A murder and a drowning give Linn Ullmann’s Nordic noir a route into family secrets and stresses

Ullmann’s latest isn’t strictly a crime thriller, but it does contain much of what we’ve come to enjoy from Scandinavian outings in the genre.

Norway's coast is the setting for Linn Ullmann's new novel, where a murder and a drowning are the routes into family secrets. iStock / April 2014

In recent years, Scandinavia has proved herself the queen of crime thrillers. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, Henning Mankell’s Wallander books, Jo Nesbø and Arne Dahl – these are household names, defining contemporary audiences’ tastes in dark, stylish literary and TV noir just as, say, Raymond Chandler’s tales of LA corruption defined the 1940s.

Where fictions not of this genre remain lost in translation, if indeed they even make it that far, we’re hungry for the original when it comes to crime thrillers – just think how popular the original Danish TV series Forbrydelsen was compared to its derivative American counterpart The Killing. One might trace this international success to the Danish author Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, published in 1992 and one of the most popular novels of the 1990s. It wasn’t exactly the police procedural we’ve come to embrace in more recent years, but it was an investigative murder mystery with an existential edge – the USP of any self-respecting Scandinavian crime thriller since.

It’s precisely this layer of human complexity – whether issues of social inequality and injustice, political and moral intrigue, or simply the very visible breakdown of those affected by the crime in question – that elevates Nordic noir to something more than simple genre fiction. Watching the Birk Larsens struggle with each other in the wake of their daughter’s murder in Forbrydelsen, for example, is a lesson in tormented suffering measured out in domestic chores and the nagging responsibilities of family members still living.

The Norwegian novelist Linn ­Ullmann's masterful fifth novel The Cold Song, while not technically a crime thriller as such, is something of a case in point – borrowing elements of the genre but combining them with those of a subtle dark domestic drama, she's written a technically adventurous hybrid that delivers in terms of complexity of characters, the darkness of an original Grimm's fairy tale and the heightened atmosphere of a tense thriller.

Siri Brondal, a successful chef and restaurant owner, and her husband Jon Dreyer, a critically acclaimed novelist suffering from crippling writer’s block, spend their summer in the beautiful white mansion on the coast that belongs to Siri’s mother Jenny Brodal. Fully occupied with their work (or lack thereof in Jon’s case), they hire 19-year-old Milla to watch their children, 12-year-old Alma and 4-year-old Liv, for the duration of the vacation. One rainy, misty July night, Siri throws a party for her mother’s 75th birthday and by morning Milla has disappeared, her body eventually discovered two years later; two years during which a family that was already spiralling out of control continues in free fall.

The novel begins with the discovery of Milla’s body, shifting back in time to explore the run-up to her death, but the huge tragedy that is the revelation of her murder and the grisly details of her violent end, are somewhat secondary to the ordinary, everyday miseries of Siri and Jon’s flailing relationship, Jon’s desperate but aimless philandering and his battle with his non-existent novel, and the unfathomable actions of their clearly deeply troubled, “strange, baffling child” Alma.

Ullman’s depiction of Jon as he flounders among the flotsam and jetsam of his life is magisterial, but part of his bewilderment stems from the fact he’s adrift in a sea of troubled mother/daughter relationships. Alma mounts a teenage rebellion against Siri; Milla resents the photographs her mother Amanda took of her as a child, subsequently published in a famous book, that “robbed her of something, a part of her”; following her daughter’s disappearance, Amanda bombards Jon with desperate, blaming texts; and Siri and Jenny’s relationship is haunted by the ghost of Jenny’s son, Siri’s brother, who drowned one winter’s day on his sister’s watch while they were both children young enough to be playing in the snow.

Towards the beginning of the story, Alma tells Simen, a boy she babysits, the story of her uncle’s death, but in doing so, the story “changed into a kind of fairy tale”, in which the grieving, unforgiving mother eventually drowns her daughter too. Simen doesn’t understand. “That’s because you’re a little boy,” Alma tells him, “and because you don’t know what mothers do when they can’t stop crying – and that girl’s mother just couldn’t stop crying.”

Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.