The Redbreast

I came to The Redbreast late and from the wrong direction. I had already read the Snowman and a couple of the later Harry Hole books, so I knew the detective as a wreck with a method, and I wanted the origin story that everyone kept calling the best one. This is the third Harry Hole novel, first published in Norwegian in 2000 as Rødstrupe, and it reached English in Don Bartlett's translation. I read the Vintage Books edition, 624 pages, and for the first fifty or so I kept waiting for the plot to declare itself. Then the two timelines locked together and I stopped counting pages.

On paper it sounds like a standard thriller. A rare sniper rifle is smuggled into Norway, an old man starts killing the people he blames for a betrayal half a century old, and Harry Hole has to stop him before a public holiday turns into a bloodbath. What Nesbo actually does with that frame is odder and better. He uses a murder investigation to pry open a wound in Norwegian memory, the question of the volunteers who fought for Hitler on the Eastern Front and came home branded as traitors. It reads as a crime novel, but a large part of it is a war novel, and the two halves are not separate. They are the same story told from opposite ends.

A shot in the fog

The book opens on the first of November, 1999. A United States president is visiting Oslo for a peace conference, and Harry and his colleague Ellen Gjelten are posted at a toll barrier along the motorcade route. Harry sees a man in a toll booth holding what looks like a weapon, gets no signal that the figure is friendly, and fires. The man goes down. He turns out to be an American Secret Service agent.

The shooting should end Harry's career. Instead, the government decides it cannot afford a diplomatic scandal, and a senior foreign ministry official, Bernt Brandhaug, arranges a cover story. Harry is promoted to inspector and moved sideways into POT, the national security service, where the idea is to keep him busy and quiet. His new boss, Kurt Meirik, resents being handed a babysitting job. Harry resents the whole arrangement. He is a recovering alcoholic with a talent for making enemies in his own building, and a desk that is meant to bury him is the last thing he wants.

The posting does give him one useful thing: a reason to watch the neo-Nazis. A violent skinhead named Sverre Olsen has just walked free from an assault charge on a technicality, and Harry, who knows that world from an earlier case, starts paying attention to the people around him. Then a routine report from the forest district of Siljan catches his eye. Local officers recovered spent cartridges from a Märklin rifle, a powerful German weapon built for snipers, illegal in Norway, and rare enough that its presence can only mean someone paid a fortune to bring it in. Harry is a paper-pusher with a hunting complaint on his desk, and he treats it like the beginning of a murder.

Two winters

Halfway through the first section, the book drops the reader into 1942 without warning, and stays there long enough to matter. A small unit of Norwegian volunteers is dug into trenches near Leningrad, fighting for the Germans against the Soviets. They are cold, lice-ridden, and scared, and Nesbo makes the fear physical: the shelling, the frozen ground, the way a man can die between one breath and the next.

The unit's star is Daniel Gudeson, a legendary marksman and the natural leader the others orbit. On New Year's Eve a Russian sniper kills Daniel when he stands up to cheer midnight. His body is covered and left for the burial detail, and that same night another soldier, Sindre Fauke, vanishes, presumed to have defected to the Red Army. Then the strangest detail of the whole book arrives. Daniel's body reappears in the trench, as if it had never left. Years later, when the rifle starts firing, that detail stops being a ghost story and becomes a clue.

Later a grenade puts several of the men in a military hospital in the Vienna Woods. One of them, using the name Uriah, falls in love with a young nurse named Helena Lang. A jealous doctor named Brockhard, who also wants Helena, threatens to send Uriah back to certain death unless she gives in to him. The two lovers try to run, fail for want of travel papers, and are pulled apart. It is a small tragedy inside the larger war, and Nesbo lets it breathe. Only much later do you understand why he spent so much time on one nurse.

I did not enjoy the first half as much as I wanted to. The war chapters are vivid but they keep interrupting the investigation, and the present-day chapters keep interrupting the war. For a while the novel feels like two books stapled together. The payback comes when you realize how carefully the seam was placed.

The Prince, the rifle, and Ellen

Back in 1999, Harry and Ellen pull at the threads separately and then together. An arms dealer, and later a source in Johannesburg, tells them the rifle buyer was an elderly Norwegian who used the codename Uriah and mentioned a training camp called Sennheim, one of the places where Norwegian volunteers were prepared for the Eastern Front. The middleman who brokered the deal goes by a nickname: the Prince. Nobody knows who the Prince is, only that he moves between the neo-Nazis and the money and never shows his face.

The police angle keeps folding in on itself. Harry's old boss, Bjarne Møller, is decent and hamstrung. A colleague named Tom Waaler is efficient in a way that never quite feels clean. And through the veterans, Harry meets Rakel Fauke, the daughter of a former front fighter, and the two of them begin something careful and hesitant. Rakel is fighting a custody battle over her son Oleg, and she cannot afford complications. Harry, who collects complications, does not immediately understand how much of her life is being arranged behind her back.

Ellen is the best of the early book. She is smart, funny, and steady, and her partnership with Harry is not romantic, which is refreshing in a series that keeps threatening to turn every woman into a wound. She is also the one who gets too close. On a night shift with Waaler, she answers his ringing phone while he is away, pretends to be a machine, and hears Olsen demanding his commission for the shooter hired by the old man. In that moment she works out the Prince's identity. She tries to reach Harry, cannot, and is attacked and killed with a baseball bat on her way home. A combat cap is left at the scene to point the blame at the neo-Nazis.

That death hits the book like a dropped weight. I stopped reading it as a puzzle after that. Harry's grief is not tidy or noble. He drinks, he lashes out, he blames himself for missing her call, and none of it makes him easier to be around.

