The Girl on the Fløibane
Norway has pioneered and perfected the art of slow TV, and it's natural enough that one of the country's foremost authors, Knut Ove Knutson, should turn his meticulously-detailed attention to perfecting the previously-neglected art of 'slow crime.'
The Girl on the Fløibane, by Knut Ove Knutson
Midnight Thrillers, 664 pp, 451kr, September 2018
Every minute of the seven-hour rail journey from Bergen to Oslo (that uniquely Norwegian katabasis, a descent through 182 tunnels from the airy light of the country's ancient capital to the dank underworld of the modern pretender); every minute of the coastal voyage to Kirkenes (this time an ascent to darkness); eight hours of wood slowly burning in a fireplace. Norway has pioneered and perfected the art of slow TV, and it's natural enough that one of the country's foremost authors, Knut Ove Knutson, should turn his meticulously-detailed attention to perfecting the previously-neglected art of 'slow crime.'
The cable car journey up Bergen's Mount Fløyen takes only a few minutes, but from those fleeting minutes Knutson has extracted the material for a novel of nearly 700 pages. His authorial gaze shifts from exterior (every house, every tree, every rock on the mountainside is afforded a place in the narrative) to the interior (who are these people travelling up a mountain by cable car? Where have they come from? Which one of them will ultimately commit the crime, and what will the crime be?).
This reviewer is loath to include spoilers, but the nature of the crime came as a genuine shock. Some critics may yearn for a faster pace to their thrillers, but for the true Norwegian the crime novels that burns slowest burns with the brightest flame. What Knutson gives the world with this latest instalment of his Girl series is a glimpse of what the crime genre's potency when placed in the gnarled hands of a true artist.
Reading The Girl on the Fløibane, it's impossible not to be filled with longing to dismount, as the narrator dismounts, at Promsgate and explore (for more than 100 pages) every inch of that intermediate stop, to walk every step of the concrete staircase. In this stunning novel, Knutson succeeds in reinventing the way we approach death: no longer a descent into the darkness of the unknown, but a steady and utterly beautiful climb towards the purity of the clean mountain air.