Decent Norwegian realism built on a flawed premise
Johan Bojer (1872–1959) is a Norwegian novelist who achieved some popular and critical success in his native country. Several of his books have been translated into English. His novel The Power of a Lie (Troens magt) was published in 1903.
The story takes place in a rural provincial Norwegian town. I don’t believe the town is ever named, but it’s somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Mjøsa and the city of Lillehammer. Knut Norby is one of the wealthiest landowners in this region. In years prior, had invested in the business venture of a neighbor named Wangen. Norby co-signed a loan to help Wangen establish a brickworks. Desiring to keep this financial dealing a secret from his wife, Norby hasn’t told anyone about his involvement in Wangen’s business. Now that brickworks has failed, gone bankrupt, and the creditors have come a-calling. Norby is liable for about two thousand krone—not an exorbitant sum for a man of his standing.
Since nobody knows that Norby has co-signed as surety on Wangen’s behalf, a rumor gets started that Wangen forged Norby’s signature on the document. Norby does nothing to dispel this rumor, and, as the story of forgery spreads, he becomes hesitant to counteract the ever-growing lie. Hoping to avoid the ire of his wife and some embarrassment in the face of his friends and neighbors, Norby decides to affirm the accusation. Thus accused of forgery, Wangen faces prison time. If the forgery is disproved, however, Norby could also face a prison sentence for bringing a false accusation against an innocent man.
I had previously read Bojer’s novel The Great Hunger and liked it well enough. I was less satisfied, however, with The Power of a Lie. The premise on which the plot is based just seemed unreasonable to me. Once the lie gets started, then the book becomes a good naturalist novel with realistic human behavior and an inside look at Norwegian village life. Establishing the lie in the first place, however, seems to me a hurdle over which the novel stumbles. First of all, Norby himself doesn’t come up with the lie, so that lessens his moral culpability somewhat. Then, the fact that he would reinforce this false rumor feels unrealistic and farfetched. I’m certainly not a paragon of moral virtue, but I wouldn’t send a man to prison just to pacify my wife and avoid a little embarrassment. The hearings, depositions, and trials would be more trouble than it’s worth. This whole crisis seemed avoidable. Norby could have easily come out with the truth early on, and he really wouldn’t have suffered much from it. Instead, the novel needed a plot premise to get the snowball rolling, and here that plot premise feels forced.
The novel does have its moments, however. Potential witnesses face compelling moral dilemmas of whether they should testify of not. There are some interesting revelations of class struggle in the story. Within this isolated country corner, Norby is somewhat of an aristocrat, a feudal lord of sorts who governs over a corps of peasant laborers. He has conservative views on capital and labor, while more liberal views are starting to encroach into his domain. Wangen, on the other hand, is decidedly less well-off, and the destruction of his reputation clearly creates a financial burden on him. His wife, who suffers along side him, is a particularly sympathetic character. The Power of a Lie is a decent but flawed work of Norwegian literature. Bojer’s probably got better novels in him, but I can more consistently count on the works of his countrymen Knut Hamsun and Alexander Kielland.
The Madman of Bergerac is the 16th book in Georges Simenon’s series of Inspector Maigret detective novels. It was first published in 1932 as Le Fou de Bergerac. Traveling by train to visit his friend Leduc, who lives in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, Maigret spends the night in a sleeping car. He has trouble sleeping, partially due to the man in the berth above him, who won’t stop fidgeting and intermittently sobs. The stranger descends from his compartment, and Maigret sees him jump from the moving train. Without really knowing why—driven by a detective’s instinct I suppose—Maigret jumps off the train in pursuit. When the mystery man discovers he’s being followed, he fires a shot at Maigret, wounding him in the shoulder.
Maigret wakes up in a hospital in Bergerac, a small city in the Dordogne. He is soon moved to a hotel on the town square, where he receives outpatient medical treatment, as well as the loving care of Madame Maigret. Maigret spends the rest of the novel in bed, but still manages to conduct an investigation into the man who shot him. In addition, a serial killer is afoot in Bergerac. Two women were strangled to death and stabbed post mortem in the heart by some kind of needle-like instrument. From his bed, Maigret meets and questions various citizens of Bergerac. Despite being confined to his hotel room, he is able to form a picture of the town and uncover some of the hidden secrets of its citizens.
Although Sherlock Holmes or C. Auguste Dupin sometimes solved crimes without ever leaving their chairs, an immobile Maigret is an oddity in the series. His bedridden convalescence leads to a lot of second-hand action. Important events take place “offstage,” and Maigret and the reader only find out about them through indirect accounts. Also unusual is how uncharacteristically jolly Maigret is throughout this book. He seems to be having the time of his life solving crimes from his bed. He enjoys tormenting the suspects and making them squirm. The phrase “madman of Bergerac” is coined to refer to the killer, but some of the mystified Bergeraciens sometimes wonder if Maigret himself might have a screw or two loose.
I got hooked on this novel from the get-go, and it held my rapt attention for the first several chapters. I found the ending a little disappointing, however. In pursuing the case, Maigret is more interested in the private lives of his adversaries rather than the fact that people have been murdered, which is treated almost as an afterthought. As usual, Simenon has developed a compelling back story for his characters, a family drama drawn with psychological authenticity. It seems to me, however, that I’ve seen elements of this conclusion in other Maigret novels (Repetition between books, of course, would depend on the order in which you read them, which in my case has been kind of random). Also, the ending seems to materialize out of thin air. Simenon doesn’t leave a lot of bread comes for the reader to follow. There doesn’t seem to be much cause and effect between investigative work and final revelations. The bed-bound Maigret just seems somewhat omniscient.
Though The Madman of Bergerac is not the best Maigret, any Maigret is good Maigret. Compared to the consistent quality of the Maigret books, this one falls a little short, but it’s still better than the vast majority of detective fiction out there.
