NEW STUFF: The Wolf & the Watchman - Niklas Natt och Dag

The Wolf and the Watchman
by Niklas Natt och Dag
orig published as 1793
translated from Swedish by Ebba Segerberg
Atria/Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9677-5
373 pp. $28
Publication date: March 5, 2019

Stockholm, 1793. One year after the assassination of King Gustav III at a masked ball. Two years after the Swedish navy defeated the Russians at the Battle of Svensksund that ended to the Russo-Swedish war. There is new albeit limited religious freedom for Roman Catholics and Jews, torture as a tool to gain confessions from prisoners has been outlawed, capital punishment is limited to only a short list of crimes. And yet amid all these reforms the city is a seething brutal cesspool of political corruption, lax morality, and heinous murder. Recently recovered from the filthy (formerly freshwater) lake known as the Larder is a horrific find -- the limbless corpse of a man who has also been blinded had his tongue cut out. Two men join forces to track down the vile murderer and also discover the identity of the pathetic victim.

The Wolf and the Watchman of the title are the two men who from a detective duo of sorts. Cecil Winge, is the wolf -- a lawyer who is called in by the Swedish police to help in unusual criminal cases. He is aided by the man who pulled the body from the fetid water, war veteran and sometime watchman Mickel Cardell. Mickell is also an amputee who regularly suffers from "phantom limb syndrome" years after his injury. His experience of losing his arm to a literal hack of a shipboard surgeon is of benefit to Winge when the two examine the gruesome wounds on the corpse. Mickell is able to show the age of each wound based on how it has healed, the look of the scar tissue, the manner in which skinflaps were grafted. He does a better job at revealing how the man must have suffered for days or weeks than the coroner, an indifferent bureaucrat who barely cares.

Winge also find clues about the body based on an embroidered cloth that the body was wrapped in. Clever questioning of area drunks and vagrants reveals that a sedan chair with unusual green paint and matching curtains was abandoned temporarily within walking distance of the Larder. Winge then follows the clues of the sedan chair and the embroidered cloth to a notorious brothel where he learns of an unthinkable fate the victim underwent prior to his death and disposal in the polluted lake.

Here is a historical novel that mixes some intensely perverse nightmares of the past with modern day horror worthy of yet another installment in the already too long series of Saw murder movies. Natt och Dag seems to be exploiting Sweden's dismal past as a commentary on our own dark and seedy times. Uncontrolled pollution, rampant disease, sexual indulgences are described with an almost gleeful relish while power plays, sadism and wicked revenge dominate the narrative. There is little room left for goodness.

Rare are the times when Cardell is allowed to voice his moral outrage in his vociferous voice and violent reactions. When those moments come the reader finds himself wishing for the villains to at last receive their comeuppance. This is a nihilistic world, one where survival of the fittest means nothing, it is only about survival. The weak have more than their fair share of struggling to survive while the powerful abuse and exploit all in their way.

Winge is among the weak though he does a good job of hiding it. He is suffering from the end stages of tuberculosis. He wonders if he will live to see the close of this murder case with the offensive criminal not only brought to justice but mercilessly executed. There is one such execution scene described with the kind of raw, grisly detail that makes the book often difficult to stomach.

The novel is divided into four books and the second part titled "The Blood and Wine" is probably the toughest section to wade through. It tells the story of Kristofer Blix. His selfish carousing and gambling land him at the mercy of a slavish moneylender who then sells Blix's debts to a mysterious and reclusive nobleman. Blix is basically imprisoned in the nobleman's home, kept at bay by a savage and hungry dog, exploited for his skills as an apprentice surgeon, and forced to commit acts of atrocity that will haunt him for the rest of his brief life.

Niklas Natt och Dag
(photo: © Gabriel Liljevall)

Part three ("The Moth and the Flame") relates the life of Anna Stina Knapp who, of course, also suffers a cruel trick of Fate. She is accused of prostitution by a man whose sexual advances she rejected, arrested, found guilty in a kangaroo court and sentenced to a year and a half in prison. Then the bulk of the section deals with life in a prison workhouse for women who toil endlessly at spinning wheels creating wool thread for textile manufacturers. Their sentence is literally measured out in threads rather than years. The Greek mythological analogies we are thankfully spared. One cannot help but think of Dickens and Atwood's Alias Grace while reading of Anna's harsh life and the foul treatment of the women at the hands of the sadistic guards and a sanctimonious preacher.

Anna plots an escape with the help of some other prisoners. This is actually the most exciting part of the book and the least repellent for it deals mostly with a strong minded woman tenaciously holding onto her dignity, her chastity, and her moral conscience. Will she triumph? Will she succeed in her escape? And how does she figure in the tale of the unfortunate limbless and nameless body so horrifyingly slaughtered? We find out all the answers in part four when the story returns to the detective duo and their murder investigation with Anna appearing towards the end in one of the novel's unexpected plot machinations.

Natt och Dag won an award for Best Debut of 2017 from the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers. The book is being praised by several European newspaper reviewers and literary experts. It's been compared to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, The Alienist and any other novel that mixes detective fiction with history. All of this praise is a bit excessive for the book is far from a masterpiece, not really very original, nor even very enlightening or factual about Sweden's history in 1793. What it is -- a truly unabashed 21st century sensation novel inspired by the penny dreadfuls of the past, also overloaded with gore, sadism, and unspeakable acts. Admittedly, some sections have truly thrilling edge-of-your-seat excitement and much of the plot is not at all predictable. Still it is more than indulgent in heaping on the depths of human degradation and perversity that crowd its pages. What we have here basically is a "shilling shocker" in sham literary packaging. A novel meant for this New Age of Horrors Unlimited. And if there's also an award for that, I wouldn't be surprised at all.