Customer Reviews

Arctic Chill

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the fifth book of the Reykjavik murder mysteries (a sixth will be published at the end of this year titled "Hypothermia) and it is at the top of it's class. Indridason is favorably compared with 'Henning Mankell' and 'Jo Nesbo' for good reasons, in that each book is more than just a mystery or police procedural. In this one Arnaldur (I'm using the normal Icelandic habit of referring to everyone by their first name) is called on to find the murderer of an eleven year old boy.

What makes this mystery personal is Erlandur's ongoing nightmare of having gotten lost in a blizzard and then separated from his then eight year old brother, who was never found. The boy, who is Icelandic and Thai, was born in Iceland. He has a fifteen year old half-brother who his mother brought over from Thailand. The older brother is suffering terribly from 'cultural shock' and doesn't fit into Icelandic society.

Much of the book is a polemic about how Icelanders view themselves and how they view the 'incomers'. With a population under half a million and a language that is difficult to learn, they are proud of their years of isolation. [Icelandic is an offshoot of Old Norse and is related to Danish, but is very archaic is it's pronunciation and grammar.] Many fear that 'multiculturalism' will destroy their unique culture. As an example: for over fifty years there was an US Air Force base in Kaflevik but little intermarriage or cross-culture during that time.

Erlandur spends some of his time questioning his own feelings about immigrants and their need to hold onto the 'old country'. The natives fear that their children will lose touch with their ancient culture and become Euro-centric. [Note: the Allthing, Iceland's Parliament has been in existence since before the year 1000 CE.] He is approached by both his estranged children who want to discuss with him the death of his brother and the effect it has had on all their lives. Erlandur, like most of his countrymen (according to Arnaldur) is exceedingly private and not comfortable with 'touchy-feely' discussions.

In a parallel investigation Erlandur has been called into a missing persons case which he decides is a scam between the husband and wife or for the husband to cover up a murder. When he investigates the husband he finds that he is a philanderer who has cheated on his wives with their successors. Erlandur, who prides himself in NEVER deciding on a case before he has REAL evidence, makes the mistake of deciding the husband has started cheating on the new wife (just over two years) and this has driven the current wife to suicide. His premature decision also comes to effect how he looks at the boy's murder case.

In the end the conclusion is satisfying in that the culprit(s) are caught but for Erlandur the strange background to the case and the information he digs up on the people involved is disconcerting to his vision of Iceland. His relationship with his children and the woman he is seeing, are all stand-ins for the ongoing problems in Icelandic society.

Great read, I look forward to the next book in October.

Zeb Kantrowitz

I enjoyed this book, particularly the characters and the setting, and I've recommended it to friends. The complex relationships between characters are interesting, the plot satisfactory.

This duo is fabulous! I hope they get this double set in stock for Bryce Courtney fans. Page after Page, the story and imagery imprint upon readers such a sense of honor and integrity, injustice and privilege, and the beauty and diversity of Africa. You won't be able to put it down.
First read these in my late teens, and now want my own kids to read them.

I am not a traditionally a reader of mysteries, but since my wife introduced me to selected writers, there are a few to whose new books I quite look forward.

Scandinavian writers of this genre appeal a great deal. After all, part of what we get from any novel is being taken into a world we do not know, and the place and people names of Scandinavia are exotic and fascinating. Also, there is a great touch of humanity in the stories coming from Scandinavian writers, quite in distinction to some well-known, hard-boiled American writers whose fiction I find almost unreadable.

Norway's Karin Fossum is chief among the Scandinavians, being a writer and storyteller of top quality, but I enjoy Iceland's Arnaldur Indridason too. His first books were not in the same class with Fossum's, but with Arctic Chill, he rises to a new level of quality. This is fine and gripping book, an interesting tale with many twists and turns.

Indridason weaves several plots together here and manages them with great skill. The two criminal cases - a murder and a separate missing person - actually nicely reinforce each other and are used to introduce some interesting complexities.

