A HUNTED MAN

Author: Hans-Olov Öberg
Year: 2001
Publisher: Pocketförlaget
Language: Swedish

Detectives and crime fighters come in all shapes and forms in literature. Sometimes they are attorneys, at other times ex-cops. We have read about professional assassins turning the tables on their former employers as well as mellow antiquities dealers who would not hurt a fly and yet are tossed into intricate mysteries hidden in the artefacts that pass through their hands. Some sleuths are teenagers that happen to, time and time again, stumble upon the most sinister plots in their own community, whereas others are little old ladies with a keen eye for the unexpected and a mind so sharp you could cut a diamond with it. There are university professors, physicians, navy officers, taxi drivers, cooks, crooks, hackers, slackers, firemen, journalists, priests, and politicians. And last but not least the veteran police inspector who has seen it all and just needs to solve his last case before retirement.  

So of course, we also need a murder mystery in the world of finance. Micke Norell is the protagonist in Hans-Olov Öberg’s novel “En jagad man” (not available in English but a translation might be “A hunted man”. This novel has previously been printed under the title “En gudabenådad bullshitter”). He is a financial professional who has turned to journalism and works for a small but respected business periodical in Stockholm. When the controversial former CEO of a small but publicly traded company that is the target of high-value market speculation is murdered during a hunting trip, Mikael is pulled into a power struggle which escalates to a point where his life is suddenly in peril.

Those of you who follow my reading will know that crime is not my forte. As a Stockholm-based banker with over 15 years of experience from the industry, I was however curious about how a murder mystery might play out in an atmosphere that should be well-known to me. And true enough, there is a certain measure of recognition.  The banter is authentic and the financial instruments and the transactions mentioned are mostly accurate and relevant. Having said that, there are two significant differences between Öberg’s world and my reality.

Primo; the book feels old. It was published several years before the authorities began to aggressively regulate the financial market. MiFID, GDPR, EMIR, Basel I-IV, AML Directives, and a plethora of other rules and regulations have rained down on the operators in the financial industry in the last two decades. It began shortly before the Lehman Brothers-crash and ensuing credit crunch in 2008 and virtually ballooned after that event. A process that is still ongoing and new requirements are being introduced, tightened, or amended all the time. The financial magic tricks that the high-rollers in Micke Norell’s world amuse themselves with are largely a thing of the past.

Secundo; none of the action in Öberg’s book takes place in any of the major Nordic banks at the time but rather in small financial institutions, brokers, financial advisory forms, and independent asset managers. I have no insider experience from what it is like to work in such an environment and what the corporate culture might be. Suffice to say, it seems far removed from that of a major Swedish bank of today.

As a piece of literature, this is a novel that is intended for quick consumption. As a murder mystery, it does not really gain pace. The plot never thickens and the ending arrives all of a sudden without the reader even realising that they have reached the climax of the story. It is obvious that Öberg has a good command of the ins and outs of the financial industry and the premise of the story is reasonably strong, but the delivery, I am sorry to say, is sub-par. Öberg also has a crack at trying to bring his characters to life by dwelling on their private lives and relationships but it works very poorly. The relationship between the analysts, traders, and managers are relevant and interesting but the passages about Norell’s wife and kid constitute a complete waste of time to a point where they become annoying. It is clumsy and irrelevant, as if the writer had heard from others that he ought to add further dimensions to his characters for the reader to care about them but had no clue as to how to go about it.

For a quick reader who wants to broaden their perspectives and add some Stockholm and some finance into their reading, this might not be a complete loss but for more discerning readers, this is a book that may be by all means be left on the shelf in favour of more inspired literature.

FAHRENHEIT 451

Author: Ray Bradbury
Year: 1991 (1953)
Publisher: Del Rey Books
Language: English

Imagine a world ablaze with flickering screens either plastered onto the walls around you wherever you turn your head or in every man’s, woman’s, and child’s clinched fists. Imagine the barrage of banal messages spewed onto satiated eyes and ears, overwhelming them with manufactured desires and spurious identities. Imagine a society where contemplation and knowledge are scoffed at and the written word is relegated to the fringes of the public sphere while the mainstream agenda is determined by the illiterate and the benighted who by the sheer force of numbers successfully equate opinions with facts in the public discourse on the state of affairs.

Are you imagining a future dystopia?

Or are you picturing the world of today?

