writing going on here shouldn’t work as well as it does. The Father (the book is Part 1 – Quercus will bring out The Sons next year) is incredibly gripping reading, every bit as good – in fact, often quite a bit better – than the faddish Swedish crime fiction that’s been dominating the fiction bestseller lists for over a decade. We get prickly insights into Ivan, the violent paterfamilias of this crime family, into his sons Leo, Vincent, and Felix, and, intriguingly, into the mind frame of the mother, Britt-Marie. And the tension hardly ever lets up – the writing team does a very effective job of constantly working the narrative’s tempo:

Linden was sitting in the driver’s seat when he saw Samuelson exit with the security bag. He pressed the button engaging the internal lock and was about to turn toward his colleague when he saw something else. Nothing clear, more like a fragment, something you try to piece together without quite understanding it. First, he saw through the windshield that the wheelchair he’d seen in the crowd earlier was lying overturned on the pavement above, empty. And then, in one of the wing mirrors, he saw a movement, as if someone was falling toward him from the wall embrasure, someone whose face was completely, almost inhumanly, black. And finally, Samuelson opened the side door. Run! And through himself inside For fuck’s sake run! And rolled across the floor of the van seeking cover.

And there are plenty of close-up action scenes scattered throughout the book to keep things on edge – it’s easy to understand why Hollywood would be interested:

Leo is about to turn toward the balcony, toward Papa and Felix, when everything changes again. He doesn’t see how, or why, but Papa suddenly starts shouting and pointing, as if trying to warn him.

Someone grabs him from behind. Leo squirms. Pulls. He needs to get free! And lucy reads the fatherhe’s almost out of his grasp …

When it falls out of his jacket pocket.

Papa’s Mora knife.

He’s not quick enough. He bends to the ground to pick it up, and it’s not there. Kekkonen is faster and waves it in front of him.

When a knife flashes in front of your face, it’s mostly the blade that’s visible.

Especially when it strikes.

“Cut him, for fuck’s sake!” shouts Hasse to Kekkonen, lying on the filthy asphalt with both hands on his nose as if trying to hold it in place.

When I first encountered The Father I groaned a bit on the inside, since I’m heartily sick of those aforementioned Swedish sludge-fests that so seem to captivate contemporary readers. But thanks to the skill and dramatic flair of the authors, I read it eagerly and I’ll gladly gulp down the second half when it reaches me.

Originally published at Open Letters Monthly May 2016