Indridason is always a clear writer, but this book introduces a new level of sophistication in his storytelling. We still have his intelligent, very human, and sympathic detective, Erlendur, a man with whom we feel it might be nice to spend some time discussing the human condition. We still have the wonderfully forbidding weather and brooding landscape of Iceland as major characters.

This is a book you will not want to put down. Highly recommended.

Do you want to feel yourself really in another world, with the silence and the uniqueness of Iceland? Read Indridason. I'm kind of an expert in "noir novels" and this author has me hooked. Such a clean language. Such a painfull soul this detective. Wonderfull combination.

When I bought this book, I thought that "import" must mean that this edition came from Iceland. That's why I spent almost $10.00 more than I would have had to for the American hardcover edition. I was wrong. This edition is from Canada and is nothing special. Save your money and buy the American edition. I would have sent it back but it just takes too much effort to wrap it up and get to somewhere to send it back.
The 5 stars are for the book itself. It is superb. What the other reviewers say about it is right on. I've since bought two more of Arnadur's books.

They're a surly bunch, the Icelanders, sullen and taciturn, as portrayed by Arnaldur Indridason in all of his 'Reykjavik Murder Mysteries', of which Arctic Chill is the fifth. In this installment, even the three detective partners are churlish to each other, and every interrogation becomes a nasty four-letter-word exchange. Frankly, I don't find this incessant hostility quite convincing. Verbal rudeness of the most aggressive sort, yet no punches thrown! Icelandic cops must be marvels of apathy or repression to field the defiance they get from every side! The 'action' of Arctic Chill emerges chiefly from the interrogations, so the implausibility thereof is a serious weakness of the novel. I haven't spent much time in Iceland - just a day now and then en route - but I know my Scandinavians from the four kingdoms (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Minnesota). Indridason's characters in the earlier episodes rang true, at least as individuals, but in Arctic Chill they're all alike, and all unlikely.

Character study was the prime attraction of the earlier mysteries. It was the complex, guilt-ridden personality conflicts of Detective Erlendur that held my attention, even when the story line got sloppy. There isn't much character study in Arctic Chill - no revelations of Erlendur's wellsprings - and what character study there is is perfunctory. Instead, the burden of this novel is the issue of immigration in Icelandic culture. The murder victim, introduced lying dead on the street in the first sentence, is a ten-year-old boy whose father is Icelandic but whose mother is a Thai immigrant-by-marriage. Immediately the dreaded question has to be asked, whether the murder was racially motivated, whether it's to be explained by anti-immigrant frenzy, and that's a question that most people seem to want to avoid. Essentially the novel becomes a profile of Icelandic attitudes toward immigration, both the tolerant and the rabid. Obviously the author could expect that question to resonate with his chief markets in England and America, with consequences for his sales.

My knowledge of Iceland comes mostly from reading, from the Medieval sagas and from the novels of the great Halldor Laxness. Between the sagas and Laxness, for roughly 700 years, Iceland was one of the dreariest and most isolated communities in the world. The population shrank through an kind of genetic bottleneck, with the result that the larger modern 'stock' affords geneticists a kind of laboratory of the human genome. Oddly enough, Iceland's narrow-gauge DNA is a kind of 'national treasure.' Iceland's cultural evolution has paralleled ins genetic isolation. There could be very potent reasons for Icelanders to be wary of immigration. In fact, Iceland has had a fairly firm restrictive immigration policy, with an overwhelming commitment to "assimilation". It would seem that most Icelanders, decent social liberals that they are, want to be generous and tolerant ... want to warm up to 'multi-culturalism' while at the same time preserving Icelandic culture undiluted. That's how Indridason depicts things, anyway, and it sounds a lot like Sweden to me. But there are perfervid nativists, people who rant about the contamination of their precious DNA and who prophesy the doom of the Great Nordic race. Well, of course there are such people! Can any American reader be surprised? If Indridason had managed to treat this serious issue more revealingly, more in depth, Arctic Chill might have been a far better novel. As it stands, I have the impression that Indridason merely used this social dilemma as a marketable backdrop for his trivial pop fiction.