Us Against You – A Middling Follow-Up to the Brilliant “Beartown”

“….he learns that people will always choose a simple lie over a complicated truth, because the lie has one unbeatable advantage: the truth always has to stick to what actually happened, whereas the lie just has to be easy to believe…”

What’s so great about a Fredrik Backman novel? He delivers elegant, unparalleled insights on the fragility and strengths of human nature. That’s all.

Of course, the Swedish novelist isn’t saying anything perfectly original on this topic that philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, and artists haven’t said throughout centuries of human history. Yet the way Backman packages the truths about human condition through well-drawn, three-dimensional characters and poignant narrative evokes a kind of frenzy within the reader to finish his book ASAP. Us Against You [Beartown #2] , the sequel to the author’s much acclaimed ‘Beartown’, is no different. It has all the ebbs and flows of a good fiction. There’s also a third book in works to form the ‘Beartown trilogy’. The first question before starting up Us Against You that plagued me is, ‘why there’s a need for a sequel?’ Backman pretty much resolves most of the huge conflicts brought forth in ‘Beartown’, and even provides glowing forecast regarding our favorite characters’ future. But of course, I was not going to pass off the chance to keenly observe this fictional community, whose caustic as well as estimable qualities holds a mirror to the modern human existence.

‘Us Against You’ starts off from the summer with star-hockey player Kevin Erdahl (who raped the ice hockey team general manager Peter Andersson’s daughter Maya) moving away from the fictitious Swedish backwoods town Beartown. Maya is still vilified for saying the truth about Kevin in public (“the idiots won’t say it was Kevin who killed Beartown ice hockey; they’ll say that ‘the scandal’ killed the club.” laments Maya). Although this isolated town had lost its jobs and investments, it had a strong sense of community thanks to the hockey rink. Now the townspeople are divided over 'the scandal’. Most of the hockey players have moved to Hed hockey, Beartown’s rival team. Beartown hockey has also lost its funding and the town council has decided to only support Hed. Peter’s wilful and beloved wife Kira Andersson sees a silver-lining in the club’s decision. She thinks that it’s time to move on and take steps to achieve her career dreams.

Their family unit, however, has taken a heavy damage. Peter and Kira’s relationship is in shambles. Maya tries her best to suppress the traumatic memories with the help of her oddball best-friend Ana, but it hasn’t been easy. Twelve-year-old Leo, Peter & Kira’s youngest son, feels alone like any kid on the cusp of adolescence, although what happened to his sister has kindled a violent impulse within him. Soon, the town gets its savior, who is actually a corrupted and manipulative politician. Richard Theo, the isolated political figure in Beartown, tries to revive the town’s ice-hockey prospects and jobs. Even though the intentions seem good, Theo’s primary aim is to gain political power and oust his rivals. Hence he conceives an elaborate, sinister plan that once again sets in motion the hate, anxiety, and violent disputes. Beartown also gets a new hockey coach with no-frills attitude, Elizabeth Zackell. Her alleged homosexuality and utter lack of sense of humor raises concern in certain quarters. But all she wants to be is a hockey coach (not ‘female’ hockey coach). Two additional characters are thrown into the mix: Teemu Rinnius, the unheralded leader of the ardent hockey fans (known as ‘The Pack’ and ‘hooligans’); and his madcap younger brother Vidar Rinnius who happens to be the team’s best goal-keeper, now serving a sentence at a psychiatry institute. Benji, the brawny 18-year-old who stood up against his best friend Kevin, continues to wrestle with his gay identity. Similar to ‘Beartown’, Backman opens the tale by saying what the cumulative force of hate is going to achieve in the end: a death. Naturally, it makes us dig through the pages and wait with bated breath to find out which one of our beloved characters’ life is in threat.

‘Us Against You’ lacks the dense, organic plotting of 'Beartown' and the author’s other novels. But Backman’s storytelling technique retains the page-turning qualities, consistently tickling, hurting, jabbing us with the narrative developments. Us Against You is written to be read as a stand-alone novel, so for the first few pages the writer repeats the gist and feelings of what happened earlier. This is a minor distraction. And it would be wholly fruitless to read the sequel first without going through the flagship work. In Backman’s universe, like in ours, there are no pure evils and pure goodness. People and their actions always occupy the grey territory. So once again Backman makes good people take bad decisions and gives space for the bad ones to nurture humane gestures. Maya, Kira, Ramona, Jeannette, Adri, the story gives us array of strong female characters who often stands as the forces dispelling the climate of ill-will. As I mentioned earlier the voice of Backman is lyrical and insightful. However, the conflicts he introduces and the characterizations aren’t much interesting as it was in ‘Beartown’.

Much of the problem is that Us Against You doesn’t have a centralized plot. It boasts far too many narrative threads which lead to bit of a stale, vignettes-type of storytelling. There was no moment when there’s a feeling that everything came together. Frankly, I was not interested in Richard Theo’s political manipulations, which is too convoluted and implausible to make us eventually care. Well-established characters like Peter, Kira, and Amat sleep-walks throughout the novel, the latter’s name being reduced to few mentions. Zackell is charming enough but nowhere as interesting as coach David (David is also cast to the periphery in this story). Teemu Rinnius and his Pack’s conflict with Peter don’t bring much tension as we expected. Teemu itself looks like a slightly older copy of Benji with a too simple emotional core. Vidar is introduced far too late into the story and his love story, created for the sake of making the ending ‘heart-breaking’, is cloyingly melodramatic. The fascinating portions in the novel involve Maya, Benji, Leo, and William Lyt. Especially, Lyt’s trajectory was unexpected but touching. ‘Beartown’ had some description of the team’s on-field games. Here the details are fleeting.

Fredrik Backman pursues his favorite thematic strands: hardships of parenting, misfortunes of adolescence, beliefs in tribalism, group hysteria, etc. His razor-sharp perceptions on greed, self control, sexuality, culture, ambition, dreams, etc are once again thoughtful and quote-worthy [“Sometimes good people do terrible things in the belief that they’re trying to protect what they love”, “When guys are scared of dark, they’re scared of ghosts and monsters, but when girls are scared of the dark, they’re scared of guys”, “Our spontaneous reactions are rarely our proudest moments”, “The worst thing we know about other people is that we're dependent on them. That their actions affect our lives. Not just the people we choose, the people we like, but all the rest of them: the idiots”]. The author’s wisdom keeps flowing which makes the novel’s emotionally manipulative turns less irritating. Subsequently, it would be nice if the author tone-down a bit with his faux-foreshadowing and overly bright character forecasts; it’s starting to get too repetitive. Altogether, this sequel to Beartown isn’t entirely necessary, but all the same it’s compulsively readable.