Book Review

By Derryll White

Adler-Olsen, Jussi (2012). The Absent One.

“Privilege” is the first word that occurs to me while beginning ‘The Absent One.’ People from rich families manufacture their own world, and woe to those lesser beings who enter that world or cross the path of its denizens. Bad things happen.

Alder-Olsen takes a circumstance – select private school – and a seemingly inconsequential act of violence, and builds that into a pattern that lays suspect many of Scandinavia’s power brokers. His readers are forced to ask questions about how things have come to be the way they are and how immunity is granted to some from the rules that govern most of us.

Adler-Olsen lays the story out in a way that allows readers outside Scandinavia to make links with their own political culture. The assumption of privilege has no limits or bounds. Private schools the world over demand relentless observation of the group good, attention to discipline, and exploitation of those outside the group. And those are the exact conditions that spawned Detective Inspector Carl Mørk’s elite serial killers.

The author has a pronounced sense of humour as he builds the Department Q team. Assad came in the first novel, quirky and a great counterweight to the sometimes morose Carl Mørk. In ‘The Absent One’ Rose appears, edgy, pushy and highly competent. Always, the assaults on the sensibilities of the Danish justice establishment continue, even as the cases are solved.

Carl Mørk is a man seldom at ease. He struggles with the world and his place in it, as do we all. He is intelligent and therefore unable to find comfort when confronted with the realities of tremendous wealth and power. He is also burdened by a very large and defined sense of justice – which he is totally committed to. Gangly and awkward as Mørk is, I believe Adler-Olsen has created an excellent example of what most readers aspire to at some level – an “everyman” with morals. The villains are quirky, slightly mad and believable. The translation is excellent. I really enjoyed this novel.

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Excerpts from the novel:

DENMARK – She didn’t eat much, and thanks to the so-called health-conscious government, alcohol cost next to nothing. A person could now drink himself to death at half-price. What a terrific society Denmark had become.

PRIVILEGE – Some of the men were thoroughly addicted to the kick they got out there in the morning fog. Squeezing the trigger could satisfy them for days. They earned millions but it was the killing that made them feel alive.

MUSIC – An unusually dreadful cross between gangsta rap and an entire town of collapsing corrugated metal houses thundered through the wall from Jesper’s room.

DANISH SOCIETY – In tiny Denmark the system was so ingenious that if you knew some dirt about somebody, they also knew something just as bad about you. If it wasn’t hushed up, the one person’s offense quickly infected the other’s. A strange, practical principle that meant that no one would say anything about anyone else, not even if they were caught with their hands in the biscuit tin.

CLASS DISTINCTION – “The girls board at a wonderful all-girls school near my in-laws’ estate in Eastbourne.”

She said it so sweetly and unaffectedly and shamelessly. How the hell did she have the heart to do that to her children? Eleven years old, and they were already exported to the backwaters of England and subjected to relentless discipline.

He looked at her with a freshly cemented foundation under his class prejudices.

BUSINESS – “I learned that when opportunity presents itself, you take it, whether it’s random or not. Without considering fairness or another person’s guilt or innocence. That’s the business world’s alpha and omega, you understand? Sharpen your weapons and use them constantly. Just go for it.”

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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