The Shadow District, by Arnaldur Indridason
Translated
from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb
New York,
NY: Minotaur Books, 2017
Originally
published in Iceland with the title Skuggasund in 2013
List of
main characters:
Stephan
Thorson/Stefán Thórdarson
Flóvent
Ingiborg
Ísleifsdóttir
Konrád
Rósamunda
Hrund,
the woman from the north
The Shadow
District:
Murder, Folktales, Women’s Issues
I’m
repeating the copy on the inside front cover flap of The Shadow District for two reasons: (1) It sums up the plot rather
well, and (2) I found the “missing link” the most compelling feature of this
new book from Arnaldur Indridason, although the term is not used in the novel
that I can recall. In any case, here is the inside front cover copy:
THE PAST: In wartime Reykjavik, Iceland, a young woman is found strangled in “the
Shadow District,” a rough and dangerous area of the city. An Icelandic
detective and a member of the American military police are on the trail of a
brutal killer.
THE PRESENT: A ninety-year-old man is discovered dead on his bed, smothered with his
own pillow. Konrád, a former detective now bored with retirement, finds
newspaper cuttings in the dead man’s home about the World War II Shadow
District murder. It’s a crime that Konrád remembers, having grown up in the
same neighborhood.
A MISSING LINK: Why, after all this time, would an old crime resurface? Did the police
arrest the wrong man? Will Konrád’s link to the past help him solve the case
and finally lay the ghosts of World War II Reykjavik to rest?
I read The Shadow District in three or four
days because I was completely absorbed by the narrative, which skillfully
interweaves the two stories, one from the past, during World War II, and one
from the present. But a day or two after I finished reading the novel, I found
myself thinking about the so-called missing link more and more. The missing link comes in the form of a folktale: The man who rapes two
women tells them both that they can blame the huldufólk, “or ‘hidden people,’ as the elves were known
(page 40),” for his crimes. These clues from the killer are revealed in
roundabout ways, but two detectives working on the past case and one working on
the present case use these clues to pursue their respective investigations.
The
English translation reveals simple, clear prose about heartbreaking stories. The
author lets the characters reveal plot
details in their own time. A total
of three investigators, two from the past and one from the present, are honest
and hardworking: They are simply trying to get at the truth.
Flóvent saw the instant recognition. Saw from the way
the hope died in their eyes that she [Rósamunda] was their missing daughter.
(page 62)
I thought
these last two lines, the last paragraph, from Chapter 10, told from the point
of view of one of the investigators from the past, summed up the mood of the
novel: the despair over the loss of a child and the sympathy and compassion
that the investigators felt in finding justice for the parents of the victim.
The
tension builds, not so much because of a sense of violence to come but because
the narrative follows the uncovering of secrets and clues in both plot threads
that are obviously connected across time. The
Shadow District is more than a story about two related murder
investigations, however. It’s a story about social upheaval as a result of
World War II, the societal changes that some welcomed and others feared, and
the ways that women dealt with these changes while being blamed for them.
Very early in the
novel, in Chapter 2, Indridason explains for readers what living in Reykjavik,
Iceland, was like after the start of World War II:
. . . At
the beginning of the war Reykjavik had had a population of forty thousand, but
since then tens of thousands of servicemen had poured into the town. Liaisons
between soldiers and Icelandic women were inevitable with the arrival of the
Tommies [British soldiers], and they rapidly increased in number when the
Tommies were succeeded by the Yanks, who, with smarter uniforms, more money and
better manners, were almost like film stars to the locals. Language was no
barrier—the language of romance was universal. But such was the resulting moral
panic that a committee was set up to deal with this scandalous state of affairs
which came to be known, in all its manifestations, as the Situation. (pages
7–8)
World War II brought
social upheaval for the citizens of Reykjavik, as one might expect. The influx
of so many foreign soldiers turned everything upside down, and women were able
to take advantage of the changes in many ways. They found new romantic
partners, and they found employment in the war industries. The economic freedom
that came with steady work and a steady paycheck meant that women had more
choices, and some men in Iceland, and the killer in particular, resented the
changes.
(This blog post about
the novel The Shadow District
contains spoilers.)
