Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason
Translated by Bernard Scudder
Picador. 290pp. $14
Reviewed by Steve Himmer
1.13.07
Arnaldur Indridason’s Jar City features a divorced, aging detective whose relationships with his children are strained and whose ambivalence toward his younger colleagues and a changing society leave him as frustrated and embittered as any number of other crime novel protagonists. What makes Jar City engaging and surprising is how Indridason both adopts and adapts these conventions as the investigation undertaken by his Inspector Erlendur proceeds.
When a man is found murdered in his Reykjavik apartment, the only apparent clues are a cryptic note left with the body and a photograph of an anonymous tombstone, with no indication of either the motive or the assailant. As Erlendur learns more about the victim, the less sympathetic the dead man becomes and the more possible reasons for his slaying emerge. He turns out to have been a thug and a rapist who left a victim pregnant. The tombstone belongs to the daughter born of that rape and killed decades earlier by a rare genetic condition.
The investigation is made difficult by Erlendur’s discovery of police corruption and apathy, which prevented the murdered man from being held accountable at the time. Incompetence in the medical examiner’s office and the hospital where the girl died caused her brain—a vital clue—to be sold into a private collection of organs and other specimens. As cynical Erlendur is exposed to seamy strata of society even he wasn’t aware of, past secrets and mistakes make the truth of the murder harder to find and only increase frustration with his profession and cultural changes occurring in Iceland.
Though Jar City isn’t outright social critique, Erlendur’s nostalgic confusion and aged bitterness lend the novel and his character more complication than the plot might seem to allow. It’s not unusual for the concrete act of gathering clues and solving a crime to stand in for more ambiguous urges to create order from chaos and put the world to rights, but in Erlendur’s case there’s a strain between his desire for answers and a wish to leave some stones unturned. When he tells his young partner that the apartment crime scene looks like “a typical, clumsy Icelandic murder,” he seems to be wishing for a simplicity the world around him has lost, even in its cruelty and violence. Indridason avoids turning his Inspector Erlendur into a curmudgeonly cliché; however, the investigation reveals more mistakes and corruption in those old days for which the detective is nostalgic. Erlendur’s sense of guilt, as if he were responsible for setting the world around him to rights and bearing the weight of what he sees as a failing society, keep the novel compelling despite the familiar elements.
Still, the conflict between order and disorder may be a bit overplayed. Every element of the novel seems to have a direct, often obvious parallel. The dead child and young rape victim are echoed by a subplot involving a bride fleeing her own wedding after years of sexual abuse by her father. Erlendur’s own daughter is yet another “girl in trouble,” a drug addict who becomes pregnant and alternates between wanting her father’s help to get clean and sinking back into addiction even as the Inspector tries to protect her from violent debt collectors. The image of buried secrets also recurs too frequently here, between the significance of a tombstone and grave, the dead girl’s brain buried in a private collection, crucial information lost in disordered files and the discovery of a corpse beneath the murdered man’s floor. All of those parallel threads make the novel so ordered and tidy that even as Erlendur’s world spins into chaos it is still too obviously under the control of an author.
Difficulty suspending disbelief is compounded by a number of disruptive textual moments, though whether these are a result of the translation or of the original Icelandic text is unclear. Awkward, abrupt shifts in perspective and unconvincing moments of small talk—often mentioning films and pop-culture trivia in distracting, conspicuous ways—make it difficult to forget the presence of an author and/or translator to focus on the story. Yet that awareness of the text isn’t complicated in any way that might suggest a more radical intention on the part of the author. Inspector Erlendur is a complex enough character and detective to engage the reader and the investigation he undertakes is enough to satisfy, but both would be better served by less conspicuous plotting and prose.