Roseanna

Undeterred by the damp Dutch weather, 9 TIC members made their way to my house in Tilburg north – 5 by bike! – to discuss our latest book – Rosanna. After getting drinks and some snacks taken care of, we got right into talking about the book. While most had liked it, no one was really thrilled with the book. To begin with, a little background information was given about the  authors and the series of 10 books they wrote: 

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo are widely regarded as the godparents of Scandinavian crime fiction. Both left-wing journalists, they met in 1961 and together created the Martin Beck crime series, famously writing alternate chapters at night after putting their children to bed. Wahloo died at the age of 49 just as their tenth book was going to press. Their books chronicle the changes in the Swedish Police force, which was nationalized in the early 1960’s, by following the lives and work of the Stockholm Police Homicide squad, focusing primarily on Detective Martin Beck. By choosing the crime novel as their genre, Sjowall and Wahloo selected a medium that would allow their characters to interact with all levels of Swedish citizens, as well as reflect the changes taking place in Sweden and the decaying relationship between the police and Swedish society. Sjowall and Wahloo transformed the crime genre into a vehicle for addressing wrongs, rather than diffusing social anxiety. Until their work, the police procedural had been little appreciated in Sweden.

While these are lofty ambitions, it is hard – almost 60 years later – to see it as something new. Today we are innundated with CSI – type tv shows that are ALL about police procedures and the detectives portrayed in books, movies and tv shows are almost always kind of quirky. The books were written before the days of mobile phones, tiny tape recorders you could slip in your pocket, computers and internet and the ease of e-mail communication. It seemed kind of slow to have the detectives sitting around smoking and waiting for a letter from their colleague in America to see if he could shed light on their victim, Rosanna, or give clues about the identity of her killer, but that was an accurate portrayal of how it was done in the 60’s and 70’s! Some members had a hard time with the main character, Martin Beck. With his self destructive eating habits, complaints about his wife and marriage – which he made no positive contribution to! – he was hard to feel very sympathetic towards. While the writing was very straight forward it was impressive to learn how accurately the authors documented the exact happenings of the years in which the books took place and were written – down to flight numbers and departure times, political events and the weather. While none of us could really grasp the social commentary said to be present in the book, it was felt that, since the books were conceived as one epic novel, published at the rate of one installment per year, we would have to read more of the books to understand that aspect better. Tim and Anne both plan to do that so we will report back to the group on what we find.
In conclusion, an OK book which had a good plot and was nice to read, but not thrilling. Average score of the group was 3.4