“You’re a tiny bit damaged every time you unravel a murder case”, says Harry Hole in his debut thriller.
“Unfortunately, as a rule there are more human wrecks and sadder stories, and fewer ingenious motives, than you would imagine from reading Agatha Christie.” The worldview presented here is certainly starker and bleaker, with good and bad in a more complex dialogue than in the British school of crime writing.
Norwegian police detective Harry Hole is in Australia to investigate the murder of a young Norwegian woman, who he quickly realises is the victim of a serial killer. The investigation takes him into seedy underworlds and showcases police corruption, racial tensions, and institutional homophobia (although, in the latter case, he shows us his manly heroism by indulging in it).
I do not think this book has aged as well as it might have since first publication in 1997. We are meant to admire Hole for fondly remembering homophobic persecution he inflicted on a gay adult as a child and noting that he hadn’t been very nice (he has evolved and is a nice liberal), just a few pages before joining in extensive homophobic police jokes that pretty much result in the one gay character – who is of course wildly attracted to our hero – ending up dead and mutilated.
The novel features racism in a very deliberate way, and has some commentary on the dangers of othering, which struck me as similar to the way in which Val McDermid presents transgender issues in The Mermaids Singing, published just two years before The Bat.
The most famous critic of the Christie school of crime writing was Raymond Chandler, who sought (how successfully depends on who you ask) to move the crime novel away from artificiality and towards the real world in all its grim, messy reality. Nesbø seems to be following his lead, but his narrative devices, which may enhance the real-world social commentary, present a self-consciously fictional world.
At least half the characters have a habit of going off into long and involved stories, each spanning several paragraphs and multiple pages. Sometimes, these are reminiscences which serve as fables from which a clue or psychological point can be extracted. More often, they are bits of history or localised (Australian) legends used as cautionary tales. Everyone is remarkably erudite!
I’m not trying to criticise this aspect, because I found these moments among the most engaging. And, honestly, the last thing I expected when settling down with a landmark Norwegian novel was to learn so much about Australian culture and heritage. It’s all told in a pacey, engaging way.
In summary, I enjoyed The Bat, but with some reservations. It is an impressive thriller with an understandable wide appeal, and makes reading more - seeing the character and the series evolve - an extremely attractive proposition.
