Läckberg/Cockburn/TheFollowing

Today I finished Camilla Läckberg’s The Ice Princess. Not surprisingly, the pace picks up dramatically in this final part of the novel, as this is when the solution to the mystery is revealed. I’ve decided not to give away any spoiler information, but I will say that the murderer’s identity is satisfyingly unexpected, there are enough loose threads to make one hope for a sequel involving some of the same characters (which would be Läckberg’s novel The Preacher http://www.camillalackberg.com/the-preacher-6), and the most interesting aspect of the conclusion is the way Läckberg connects a) the past and the present and b) different types of violence. On the first point, although this is not a noir-ish book, a good alternative title for it could be Out of the Past for the way in which the solution of the crime in the present is found in the secrets of the past. Although the legal statute of limitations is invoked at one point, Läckberg makes it clear that people whose lives have been impacted by violence live in a continual present unaffected by a sense of either limitation or closure. And on the second point, true to her emphasis on emotion and interpersonal interaction throughout the book, Läckberg finishes this novel by complexly interweaving domestic violence, child abuse, murder, and even silence as a form of violence in order to demonstrate the impossibility of separating out one form of violence as the exclusive or ‘proper’ focus of crime fiction.

I also read the next fifty pages of Alexander Cockburn’s A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture. There’s no doubt that part of the reason I enjoy Cockburn’s work as much as I do is because, as a fellow expatriate, we tend to be struck by many of the same things about American culture. Take, for example, its peculiar attitude toward sex and violence, in which any public discussion of the former falls under a kind of prohibition, while the second is all too often accepted as a routine feature of American life. With this in mind, Cockburn has a wonderful reaction to the American response to the Monica Lewinsky affair: “It’s been marvelously cathartic for people to have had to talk so long and so loudly about blowjobs, orgasms, infidelity and privacy. Nothing has been more ridiculous than the whinings of parents about how to talk about it all. Kids who’ve watched forty-five deaths a day on American TV their whole lives are experiencing a marked elevation in the quality of their cultural consumption by listening to accounts of Bill and Monica’s sexual encounters.” And on a more serious note, Cockburn is just as useful when criticizing the response to the Columbine shootings, and in particular the American tendency to single out the usual scapegoats for blame while thoughtlessly exculpating others: “By now mandatory apologies for what happened at Columbine High are incumbent on Marilyn Manson, video-game manufacturers, Hollywood, publishers of Mein Kampf, and the internet. The only people who apparently don’t have to apologize are the US military and their civilian overseers…who mint the currency of violence.” One has only to think of Obama shedding tears over the child victims of the Newtown shootings while simultaneously ordering drone strikes that will kill other children to be struck by the depressingly current accuracy of Cockburn’s observations. Plus ça change…

Now that Claire has joined Joe Carroll and their son Joey at the cult’s mansion and their family is ‘reunited,’ the action of ‘The Following’ slows to a snail’s pace. Episodes 11 and 12 of this seemingly interminable show both exhibit a singular lack of ideas and plot development. By this stage, the writers have apparently reached the ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ stage and so they throw in an undeveloped plot line about a link between Carroll’s cult and a hazily-defined militia group called ‘Freedom 13’ in an effort to maintain the viewers’ interest. The precise nature of this militia group has to be hazy, of course, because to explore militias in any degree of detail would require discussing white supremacy and this would disrupt the artfully crafted multicultural profile of the show’s cast (although all the main characters are (surprise, surprise) white). The writers also show Carroll ‘unraveling’ both to delay the revelation of what the climax of Carroll’s plan will be but also in an effort to make him more interesting. This attempt fails. He is more irritating and tedious than ever and in this regard, at least one aspect of his character is spot on: as a former academic, of course he would love to listen to himself talk! The lowest point of many comes after an excessively long and boring conversation between Carroll and Ryan Harding, when the former arrives at a staggeringly banal insight: the two of them are just alike. The villain and the detective sharing an unexpected similarity? Brilliant! Why has no one thought of this before? Oh wait…EVERYONE HAS! Episode 14 of this dreary garbage is titled ‘The End Is Near.’ The promise of that title is the only thing that is keeping me going.