The killer hijacks
Icelandic folktales to defend his crimes against two women. Indridason, the
author, makes the case, through the chief suspect, Jónatan (in the first murder
investigation during World War II), for Icelandic folktales being the creation
of women. They were handed down by women, from mother to daughter, as a way to
deal with the harsh realities of their lives in Iceland. Jónatan is studying
Icelandic and history, and he knows a lot about Icelandic folktales. He also
has some insight into their utility for women. He discusses what he knows with
Thorson and Flóvent,
the two detectives investigating the case in the past:
“Yes. Of course. Not that I’m [Jónatan] familiar with
the type of malevolence you’re referring to in tales of the huldufólk. After all, they’re mostly
told by women, passed down from mother to daughter. That’s essentially how
they’ve survived. And because they’ve been kept alive by women, they reflect a
female view of the world, feature concerns close to their hearts. They tend to
be stories about faithless lovers, childbearing, the exposure of infants.”
“Exposure of infants?” queried
Flóvent.
“Some things don’t change much.”
“What do you mean?” asked
Thorson.
Jónatan looked from one of them
to the other, seeking to make himself understood. “The stories often describe
the harsh lot of women. Such as giving birth to a child out of wedlock and
being forced to dispose of it. Exposure of infants was the abortion of its day.
Naturally it would have been a harrowing experience and huldufólk stories were a way of glossing over the harsh reality and
easing the mental anguish. They offered an alternative world in which women
have children with handsome, gentle men of the hidden race, who are the
antithesis of their brutish human counterparts. The infants are left out in the
open for their fathers to find, and grow up, cherished, among their father’s
people, and may even return one day to the human world. In other words, the
stories serve to alleviate a destressing experience.”
“Handsome, gentle men?” repeated
Thorson.
“Like the Yanks,” said Jónatan.
“Are they the new huldufólk?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“How do you feel about that?”
asked Thorson.
“Me? I don’t
have an opinion.” (pages 231–232)
Jónatan’s knowledge
and insight are exactly what bring him to the attention of Thorson and Flóvent. Only someone who knows a lot about
Icelandic folklore would have used the information to convince two women to lie
about what had happened to them.
If I have any
complaint about The Shadow District,
it’s that the novel and the stories about the various women in it are told
almost always from the perspective of male characters. It’s not a major
complaint because I found the compassion displayed by most of the male
characters refreshing. But the women, especially the older women, are often
portrayed as angry and cranky, with the men reacting as though their feelings
are inappropriate. Here’s an example from the end of the novel, when the
detective Konrád
talks to his sister Beta about their father, who was a petty criminal and a
domestic abuser:
“It’s called domestic violence, Konrád. She [their
mother] fled all the way east to Seydisfjördur. He only hung on to you to get even
with her. That was typical. He was a nasty piece of work, Konrád. He drank, he
was violent and got sucked into crime.”
“I know all that, I was there,
remember? It was ugly, and I’ve never forgiven him for what he did to Mum.”
“Yet you’ve always tried to
defend him! You’re always trying to find excuses for him. Like that Benjamín
did, and his father before him.”
“That’s not the same—”
“Yes, it is,” said Beta. “You
bloody men, you’re all the same. Too bloody spineless to face up to the truth.”
“Calm down,”
said Konrád. (pages 340–341)
Beta has many good
reasons for being angry with her father, and her brother Konrád
doesn’t sound like he’s willing to take her seriously when he tells her to calm
down. But this exchange comes at the end of the novel, which is promised to be
the first in a series, presumably about the detective Konrád. Is it
possible that Konrád
will understand his sister’s point of view in future installments?
Will Indridason
continue the themes introduced in this first book in the series? Will he
continue to use folktales and allow female characters, instead of men, to
interpret them for readers? The way that Indridason ends the novel is both a
final wrap-up and perhaps a clue about where he intends to go next:
Deep in a
remote cleft in the lava, too deep for the roar of the waterfall to reach, lies
the realm of eternal cold and darkness. The cleft narrows as it deepens, its
rugged walls sheer and perilous, its depths inaccessible even to raven and fox.
The walls are over grown with ferns and mosses, down which water seeps from the
nearby springs, transforming the fissure into a fairy-tale palace in frosty
weather. At the bottom a cold silence reigns, which neither the moaning of the
wind nor the crying of birds can break, ensuring that the palace’s only guest,
the unfortunate elf maiden, never wakes from her long sleep. (page 344)
These last lines
(which form both the last paragraph and the last chapter) bring readers back to
the folktale theme—the missing link—that held my attention while reading The Shadow District and left me
wondering once I finished. I want to read the next installment to see if any of
my questions are answered.
The next book in the
series, The Shadow Killer, will be
published in March 2018 in English translation (click here for more
information). Click here for more information at Wikipedia about the author Arnaldur Indridason.
