Nesbø, Harry and 'Phantom'

Jo Nesbø

In Wednesday's post I went over the lineup of the nine novels to date in Jo Nesbø's series about sometimes Oslo police inspector Harry Hole. Let's pick up the frequently asked questions where we left off.

Q: How violent are the books? I'm not big on books about serial killers.... A: Only a few of the books to date actually involve serial killings. You definitely don't need to be a fan of, say, Thomas Harris to enjoy the Harry Hole books. Violence? When I read The Snowman, it struck me as the most violent book so far, with The Devil's Star a close second, but the violence never seems gratuitous (or purely genre-driven) to me. True, the books all involve homicide investigations, including at least some forensics. And Harry does manage to get roughed up quite frequently, even for a fictional detective.

Q: Suppose I'm the one reader who never got into Stieg Larsson's books? Or Henning Mankell's? Or.... A: Not a problem. Scandinavia is just a geographic region--not the best reason to read one author rather than another. Scandinavian crime novels are all different. Even Nesbø's own novels seem to me quite different from one another. Try one. You might like it. (I suggested The Redbreast as a starting place for US readers. But not because it's in any way 'typical'.)

The 9th Harry Hole novel
German translation
Die Larve (2011)

I'm blogging about Nesbø and Harry this week because I just read the ninth book in the series, the one that will be published in the UK in March 2012 under the title Phantom. (I can't contain my enthusiasm for the book, but I'll do my utmost to keep this post spoiler-free.) Until this point I'd been playing catch-up with Nesbø; with this book I have become a follower--as addicted to the series as his hero and certain other characters in the new book are to their drugs of choice.

Harry is a recovering alcoholic with memorable lapses; the new book involves the illegal drug trade in Oslo. Phantom, appropriately enough, brought me more highs and lows, as a reader, than any other Nesbø novel. And by lows I mean not disappointments but... let's say developments from which some readers may take a while to recover. Obviously I'm still working on my recovery, three days after finishing Phantom. And speaking of following--and serials--I'm already impatient for the next book in the series. I just realized: Harry Hole is a serial. The blogger is, at least sometimes, the last to know. (Inexcusable parenthesis, especially addressed to fans of Samuel Beckett: I've had my own I-can't-go-on-I'll-go-on oscillation with Phantom and its final scenes. Try, all readers of Phantom please try, this experiment on yourselves: count the number of days or hours after finishing Phantom before you start thinking about book ten in the series.)

Speaking of trying to remain spoiler-free: by some lucky accident, I managed to read the first several chapters of Phantom without knowing certain facts about the plot. I had read only the earliest, briefest descriptions released by Nesbø's German publisher, Ullstein--which have since been replaced by longer blurbs that continue to be discreet but reveal, among other things, how the set-up of the novel relates it to the others that preceded it. In other words, I was surprised--not bowled over, more delighted, mildly but quite 'pleasantly' surprised--by parts of the set-up with which almost every future reader may be familiar before starting the book. (It was, for me, the first of the book's 'highs'. It's a high you may still be able to share--if you restrict what you read and hear about the book between now and the time you read it.)

The whole experience made me dream of an alternative universe in which readers could approach each new book in a state of comparative innocence. In which publishers didn't feel they had to give anything away for the sake of making a sale. In which bloggers, even, rivalled one another in discretion.

I've far exceeded my allotted 500 words for the day--which can be justified not by anything I've communicated about the plot of Phantom (of which I'd vowed to reveal as little as possible) but perhaps by the fact that I'll be taking several days off from blogging (although not from Twitter). I'll be on the road, and if I weigh in here at all it will be only with a comment or two rather than a scheduled post. (By the way, I'm holding off on talking about book eight in the series until closer to its US release date.) Happy reading, listening and coffee-drinking, and happy living as well--until next time.

Dickens: What Are You Doing for the Next 16 Months?

I already know that this will be just the first of many posts I'll devote to Charles Dickens (1812-1870) over the course of the next 15 months or so--and not just because the Dickens year 2012 (the bicentenary of his birth) is approaching.

What I have to say today is addressed primarily to people who, in some way or another, love Dickens--or who can remember deriving pleasure from a Dickens novel at some point in their lives.

On the weekend I came upon a series of posts on the Penguin UK blog, about how one group of readers is celebrating the approaching anniversary: with a massive 'Dickens readathon'. Their goal is to read all 16 of Dickens' novels at the rate of one per month. They've already made it through Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield--and they're having a ball. Here's a temporary link to Penguin's 'feature' about the readathon, and here, here and here are more permanent links to the three 'Doing Dickens' posts (to date) chronicling the group's progress and impressions of the first three books.

I'm posting these links today because there's some chance you might like to join the readathon yourself. And because I notice that Penguin has slashed prices on the Penguin Classics ebooks of many Dickens titles. If you'd like to explore this, click here for Amazon UK or here for Amazon US to get to the page for the first novel, Pickwick Papers, then surf from there (using 'Customers who bought this item also bought') to see additional titles. Ordinarily I'd recommend searching for free ebooks at Amazon, but at the current prices the Penguin Classics editions with introductions and notes are very tempting.

I confess that I've never managed to read Dickens following a timetable. Even my attempts to read individual novels on a schedule imitating their original serialization have met with little success: I've been unable to stop at the end of an installment when I've had the rest of the novel ready and waiting, right there in my hands. (Some readers, however, love to read Dickens at a regular pace. I believe it was J.B. Priestley who read all of Dickens every three years, and that Anthony Burgess kept a similar schedule.)

