The ObserverJo NesbøReviewA killer is employed to take out his boss’s wife in the chart-topping novelist’s pacy thriller. Just don’t expect another Harry HoleOlav is a fixer. Usually, he “fixes” people – Jo Nesbø’s new novel opens as he stands over a man he’s shot in the chest and neck, blood dripping on to the snow. And he’s just been asked to fix his crime lord boss’s beautiful, unfaithful wife.
As well as people, though, Olav also fixes stories, giving us an alternative take on Les Misérables, because “the business about stealing bread just annoyed me… So: Jean Valjean was a deadly killer who was wanted throughout France. And he was in love with Fantine, the poor prostitute.” And, the reader increasingly suspects, this not entirely reliable narrator is fixing the narrative of his own life.
Nesbø topped the charts twice in 2014, with Police, the latest thriller starring the brilliant but troubled alcoholic detective Harry Hole, and with stand-alone crime novel The Son. Blood On Snow is another stand-alone for the Norwegian superstar author, a short, pacy little thriller which, instead of delving into the psyche of a morally dubious cop, reveals a villain with a heart.
Olav explains early on that he’s not much of a baddie. “I can’t drive inconspicuously… I can’t be used in robberies… I have a weak, sensitive nature [so] I have to stay well away from drugs”, plus he falls in love so quickly that pimping isn’t an option either. So it has to be murder – and he has something of a taste and a talent for “the magical moment when I, and I alone, had power over life and death” – it’s “the virus I had in my blood”, he says.
He doesn’t really want to say yes to his boss Hoffman but once he knows what the gig is, there’s no way out of it. He takes it on, reluctantly but professionally, and as he watches Corina from the hotel room he’s rented across from the Hoffmans’ central Oslo apartment, he becomes “bewitched”. Things don’t exactly play out according to plan, and Olav’s situation rapidly deteriorates until he finds himself part of a joyfully cinematic shoot-out in an Oslo crypt.
It’s all ever so noiry and pulpy: Nesbø’s gorgeously rendered images of snow, and of the titular blood on snow – “the snow sucked the blood up as it fell, drawing it in under the surface, hiding it, as if it had some sort of use for it” – are crying out to be filmed. (Warner Bros, incidentally, is planning to adapt the novel as a vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio to produce and star in, according to Variety.)
Nesbø revels in his knowing cliche of the tortured criminal soul, in Olav’s apparent slowness but secret brilliance. The author makes much – too much – of this. The character is always slipping in clunky asides, protesting too much as he says things like “I don’t know much about evolution and stuff like that, but didn’t Darwin say there were only six universal facial expressions for human emotions?”, and “according to that Hume bloke, the fact that I had until now woken up every morning in the same body, into the same world, where what had happened had actually happened, was no guarantee that the same thing would happen again tomorrow morning”.
You’d imagine there was far more meat to dig into, investigating a man who kills for a living; he does his best, but in the end, Olav doesn’t possess the sheer, page-turning magnetism of Harry Hole.
Blood On Snow is published by Harvill Secker (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £10.39
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