Translated by Philip Roughton — The topography, geography and meteorology of Iceland are never far out of mind in Arnaldur Indridason’s crime stories. His most recent to be published in English, The Quiet Mother, is a police procedural. It’s the third novel featuring Indridason’s detective, Konrád, a series that began with The Darkness Knows. Although in this story Konrád is retired, he still employs the habits he developed as a dogged investigator and calls on his continuing ties with Reykjavík’s official police detectives for help. The story, in essence, is about the heavy toll of keeping secrets.
A woman, first name Valborg, has contacted Konrád with a big secret of her own. Dying of pancreatic cancer, she would like him to find the child she gave up for adoption nearly 50 years earlier. When the baby was born, she refused to see it, to hold it, even to learn its gender. Now she’s full of regrets.
Konrád declines to help her. In fact he refuses her three times – very Biblical, that. At the time of the birth, she was under the sway of a midwife from an extremely conservative religious group that abhorred abortion.
A few weeks later, Valborg is mysteriously murdered and Konrád regrets turning her away. In recompense, he determines to unravel the mystery of who killed such a mild, quiet woman and why. As information about her past is fragmentary and hard to obtain, he fills the rest of his time with another, more personal investigation. After many years, he’s decided to investigate the murder of his father.
Not a nice man, Konrád’s father. At least some of the time, he was in league with another criminal and con man named Engilbert, and together they held fake séances to fleece money out of susceptible people, mainly elderly women.
Engilbert drowned, accidentally it was ruled, a few months after Konrád’s father was murdered. Konrád and Engilbert’s daughter, Eygló, decide to look into their fathers’ swindles as a possible key to understanding their deaths. Eygló herself has some psychic abilities, she believes, and is more uncertain than Konrád about the extent of their fathers’ duplicity. It’s almost painful how she tries valiantly to give the older men, especially her own father, the benefit of the doubt.
As these two investigations proceed, there are a great many characters to keep track of with names English speakers may find difficult to pronounce. Also, a few flashbacks deal with events that took place around the time Valborg became pregnant or the two fathers were working their schemes. Nevertheless, I had no trouble following when the action occurred and who the characters were. This may be in part because I read the novel over just a few days.
Each scene and interview adds a small bit of information or insight. Most either shed a little light on long-ago events, or, in the current story, on interactions between the murdered woman’s neighbours. Although these scattered revelations may turn out to be consequential, they arrive so gradually and after such effort on Konrád’s part that they aren’t shocking. They remind me of the saying, ‘Though the mills of the gods grind slowly, they grind exceeding small.’ In short, patience is needed, but divine retribution will come. At least in Rekyavík.
The slow pace affords the chance to get to know the characters, how they think and react, so that even if their names are hard to pronounce, you have a good sense of them. When you take into account the country’s relatively small population – the UK’s population is more than 16 times that of Iceland – people know each other, they cross each other’s paths and what might seem too much of a coincidence in a more populous country is perfectly logical in this setting. Although Valborg went ‘away’ to have her baby, the town she decamped to is only 28 miles from Reykjavík.
Only recently, I read one of Indridason’s earlier books, Reykjavík Nights, with a different central investigator – Erlendur Sveinsson, in his early days as a traffic policeman. You can read about the Erlundur books here. In this novel too, the investigation grinds along painstakingly, but with the inevitability of justice. I don’t know whether all his stories adopt this pattern, but it’s very effective, as the slow accretion of information fills out what had been a blank picture. Moreover, Indridason writes in a very matter-of-fact way, using declarative sentences, so that you sense the evidence piling up unambiguously.
Some readers dislike, or more accurately, distrust translations of books, believing they may not be true to the author’s intent. However, Philip Roughton’s translation reads quite well, and I never thought another word here or there might have been more effective or would have cast a different light on the subject.
Crime Fiction Lover has interviewed Arnaldur Indridason a number of times about his work, most recently eight years ago. He has won the award for best Nordic crime novel in 2002 and 2003, a CWA Gold Dagger Award and the RBA Prize for Crime Writing (Spanish) in 2013, said to be the world’s most lucrative. The arrival of one of his books for English-language readers is something to celebrate.
Vintage
Print/Kindle/iBook
£9.19
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