To Ray Bradbury this was the future he envisaged in his iconic novel “Fahrenheit 451”. In an unspecified post-world-war America, the protagonist Guy Montag works as a fireman. His job is to burn books. Whenever, the alarm sounds, he and his colleagues at the fire department scramble into their vehicles, called salamanders, and, armed with flame-throwers and kerosene, rush to the place where books have been sighted to purge the community of yet another secret stack of the threat to humanity which is literature. He enjoys his work, is on good terms with his colleagues and manager, and after his shift, with the gratifying sense of having done a good job, he returns home to his wife Mildred in their modest but comfortable house, equipped, like all other houses, with huge screens on the parlour walls which broadcast a carefully crafted mix of news, propaganda, and easily digested entertainment around the clock.

Life is easy, predictable, and delightfully pointless. Until the day Guy runs into their new neighbour, the teenage girl Clarisse McClellan. She is bizarre and she does bizarre things and talks about bizarre topics. Like walking for pleasure, for example. Loitering outdoors is against the law. Or thinking. What is the point of that? And most bizarre of it all, she tells Guy that in the old days, of which a teenager could know next to nothing, firemen were supposed to extinguish fires, not to start them.

The meeting with Clarissa opens Guy’s eyes and, in various forms, he begins to ponder upon the world. Like tasting the rain. Or taking an interest in what it is he is burning on the job every day. And why.

Futuristic dystopias are usually supposed to serve as warnings. They take aim at a certain phenomenon that the writer observes in society and extrapolate from there into the grotesque in order to unveil the peril that the phenomenon is posing to humanity. George Orwell focused on the control of language and history (see review of “Ninety Eighty-Four” from July 2021), Karin Boye on the consequences of the ultimate invasion of privacy (see review of “Kallocain” from June 2021), Margaret Atwood on Evangelical fundamentalism and misogyny (see review of “The Handmaid’s Tale” from November 2020).

Bradbury chooses to challenge the assault on knowledge, culture, and information. And he does it in a most powerful way by pitting two of the most critical inventions in the history of our species against each other: writing and fire. In a highly technological world with floor-to-ceiling tv screens, earbuds, mechanical hounds, advanced vehicles, communication devices, and ultimately the atomic bomb, Bradbury singles out the use of the most primitive technology available to humankind as the final solution to the main enemy of the state. The kind of technology that at 451 degrees Fahrenheit permanently destroys books.

In lieu of books, the government floods the population with the instant gratification of information snippets that are tailored to the recipient in order to create an echo-chamber of reaffirmation and pacification.

“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”

This is the second genius of Bradbury’s dystopia. The ultimate perfection is complete emptiness. The immaculate void. Utter nothingness. Mildred lives her life through the images on the screens and the messages in her earbud, which she wears even in her sleep. But when she is asked what programme she has watched or who the characters are that she is listening to, she cannot answer. They have form but no content. They do not fill her void; they perpetuate it.

This is how the government maintains order and compliance while simultaneously reproducing the illusion of freedom, happiness, and perfection. This is also why books become so dangerous. In a smooth world, they seek out and highlight the pores, the imperfections, the abrasions. That is what Bradbury considers quality writing.

“The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That is my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”

It is often said that it is irrelevant what you read as long as you read. Bradbury seems to disagree. Quality matters. Literature that does not challenge you, does not develop you.  

Of the dystopias I have read so far, “Fahrenheit 451” is undoubtedly among the better. It is very well written and thought through. For the warning signals that Bradbury picked up on in 1953, 70 years later have evolved to a blaring horn. No books are burned in Europe yet, but banning books is rapidly becoming a thing in the United States. School boards, church groups, and concerned parents go out of their way to dictate what others are supposed to read and existing literary works are bowdlerised by their publishers to cater to the fragile minds of the few.

This, in the end, drives home the third and final genius of “Fahrenheit 451”. It does not even have to be a leviathan that burns the books. It may very well suffice they plant a seed, sit back, and watch us do it ourselves. After all, there is more than one way to burn a book.

ON TYRANNY

Author: Timothy Snyder
Year: 2018 (2017)
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish (translator Margareta Eklöf)

Some people, particularly intellectually active and capable ones, happen upon a moment in life where they experience something that can be compared to a second awakening. A few may even have several such experiences. For Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University and specialist in European 20^th century authoritarian extreme right and extreme left regimes, one such epiphany seems to have been when his own country defaulted on its democratic credibility and elected Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton for president in November 2016.

One year after the elections, Snyder published what would become an almost iconic pamphlet “Om tyranni – tjugo lärdomar från tjugonde århundradet” (“On Tyranny – Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”). To a professional historian, none of what is happening today can seem particularly innovative or novel. We have seen it all before. Drawing on his vast knowledge and applying his sharp and unmistakeable pedagogical prowess, Snyder lays bare the imminent danger that our liberal society is facing from the neo-fascists in our days. He puts his finger on red flags and indicators, big and small warning signals to look for, and how to spot the threat behind the thin veil of civility and faux democracy in which the far right routinely tries to shroud its sinister intentions.

