FORTY DAYS WITHOUT SHADOW: OLIVIER TRUC trans LOUISE ROGERS LALAURIE

We have been away for a week touring the beautiful houses and countryside of Kent and East Sussex in wonderful summer weather [possibly some photos later] so that I have only just finished the Arctic set Forty Days Without Shadow by Olivier Truc. 

Olivier Truc was born in France but has worked as a journalist based in Stockholm since 1994. He has produced television documentaries including one about the work of the Norwegian Reindeer Police in Lapland. Forty Days, his debut novel draws on that documentary and blends in his journalistic interest concerning social issues such as the treatment of minorities.

The story begins with a short prologue set in Central Lapland in the year 1693, showing the persecution of the Sami by Christian pastors. The reader is taken forward to the present day in January when the polar night will end and the sun will return. At Kautokeino in Norway we are introduced to the main protagonists who are two members of the Reindeer Police. Klemet Nango, a veteran Sami officer, who at one time was working in Stockholm on the Olaf Palme investigation; and the young blonde stunningly beautiful Nina Nansen, a new recruit. They have to investigate the theft of a sacred Sami drum from a local museum, apparently one of only a limited number to survive the drum burning carried out by Christian pastors in a campaign against Sami religion and culture. As they investigate the theft and question reindeer breeders in the harsh Arctic environment Nina moves into unknown territory.

How could people live like this here in Norway, in her own country? The scene reminded her of a TV documentary she had seen once, about a Roma encampment in Romania.

When Mattis one the reindeer breeders is murdered the investigation becomes far more complex. With a UN conference being held shortly in Kautokeino the mismatched pair of police officers must look into a 1939 expedition that included anthropologists from Sweden’s State Institute for Racial Biology, hunt down the Sami drum, and search for Andre Racagnal, a villainous French geologist with a liking for adolescent girls. Racagnal is plotting with local figures to exploit the mineral wealth of the region. When Nina travels to Paris to interview Henri Mons, who donated the Sami drum to the museum and was on the 1939, she learns some shocking facts as she studies photos taken by the Swedish anthropologists.

It did not take Nina long to realise that they were clearly intended to illustrate the racial superiority of the Scandinavians, and the inferiority of not only the Sami, but also the Tartars, Jews, Finns, Balts and Russians.

Forty Days is an excellent read, rather dark and perhaps a little longwinded at times as Klemet and Nina travel hundreds of kilometres back and forth across the Arctic wastelands on their snowmobiles, but it would certainly be a worthy winner of the CWA International Dagger.

The characters are interesting, while the information about Sami culture and the problems that affect their society reminded me of Tony Hillerman’s wonderful books about the Navajo. And I took one of the messages of the book to be that indigenous peoples in many many countries are exploited, and their way of life and their culture threatened in some way by incomers. 

‘The Swedes recruited the Sami by force,’ Nils Ante went on, ‘to work in the mines. And they used reindeer to transport the ores to the rivers. There’s your story. Any Sami who refused was beaten and imprisoned.

Behold the foundations of the wealth of your splendid Nordic kingdoms.   

[the photo shows the nearest we have been to the Arctic…having left the train somewhere north of Helsinki into the freezing wilderness]

Noir Is The Colour at the Institut Francais

This is just the sort of event that makes me wish we still lived in London.  

At one of the panels I attended during Crime Fest 2012 it was suggested by a panellist that when the Scandinavian crime fever had blown over French detective fiction would be the next trend. Perhaps the trend is already here as Fred Vargas, Dominique Manotti and now Pierre LeMaitre have been getting the attention of CWA judges for several years….. now we have Phillipe Georget, Olivier Truc and Marc Dugain making waves. 

The French are coming and this is obviously an event not to be missed.

Robert Harris wins the Sir Walter Scott Prize

Robert Harris has won the 5th Annual Sir Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction with his account of  that great miscarriage of justice the Dreyfus Case; An Officer and A Spy.

I reviewed this brilliant book last year here and named it among my best reads of 2013. 

I cannot understand why it was not shortlisted for the CWA Endeavour Historical Crime Fiction Award, but I hope winning the Walter Scott Prize will bring it to an even wider readership. 

You could say that the divisions in French society exacerbated by the Dreyfus Affair would re-emerge and contribute to the collapse of the Third Republic in 1940 and the German Occupation.  

How ironic that the country of  Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité became the country that incarcerated the innocent Jew Alfred Dreyfus on Devil’s Island, and the country of the murderous collaborationist Vichy Regime.  An Officer And A Spy should perhaps become compulsory reading in our schools and universities by academics as well as students, because some people never learn the lessons of history.

When entries that did not make the shortlist come from writers such as Laura Wilson, Joe R. Lansdale, Robert Harris [the superb An Officer And A Spy], Robert Goddard, Michael Ridpath, Patrick Easter and John Lawton, I wonder if my status as an amateur historian and apprentice reviewer is under threat. 

[from my post about the Endeavour Historical Crime Fiction Prize]          

Pleasantly distracted in Devon

Forty Days Without Shadow by Olivier Truc translated from the French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie is a very interesting read set in Lapland, where the Reindeer Police enjoy cross border jurisdiction. The Sami like indigenous people all over the world struggle to hold on to their way of life, as incomers try to exploit the mineral wealth of the country. My own personal experience of the Sami people is limited to a brief alcoholic conversation on a train journey from Uppsala to Stockholm over twenty years ago.  

 

See The Swedish Apache. I mention this blog post from 2009 because there are some particularly interesting  replies to my post. 

I haven’t read as much of Forty Days Without Shadow as I had originally planned simply because I have been pleasantly distracted by some summer weather, trips out to Devon’s scenic sites, and American visitors. Those visitors from the USA have included, very old friends who emigrated from England to the beautiful Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania in 1981. And fellow blogger Margot Kinberg, who it was a great pleasure to meet in person after a few years of enjoyable internet contact. 

And I have also been seduced into reading chunks of Bill Bryson’s brilliant best seller One Summer America 1927, Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Herbert Hoover and Al Capone in a very different USA. I have also been distracted, possibly temporarily, by some football matches. 

 

All this means that unfortunately the announcement of the International Dagger Award and the Endeavour Historical Award winners will take place before I have had a chance to read more of the shortlists. 

More about Forty Days Without Shadow next week……………

 

Enjoying real weather

Where in the world could you enjoy such contrasting weather in the same afternoon?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The clue is in this third photo.

 

Rome and Normandy June 1944

In the next few days we will rightly be remembering the fortitude and courage of those  who fought in Normandy and on the Home Front during D Day the 6th June 1944.

However we should not forget that the events in Normandy overshadowed the campaign in what Winston Churchill had called the “soft underbelly of Europe” but which turned out to be a very “tough old gut”. 

….a young university student from Puglia, Angelo Galiano realised in the spring of 1944 as he agonised over whether to heed the call-up for military service by the Republic of Salo…….There was also a very good chance that the British and Americans [and the rest of the multinational force fighting for the Allies in Italy] would soon be in Rome.

In March, as he was writing in his diary, Allied forces were launching furious assaults on the German lines around Monte Cassino, just 80 miles away, hoping to link up with the bridgehead they had established in January at Anzio, to the south of the capital.

Their casualties were huge-around 100,000 in four months of fighting-but towards the end of May they finally managed to break through. On 4 June they entered Rome, two days ahead of the Normandy landings. 

From Fascist Voices, An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy by Christopher Duggan