A Indridason: Silence of the Grave
The 2005 Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award Winner
The second translated novel by Arnaldur Indridason, the follow-up to Tainted Blood.
Silence of the Grave is the second novel by Arnaldur Indridason featuring Icelandic detective Erlandur and his team, who first appeared in Tainted Blood (originally published in English as Jar City) to be translated into English.
Few Icelandic writers have made a substantial name for themselves beyond the shores of their barren, windswept island. The only other that springs to mind is the late Haldor Laxness, and at first the 1955 Nobel Prize-winner’s literary tales of grim endurance amid the wind and rain of historical Iceland would seem to have little overlap with the casebook of a contemporary Reykjavik detective, beyond both of them being translated by the ubiquitous Bernard Scudder.
However, both share an unsentimental view of the world that to many modern Europeans would seem harsh even today, and the Iceland of fifty years or more ago would seem like another planet to Britons and Americans cosseted by technology and affluence. Until fairly recently, some rural Icelanders still lived without electricity or water, in houses cut out of the turf that lay squat to the ground, to escape the unrelenting gales and blizzards of deep mid-winter near the Arctic Circle.
In fact, the mystery’s origins lie in the brutal cold of a 1910 Reykjavik winter, with panic over the appearance in the skies of Halley’s Comet. It’s difficult for an outsider to understand such rampant superstition, unless they’ve seen photographs of Iceland in the first decade of the last century, such has been the phenomenal change to the country. But unskilled Icelandic labourers differed little from their ancestors of one, two or even three centuries earlier.
The novel’s main timeline weaves between the years after the Allied occupation in 1940, and the present day, as Erlandur’s team investigate a shallow grave uncovered on a new housing estate. The brutality of life in pre-independence Iceland is unstinting, breathtaking and at times almost unbearable, while even the present day setting is bleak.
Erlandur’s life is complicated by a phone call from his daughter Eva Lind, saying “help me.” Father and daughter are estranged by her lifestyle, which includes drug addiction and promiscuity, and her hatred for him because of his abrupt desertion of his family. The complex love-hate relationship between father and daughter is made worse by her pregnancy, and Indridason has no compunction in painting Erlandur as flawed as any real-life character. But he is honest enough to look at himself, and to accept why he is emotionally stunted, and then to turn that crystal-clear gaze onto the mystery and to unravel it.
Indridason is only the second writer to win the Gold Dagger for a translated work (the first was Jose Carlos Somoza for The Athenian Murders in 2002), and it’s easy to see why. With Indridason’s emergence there is now with Denmarks’ Peter Hoeg and the Swedish Henning Mankell a triumvirate of Nordic writers who are the equals of any current British or American writers.
In the case of Silence of the Grave, there is a restrained power to the story that makes the final page truly moving; it is an outstanding whodunit, with the sense of mystery added to by the exoticism of its setting. It’s a must read for all devotees of the genre.
