book: The Darkest Room (2008; trans Marlaine Delargy 2009) by Johan Theorin

A few days ago I was assuming that Jane Harper’s superb The Lost Man would be the benchmark against which I’d compare the rest of my reading this year, but now, so soon, it has a rival in my affections. The irony is that Johan Theorin’s The Darkest Room has been sitting on my nightstand for some years now, always being passed over at the last minute as I chose my next read.

Grr! When I think of how many lesser books I read when I could have been devouring this one . . .

From the outside, The Darkest Room looks like yet another Scandinoir, and in a sense this impression is perfectly accurate. I’ve read a fair number of Scandinoirs, of which some have been great, some have been good, some have been not so good, and some have been, um, differently good. Considering it purely as a Scandinoir, I’d rate The Darkest Room as quite possibly the most satisfying novel I’ve read in the genre; I’m having trouble thinking of one to rival it.

But the reason I like it so much is related, I’m sure, to the fact that, at the same time as it’s a splendid exemplar of the Scandinoir genre, it doesn’t really fit comfortably into the category. It’s also, you see, a ghost story.

Let me qualify that.

Back in the 1990s, when John Clute and I were putting together The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, John created a whole bundle of new critical terms in order to better get a handle on the genre; that new vocabulary he devised is, I think, one of the book’s greatest strengths. I contributed just a few new critical terms of my own — a mere handful, at a guess. But one that I myself have found unfailingly useful since then is “fantasy of perception”: the kind of fantasy in which the fantastication is rooted not in supernatural phenomena of some kind but in the perceptions of the characters. A novel like John Fowles’s The Magus would seem a prime example of the fantasy of perception, in that you can if you want read it as a fantasy even at the same time as you know that any fantastication of reality that’s going on is the product of the god-gaming (John’s term!) that’s underway.

Back to The Darkest Room. As I say, it’s perfectly open to you to read this novel as a ghost story plain and simple, or as a ghost story with crime elements and what turns out to be a murder-mystery plot. For me, though, the spectral elements, if I can call them that, were born out of the perceptions of the central character, Joakim Westin, as his mind tried to make sense of the string of traumatic events he was being forced to experience, and the misplaced guilt he felt over some of them. (A few other characters, notably Henrik the thief, have lesser psychic encounters. The same argument applies to those.)

Now here’s the thing: It didn’t matter in the slightest to me that the creepy events I’m referring to seemed psychological rather than parapsychological in origin; they still got my pulse racing and, more to the point, they still drove along a plot as powerful as an irresistible river current. (Put it this way, if you can switch the light out immediately after your introduction to the hidden chapel of the dead, you’re braver than I am.) I imagine that anyone who reads The Darkest Room as a ghost story will feel that same sensation: this is a tale that, once you’ve let yourself be caught up in it, simply refuses to let you go.

So, what’s the story about?

Young couple Joakim and Katrine Westin come from Stockholm with their two small kids to live in a ramshackle old waterfront manor on the island of Öland, off mainland Sweden’s southeast coast (or north coast, as it says in the blurb to my copy of the book). Many years ago, Katrine’s semi-estranged mother Mirja, now a celebrated painter and singer, lived here, and she warned the young couple against following suit. There’s a certain creepiness about the place, but nothing prepares for the dreadful day when Katrine is drowned in the water between the house and the two historic lighthouses on islands just off the shore. Everyone assumes the death is an accident except Joakim, purely for gut-instinct reasons, and, after a while, Tilda Davidsson, a junior cop new to the area, whose elderly relative Gerlof notices the detail others have missed that indicates a murder has indeed been committed.

The eventual solution of that murder mystery is supremely well handled. The irony is that, through the vast majority of the book, it’s easy not to realize that this particular plot-strand is even there.

Meanwhile a reluctant thief, Henrik, has been swept up by two far more ruthless criminals, Tommy and Freddy, with the aim of pillaging the homes up and down Öland. The last place they plan to hit is the manor at Eel Point, the home now of Joakim Westin and his two little ones . . .

I’ve missed out a heck of a lot of plot here (including all the supernatural/”supernatural” elements). This is quite a long book, and at any one moment there are multiple narratives to occupy you — not only are we following Joakim, Tilda, Henrik and Gerlof, we’re taking glimpses into the tragedy-laden history of the Eel Point manor.

To repeat, this is quite a long book. I read it in a couple of days, snatching time away when I could from my work and from a certain amount of obligatory convalescence. It seized me that firmly, and I enjoyed it that much. I now have everything else Theorin has written (and that has been translated) on order from my library at staggered intervals over the next few months.

Like I say, this book has been sitting unread on my nightstand for a matter of years. How very foolish I can be in my ignorance . . .