Silence of the Grave – A Taut, Lean, and Endlessly Fascinating Crime Fiction

A boy is celebrating his birthday at his home situated in the outskirts of Reykjavik., Iceland While the adults and children are immersed in the atmosphere of jubilation, one bored adult guest (a medical student) watches a baby playing with a toy. The toy now gnawed by the toddler turns out to be a piece of bone from human rib. This leads to discovery of human bones freshly dug up by a new building site. The bones have rested there for at least half a century, and clearly the victim has met his/her fate in a gruesome manner. Thus begins the uniformly bleak crime fiction Silence of the Grave by renowned Icelandic author and the creator of Inspector Erlendur series, Arnaldur Indridason, .

Silence of the Grave (originally published in 2001) was the fourth in Erlendur series (featuring the gloomy yet dogged 50-something-detective) and second to be translated to English (by Bernard Scudder). Arnaldur Indridason is easily one of the best Scandinavian thriller writers. Crime authors often get tangled in weaving complex plot twists and resonating characters that they miss out in rooting their stories with themes that are exclusive to the landscape and culture. Crime fiction got be in some way a grim literary tourism, reflecting political, social, and historical truths, the ones which doesn’t get mentioned in the glitzy tourist ideas. Most of the crime novelists brilliantly build-up the tension, throwing in macabre details regarding killer’s M.O. or setting up the perfect red herrings, but eventually there would be nothing to take away from the novel; immediately after savoring the final twist everything starts to fade away. Indridason’s books are most gripping because he reveals hidden cultures and skillfully balances between social criticism and genre chills (similar in tone to Martin Beck novels by Swedish Marxist husband-and-wife authors Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall).

Like many novelists and film-makers, Arnaldur Indridason has broken out of the home market and had gone international by paying attention to the local. His novels have regularly picked up literary awards, including Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger. Considering the lower-crime rates in Iceland, murder there is treated as an anomaly. There are no serial-killers testing police force’ intelligence, no race against time, and hence the author doesn’t have to constantly build menace to keep us on the edge. However, I find Indridason’s social realist crime tales very compelling because it focuses on the darker and sadder dimensions of human condition.

Arnaldur Indridason

Indridason's protagonist Erlendur Sveinsson is a divorced loner and a tenacious pursuer of death. In his spare time, he likes reading Icelandic Sagas and stories about disappearance, partly because of losing his younger brother in a storm when Erlendur was just 10. His grown-up daughter Eva Lind suffers from drug habit. Erlendur blames himself for turning his back on his children after the divorce. While Eva frequently meets her father, at least to shout at him, Erlendur’s son Sindri Snaer, who suffers from alcoholic abuse, is far more estranged. In Silence of the Grave, as soon as the human bones are dug up Erlendur reaches the scene and sensibly seeks the help of an archaeologist to unearth the skeleton without damage. The process, however, unfolds over days and even the skeleton’s gender identity takes time to confirm. But once Erlendur’s eyes falls on the redcurrant bushes on the hill, closer to the mysterious grave site, his intuition starts kicking-in. He orders his reliable side-kicks – Detective Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli – to painstakingly investigate the history of that particular place.

‘Silence of the Grave’ alternates between investigation and chronicling the life of a woman (mother of three children), who painfully endures brutal physical and psychological abuse inflicted by her husband. Through the story of domestic violence, Indridason also touches on Icelandic reality during World War II. As the skeleton gets excavated bit by bit, the woman’s miserable circumstances slowly unfold.

                                                                                                                                            

Indridason’s books are more or less study of family life at its bleakest. Scarred childhood, abusive fathers, gentrification, Iceland’s legacy of colonization, the nation’s affluent capitalist modern society are some of the constant elements the author gets back to. The crime in Erlendur series are treated as a way to explore Iceland that’s changing. Although spare in terms of style, the narrative’s brilliance lies in its authentic, subtly-sketched characters. The whodunit quotient never turns us into voyeurs but simply provides space to share the characters’ difficult reality. Moreover, the boundaries of good and evil often get blurred that we, on few occasions, come to empathize for perpetrators despite their crime. Ten books are usually considered as limit for such detective series. Then, the themes and characters would get re-hashed, making not even half the impact of previous novels. Indridason’s last three novels in Erlendur series (including his latest ‘Strange Shores’) show such effects of wear and tear. Nevertheless, the first three English translated works of Indridason – Jar City, Silence of the Grave, and Voices – are just the perfect crime sagas to get acquainted with the bleak atmospherics of a small, cold country.