Hitman with a heart

Blood on Snow
Jo Nesbo, Translated by Neil Smith
Penguin
2015, pp 224, Rs. 449


Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole novels have established him as perhaps the noirest of Scandinavia’s current wave of noir writers. Harry is, as Nesbo has noted, a “kind of black hole, where everything is kind of pulled in, and nothing escapes.” A brilliant Oslo police detective, Harry is also a troubled lone wolf who has a lot in common with the criminals he pursues.

In The Snowman, Nesbo describes Harry as staring into “others’ faces to find their pain, their Achilles’ heels, their nightmares, motives and reasons for self-deception, listening to their fatiguing lies and trying to find a meaning in what he did: imprisoning people who were already imprisoned inside themselves. Prisons of hatred and self-contempt he recognized all too well.”

Nesbo’s latest novel, Blood on Snow, is not a Harry Hole book. Instead of examining the dark side of a man on the right side of the law, Nesbo tries here to depict the tender side of a murderer wanted by the police — a Norwegian hit man named Olav, who works as a “fixer” for a drug and prostitution mob boss named Daniel Hoffmann. The result, alas, is an ungainly, mannered — and unbelievable — story that’s saccharine where it’s meant to be moving, contrived where it’s supposed to be suspenseful.

Whereas Harry Hole’s angst feels like an essential part of his weary, existential soul, Olav’s tender sentiments feel grafted on: clichéd emotional accessories parceled out to make him seem like something more than a stone-cold killer. He can’t handle prostitution because he’s always falling in love, and he needs to stay away from drugs, too, because he’s “the sort of person who’s just looking for someone to submit to. Religion, a big-brother figure, a boss. Drink and drugs.”

Olav, who fancies himself something of a writer, turns out to be an irritating narrator, vacillating between self-pity and hard-boiled tough-guy poses, trying to channel Chandler or Hammett or James M Cain. One minute he’s talking about having “a weak sensitive nature” like his mother,“the next, he’s talking about the “white, white skin” of his boss’ wife, Corina — “it was like snow glittering in sunlight, the way that can make a man snow-blind in just a few hours.“He prattles on with equal enthusiasm about his favourite book, Les Misérables, and gruesome murders he’s committed — like stabbing one victim through the abdomen with a ski pole, or watching another bleed out in the snow, the blood reminding him of a king’s purple and ermine robe in a Norwegian folk tale his mother used to read to him.

References to snow proliferate throughout the novel (not to mention the title) in what seems like a flailing effort to remind the reader of The Snowman, arguably the best known of Nesbo’s novels outside Scandinavia. There is even a scene in which Olav “fixes” a man in front of a little boy who is trying to build a snowman.

As for the plot of Blood on Snow, it is as predictable as it is hackneyed. Hoffmann finds out that Corina has been cheating on him, and orders Olav to kill her — an order Olav resists not only because he knows it’s dangerous to be the guy “who knew everything and had the power to determine Daniel Hoffmann’s future once the police started their investigation” but also because he’s fallen in love with Corina (she of the white, white skin). And so, Olav embarks on an even more dangerous course — joining forces with Hoffmann’s archenemy in the heroin business, a man known as the Fisherman, who looks like Santa Claus “until it suited him to slash you with a Stanley knife.”

There are moments in Blood on Snow when Nesbo’s much-heralded gifts are on display — using his talent for conjuring the chilly Munch-like atmospherics of Oslo in the winter and his eye for grisly, alarming details that slam home the horror of the evil that men do. But such touches remain just that — filigree on a lazily told tale that reads like a creative-writing exercise in trying to write a softhearted hit man, or a trifling palate cleanser between Harry Hole books.