What I can say, though, is that there's no bad Dickens, not even a novel that's slightly less enjoyable than it was on an earlier reading. How many writers can you say that about?

I'd planned to suggest alternative ways of celebrating the Dickens bicentenary, but let's save them for another day--and for your comments. To see more about how Dickens fans are celebrating around the world, though, see the Dickens 2012 website.

Devour Your Serial

I’m going to try to make today’s post a simple love letter to serial fiction... or a confession to a mild readerly addiction from which it turns out I never fully recovered... a safe, easy reminiscence (no analysis, please) about bits of my childhood reading and what came along a few days ago to stir up those memories and reawaken some old passions.

Today, I won’t do the (general) history of serial fiction (whether you start with Scheherazade or Eugène Sue, the usual suspects down the road are Balzac, Dumas, Dickens, Wilkie Collins... on to All Quiet on the Western Front and beyond). And I won’t get to riffs on the relationship between serials and the sexual (postponement and anticipation as ploys of the story-teller as seducer; life and death as the stakes of narrative; seriality, transference and desire; serial horror in Sade...).

Instead, something more personal.

I grew up in a world in which not just magazine fiction (remember that?) but magazine and newspaper serials seemed to be everywhere. I can’t remember a time when my father wasn’t following multiple serials in The Saturday Evening Post (there were always two running concurrently, staggered so they never ended with the same issue), and from the time I was nine I followed his example. When I wasn’t reading the Perry Mason backlist in 25-cent paperbacks, I was reading, for example, the new Mason in the Post, serialized over the course of eight weeks just before it was to appear in hardback. Of course, it wasn’t just Erle Stanley Gardner (of the others, I remember most vividly Alistair MacLean’s Guns of Navarone and Hammond Innes’ Wreck of the Mary Deare, but there were also books from John P. Marquand’s Mr. Moto, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and C. S. Forester’s Hornblower series, as well as the occasional Western [ADDED 18 JULY 2011: and my first sci-fi novel, John Christopher's stunning No Blade of Grass, a/k/a The Death of Grass]), and it wasn’t just The Saturday Evening Post or just magazines: I read a string of Agatha Christie (mostly Jane Marple) novels as serials, in newspapers (starting with the novel now known as The 4.50 from Paddington, in the national ‘Sunday’ edition of the New York Daily News, and ending with A Caribbean Mystery in The Houston Post) and at least one in a magazine (a walk on the wild side: Cat among the Pigeons in my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal; technically not a serial, since the entire novel appeared, lightly condensed, in a single issue). Other newspaper serials I read ranged from nonfiction (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) to two of the lesser James Bond novels. I won’t include John D. Macdonald novels condensed in single issues of Cosmopolitan (yes, Cosmopolitan: before Helen Gurley Brown arrived, every issue contained a novel, and the magazine tried to appeal to both women and men) or the ‘nonfiction novels’ originally fostered in the pages of The New Yorker and Esquire.

At some point it all tapered off: all I remember of serialized fiction in the 1970s were Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet in The Atlantic and Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer in The New Yorker. And in the following decades I somehow missed most of The Bonfire of the Vanities and Harlot’s Ghost when they were serialized in Rolling Stone.

By that time, or so I thought, serialized fiction had become largely the stuff of nostalgia. With The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe was explicitly seeking to return to the model of Dickens. And Stephen King’s The Green Mile (first published in 1996 in six monthly paperback instalments) was also conceived as a return to Dickens and was the work of a writer with strong childhood memories of serials in The Saturday Evening Post.

Nostalgia or not, the first appearance of The Green Mile struck a chord with me. I remember devouring it as it appeared; if I was on the road, I calculated where I could snap up each instalment the day it came out. I even had fantasies that the huge success of The Green Mile might lead to a return of serialization on a larger scale.

Fifteen years went by, the way years do, and, if we make an exception for the enormous impact of the Harry Potter novels (it’s not always clear what counts as serial fiction and what doesn’t, but hundreds of thousands of readers lined up outside bookstores awaiting the release of the next Potter, feels to me a lot like U.S. readers lining the docks, impatient to learn whether Little Nell lives or dies), the next blip on my radar was a double one, and it came last week.

First, the new Paris Review arrived, containing the second of four parts of the magazine’s serialization of Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel The Third Reich. (Bolaño deserves multiple posts all to himself, presumably outside the context of serial fiction. And the same for The Paris Review. What might surprise you about the latter, if you don’t know already, is that it’s not a ‘duty read’. It's also available on your iPad.)

Second, I came under the spell (after 50 years of our passing like [space-]ships in the night) of the German sci-fi serial phenomenon Perry Rhodan. English speakers who don’t follow science fiction are unlikely to have heard of Perry Rhodan (of the 2600 weekly numbers of the series, which appears initially in pulp-booklet format every Friday in German, only a limited number have been translated into English, and none currently)—but the cumulative international sales of the series (which breaks down into cycles or story arcs of 25 to 100 numbers, each number running in the neighborhood of 25,000 words and selling for the equivalent of a few dollars) run close to one and a half billion copies.

Yes, it’s another space opera; yes, it’s (now) set thousands of years in the future; yes, it’s a bit like joining a TV soap or any other series in midstream; yes, it draws on principles of physics that were not imparted to school children in, say, my Perry Mason days. But it’s all coming out in ebook format, last Friday’s release (Das Thanatos-Programm, number 2600, the beginning of a new cycle) was free and the easiest iBooks download ever, future instalments will go for $1.99 in the U.S....

...and it’s an honest-to-God serial!!!

To be continued.