Only the city is real, but this is no one’s idea of an ode. The Wolf and the Watchman, Niklas Natt Och Dag’s historical crime novel set in eighteenth-century Stockholm, is grotesque, nightmarish, brilliant and far and away the most disgusting book I’ve read since The North Water.
Mickel Cardell is a shell-shocked amputee and war veteran who scrapes out a living as a watchman, as well as a bouncer at some of Stockholm’s seedier taverns. When he is roused from a drunken stupor by two street urchins claiming to have found a body in the river, he is convinced that the children have encountered a dead cow (not an unusual occurrence) or else that they are playing an elaborate trick on him. What he finds makes this most violent and hardened of men vomit.
The corpse is human, and has had its limbs amputated, its eyes cut out and its tongue removed.
The body, which is subsequently trundled off to the city morgue and cemetery, reawakens thoughts that Cardell would sooner not engage with; memories of the battle that cost him both his arm and his best friend. Unable to stop himself, he seeks out the corpse at the morgue and there encounters Cecil Winge, a brilliant lawyer and detective suffering through the final stages of tuberculosis. Winge’s right to die in peace has been hijacked by the chief of police, who wants to see justice done before government corruption sees him removed from his position. The two men conduct an uneasy examination of the body, and discover that the horrors it has endured are worse than either could possibly have imagined. Thus, Cardell and Winge, each for their own reasons, undertake to seek out the source of a sadistic act of evil; christening the corpse Karl Johann in a desperate attempt to restore the dignity it was denied in life.
Winge’s brain being an extension of himself, and Cardell’s fists serving a similar function, it would have been very easy for Natt Och Dach to frame his two main characters as a Swedish Holmes and Watson, one grounded in the cerebral world and the other in the physical. Fortunately, Natt Och Dach is a freak among crime novelists: industrious, meticulous, never in a hurry and above all, never lazy. Both Cardell and Winge live intense physical and emotional existences, the former a blunt instrument at the mercy of psychological trauma, the latter a fastidious intellectual clinging to the world of the mind as his body falls apart. The result of putting these two opposites together does not produce the usual predictable fireworks display of clashing personalities, but rather a steady, if sometimes grudging respect, highlighted by the morbid necessity of discovering Karl Johann’s killer before Winge dies. It’s characterisation done in the very best tradition of Scandinavian noir, and is one of the many things that makes this novel stand out from others.
Natt Och Dach’s exemplary characterisation is not only confined to his protagonists, but to supporting characters as well; a fact that works wonders for the novel’s structure, plot and pacing. The novel’s second and third acts, for instance, are both told from the points of view of characters who seem to have nothing to do with the plot, but who are linked to it in truly surprising and tragic ways. I normally find this way of telling a story to be infernally tiresome, but Natt Och Dag is such a skilled writer that one is drawn irresistibly to the lives of these seemingly unconnected characters and does not mind waiting around for the link to the central plot.
While interesting characters abound in this book, it might be said that the true protagonist is the city of Stockholm itself. However, not even the most optimistic reader could see The Wolf and the Watchman as an ode. Natt Och Dag’s Stockholm is a deeply ugly place. Because the city is unfortunate enough to be built on a river, its citizens are unfortunate enough to live next to a fetid, teeming mess into which every conceivable thing gets thrown. Piles of human waste pollute the water and tower above it because there is nowhere else to put it. In the winter months, the hardness of the ground forces cemetery officials to stack corpses coffinless until the thaw, and in hospitals, men are piled into beds one on top of the other for lack of space. But the ugliness of Natt Och Dag’s Stockholm is not merely aesthetic, and the devastating amorality of its citizens more than lives up to the book’s central theme of homo homini lupus est (man is like a wolf to other men). Natt Och Dag provides us with hellishly detailed descriptions of the fetishes catered to in Stockholm’s brothels, the casual sexual assault of women, the heartless swindling of penniless men and the slavery that results, and the sadistic satisfaction that these bring to the purveyors of such misery. There is such a profusion of waste, bodily fluids, rape and torture that it makes The North Water look like Disneyland, and that’s before you even get started on what happened to Karl Johann, and why. Though the book does delve into some of the bloodier episodes of the French Revolution, one is often seized by the idea that this kind of evil could not have happened in any other place and that the ugliness of eighteenth-century Swedish society is as much to blame for Karl Johann’s death as the killer is. That’s not to say that the killer is entirely a product of his society. Rather, his life is like the pieces of a monstrous puzzle being shuffled and assembled by an invisible hand, each instance of isolation and rejection like a stone on the path to what he will do, and why.
The perfection of The Wolf and the Watchman is somewhat spoiled by an excess of typos and sloppy proofreading that should have been picked up before going to print. Nevertheless, the book remains a masterfully-written portrait of a frankly dreadful period in history, and will appeal to readers who like their historical novels gritty, bloody and utterly unhinged.
LADYGILRAEN 