The good news is that besides recognising the threat, we also have some clues as to what we can do about it. What is unique about Snyder’s book, is that it does not only show us the danger and the connection to past events, but more importantly gives practical advice on how to counteract the developments and effectively stop the train from going off the cliff.

Each of the lessons is only a few pages long with a short and poignant introduction, a brief exposition, and a crisp conclusion often with a concrete call for action. It is solid, clear, unambiguous, and probably the most practically and directly applicable instruction on how to engage in opposition to totalitarianism that I have ever come across.

Although the book is intended for a US audience in response to the election of Donald Trump, virtually every lesson in it should resonate with a European reader. Snyder, after all, draws his knowledge from research on European authoritarianism which until recently, has enjoyed but modest support in the US.

I will not account for all the rules in this review but although they are all to some extent relevant, a few deserve particular attention.

·        (1) DO NOT OBEY IN ADVANCE

Virtually every authoritarian regime comes to power without violence. People are adaptable and subservient, and autocrats often bet on it and win. In order to keep out of trouble and stay off the radar, lots of good people will try to anticipate what the ruler wants and obey in advance. The autocrat does not even have to apply oppressive measures to oppress the people (cf. my review of “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” by Étienne de la Boétie from July 2021).

·         (2) DEFEND AN INSTITUTION

Institutions are not indestructible. In fact, they are no stronger than the people that manage them. They need to be defended from the moment they are first under assault. If they are allowed to stand undefended, they will crumble faster than we can imagine. Snyder encourages each and everyone of us to pick any institution (a news outlet, a court of law, a ministry, a trade union) and make it our mission to defend it. 

·        (5) RECALL PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

Does your government ask you to act in violation of the oath you took? Resist! Do they implement laws that will force physicians to break medical confidentiality to expose undocumented migrant? Refuse! Do they want teachers to report 7-year-olds to the police for fighting on the playground? Disobey! Do they require that judges pass sentences without proper trials with public defenders present? Decline! But whatever you do, do not resign. You will be easily replaced. Just stick to protocol and be the safety brake that your country needs in that moment.

·        (6) BE KIND TO OUR LANGUAGE

Avoid using newspeak (cf my review of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell from July 2021). Do you find that people around you all of a sudden call things by a different name than they used to? Pause and try to figure out what changed? Language develops over time and in a normal world there is nothing menacing about it. Just stay alert. Also, stay off the internet and read books. The internet is changing rapidly. Books are consistent (most of the time). Let books be your anchor to the use of language.

·        (9) BELIEVE IN TRUTH

Do not try to be clever. What appears to be true, usually is. Questioning established knowledge by sheepishly citing discredited sources and conspiracy theories does not make you smart. It makes you an idiot. Autocratic propaganda rarely aims to make you believe anything in particular. On the contrary, it is designed to make you disbelieve everything. If there is no truth, there can also be no untruth. Do not allow them to turn you into their instrument of oppression. Yes, scientists are wrong sometimes. So are journalists, politicians, and experts of all kinds. But neither you nor your sources are likely to be qualified to call out their mistakes in any meaningful way. You are probably great at your job. Let everybody else do theirs.

·        (13) PRACTICE CORPOREAL POLITICS

Those who want to rule unopposed will want you to be passive. They want you to stay indoors. They want you to focus on other things and let the world pass by without asking questions and without making trouble. Manifest your dissidence early, before they grow powerful enough to punish you for it. Also, do not let power pit you against other groups or categories in your society. In the 1960s, the Communist regime in Poland struck down a student revolt with the help of the workers. In the 1970s, the workers were similarly crushed by the help of the intellectuals. Not until the labour union Solidarnosc managed to organise workers and intellectuals in unified protests could the dictatorship be toppled.

·        (18) BE CALM WHEN THE UNTHINKABLE ARRIVES

Populists are actively seeking excuses to do away with obstacles on their road to their unlimited power. It they cannot find suitable excuses, sooner or later they will create them. Study carefully how your government reacts to extraordinary events like e.g. a terrorist attack, what words they use, what actions they call for. Do they try to influence the investigators, prosecutors and judges to deliver “swift justice”? Do they remove some of your liberties in the interest of your “security”? Do they accuse any particular group or category of people in your community calling for collective punishment? Is the law, although not rewritten or changed, suddenly interpreted in a completely different way than it used to be? Do not be a sheep!

The running theme throughout most of the lessons in “Om tyranni” seems to be honesty and dignity. To protect our lifestyle and our freedom we must at all times trust the best in us. Logic over panic. Dignity over humiliation. Cooperation over egotism. Respect over hatred. Facts over opinions. Action over cowardice.

In other words… we are doomed.