Grief and the paper trail

What saves Harry is the work. With a young officer named Halvorsen as his new partner, he starts building a picture out of fragments: cartridges in the forest, the poisoned oak in the Palace Gardens that someone killed to open a clean line of fire toward the royal balcony, the list of veterans who served together at Sennheim. He visits an old soldier named Sindre Fauke and listens to a story about the men he fought beside, including the gentle country boy the unit called the redbreast, a nickname for the little bird that shows its chest, and a name the man earned as a bayonet fighter.

Then the rifle speaks again. Brandhaug, the foreign ministry official who engineered Harry's promotion and who has been quietly coercing Rakel, is shot dead from a distance. Signe Juul, a former wartime nurse and the wife of a professor who studies the occupation, disappears from a home where the words GOD IS MY JUDGE have been scrawled on a mirror, and her body turns up at Akershus Fortress, the old execution site, staged as a traitor's death. Harry consults a psychologist, Ståle Aune, about what it means when a person has believed a lie so completely that passion becomes necessity.

The picture Harry assembles, and the picture the reader has been assembling, are not the same, which is the engine of the whole book. Nesbo lets us sit inside the killer's head in the war chapters and then hands us a wrong suspect in the present. Harry becomes convinced that the professor, Even Juul, obsessed with the legend of Daniel Gudeson, has developed a second personality and committed the murders, and when Even is found hanged, apparently a suicide and apparently trying to stop himself, the theory looks finished. It is the most confident Nesbo wants Harry to be, and it is wrong.

The memoir and the balcony

Harry's mistake is exposed on the morning of Constitution Day, the seventeenth of May. He wakes in Rakel's flat, wanders into the wrong bedroom, and sees a framed photograph of a woman's face. It is Helena Lang, the nurse from the Vienna hospital. Helena is Rakel's mother. Which means Sindre Fauke is not Sindre Fauke. The old soldier Harry has been interviewing, the man with the terminal diagnosis and the dying grudge, is Gudbrand Johansen, the quiet boy who idolized Daniel, killed the deserter Fauke with a bayonet, and swapped the two men's identity papers so that the dead man would be buried as Daniel and the survivor could vanish into a borrowed name.

Harry races to Fauke's flat and finds it emptied, along with a manuscript titled The Great Betrayal. In it the killer explains everything. He attacks the Norwegian royal family and the officials who fled to England in 1940 and then returned to brand the front fighters as traitors, and he sets out his plan to assassinate the Crown Prince on the Palace balcony during the holiday parade. The war chapters were never background. They were the killer's life, and the modern murders are his attempt to settle the account his country refused to acknowledge.

The ending plays out on the twenty-first floor of a hotel, in a suite overlooking the Palace, on a line of sight cleared by a poisoned tree. Harry arrives with seconds to spare and a gun he may not be able to use against a man who is part of the woman he loves. The old man is flickering between identities, and the thing that finally stops him is not a bullet. It is a name, Oleg, the grandson he has never been allowed to know. He lowers the rifle. He dies in hospital two days later, and Rakel and Oleg never learn who he was. To protect them, and to keep the near-assassination out of the papers, the whole case is buried, and Harry is promised his old job back, plus a quiet window to keep chasing the colleague he now suspects of ordering Ellen's death.

What works and what drags

I understand now why people call this the best one, even if I would not hand it to a first-time reader of the series. The ambition is real. Nesbo is doing something harder than a whodunit: he is arguing that a country's comfortable story about itself can be a kind of crime, and he makes that argument through plot rather than speeches. The historical figure of the front fighter, the man who is neither hero nor simple villain, is treated with more sympathy than most Norwegian fiction of the period bothered with, and the fact that the villain's grievance has a true root is what makes him frightening rather than cartoonish.

The cost of that ambition is length and drift. The book is long, and it wanders. Some of the neo-Nazi material creaks, particularly when it slides toward the generic skinhead menace of turn-of-the-century crime fiction. Rakel's custody subplot and Brandhaug's manipulation of her are necessary for the ending, but they read as a slower, lesser strand than either the war or the rifle. And the first hundred pages ask for patience that the book only pays back after you are already committed. I nearly put it down twice in the Siljan-to-Vienna stretch.

The structure also works against suspense in a deliberate way that not every reader will enjoy. Because we spend time inside the killer's past and inside the reader's greater knowledge, we are often ahead of Harry, and the pleasure is in watching him catch up rather than in being surprised. Twice Nesbo kills a character from inside her own point of view, and both times Harry arrives afterward to find a scene already cold. It is a confident choice. It can also feel like being told the answer before being asked the question.

Closing thoughts

What carried me through was Harry himself, in a version I had not seen before. He is not yet the ruin of the later books; he is a man sliding, and the slide is more interesting than the fall. His partnership with Ellen is the emotional center, and killing her off halfway through is the most honest thing the novel does, because it tells you the cost of this world without asking you to feel noble about it. Halvorsen, the rookie, is a good foil, eager and unbroken, and the way Harry takes him on is one of the few soft moves the character makes.

If you have read the series out of order the way I did, The Redbreast is where the whole thing is load-bearing. It sets up Harry's war with Tom Waaler, it plants Rakel and Oleg, and it establishes the historical conscience that the later books keep returning to. If you are new, know that it is slower and broader than its reputation suggests, and that its best passages are quiet ones: two men in a trench, a nurse in a corridor, an old man in a hotel suite with his finger on a trigger and a name he cannot quite say. In the Vintage Books edition, translated from the 2000 Rødstrupe, that is 624 pages of a flawed, serious book that is trying to be about more than who did it. For the most part, it earns the attempt.