a storm is brewing [jatp]

voices – strange shores [book review]

Following my recent trip to Iceland, I read two more books by Arnaldur Indriðason, Voices (Röddin, 2003) and Strange Shores (Furðustrandir, 2010).

As usual, Indriðason’s books are more about the past (of characters as well as of the whole country) than about current times. Voices does not switch from this pattern, the more because it is one of the earliest Inspector Erlendur’s books. Besides the murder of an hotel employee at the fringe of homelessness, lies the almost constant questioning in Indriðason’s books of the difficult or even impossible relations between parents and children and/or between siblings, and of the long-lasting consequences of this generation gap. The murder iitself is but a pretext to investigations on that theme and the murder resolution is far from the central point of the book. The story itself is thus less compelling than others I have read, maybe because the main character spends so much time closeted in his hotel room. But it nonetheless fits well within the Erlendur series. And although it is unrelated with the story, the cover reminded me very much of the Gullfoss waterfalls.

The second book, Strange Shores, is the farthest to a detective stories in the whole series. Indeed, Erlendur is back to his childhood cottage in Eastern Iceland, looking for a resolution of his childhood trauma, loosing his younger brother during a snowstorm. He also investigates another snowstorm disappearance, interrogating the few survivors and reluctant witnesses from that time. Outside any legal mandate. Sometimes very much outside! While the story is not completely plausible, both in the present and in the past, it remains a striking novel, even on its own. (Although it could read better after the earlier novels in the series.) Not only the resolution of the additional disappearance brings additional pain and no comfort to those involved, but the ending of Erlendur’s own quest is quite ambiguous. As the book reaches its final pages, I could not decide if he had reached redemption and deliverance and the potential to save his own children, or he was beyond redemption, reaching another circle of Hell. As explained by the author in an interview, this is intentional and not not the consequence of my poor understanding: ” Readers of Strange Shores are not quite certain what to make of the ending regarding Erlendur, and I’m quite happy to leave them in the dark!”. If the main character of this series focussing more on missing persons than on detective work, what’s next?!