Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End by Leif GW Persson – review

Leif GW Persson’s trilogy of novels about the still-unsolved assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister 24 years ago, which begins with Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End, has often been compared to Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, et al) and to the novels of Henning Mankel. They’re all three Swedish authors who write long and complicated crime novels with large casts of characters, but those are about the only two valid comparisons. Each author has his own style and way of telling a story, and these comparisons are designed to entice readers who have read and enjoyed Larsson’s and Mankell’s novels into checking out Persson’s trilogy. Nothing wrong with that, but the question is whether Persson’s Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End is as good both at holding the readers’ interest and in quality of writing as the novels of Larsson and Mankell. Is it worth purchasing, or are the comparisons solely a marketing ploy? Let us delve into the novel, discuss it a little, and come to an informed decision. Similar to CBS, “We care.”

Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End is a good title for the novel, as it’s taken in a paraphrased form from an apparent suicide note that the Swedish police found in the apartment of an American journalist, John P. Krassner, circa 1988: “I have lived my life caught between the longing of summer and the cold of winter.” He has plummeted headfirst from a high-rise apartment complex that many college students live in, near where Vindel, a man in his sixties, is walking his thirteen-year-old Pomeranian. One of the man’s shoes falls a few seconds later, hitting the dog on its neck and killing it. The astute police realize that there can be only three possible explanations for Krassner’s death: accident, suicide, or murder. They go with the explanation that seems to be the most obvious, suicide, and at least at first, don’t bother to a great extent to investigate the other two possibilities.

Two people, in particular, are nagged by doubts and investigate into the death further, despite thinking that most facts about Krassner’s death seems to suggest that he committed suicide. They are Lars Johansson and Bo Jarnebring. Lars Johansson is a solitary man, a “real policeman,” and the police superintendent on his way to becoming the head of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. The other man is his best friend, Detective Chief Inspector Bo Jarnebring, from the department’s surveillance squad. These two characters were, for me, also the most likable ones in the novel, which is filled with misogynistic characters, incompetent Keystone-like cops, and prejudiced neo-Nazi wannabes. The literal translation of the novel’s Swedish title is really “Men Who Hate Women.” It’s an accurate translation, but not as colorful and poetic as “Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End,” I suppose, and a title that I doubt would have been as marketable to American readers.

As I said, I liked these two characters, but, though many of the other characters were fascinating, because of their misogynistic, conniving, and/or racist natures, they were not characters I’d want to meet and have a cup of coffee with, or be drinking buddies with. The multitude of characters Persson writes about come from the world of Swedish politics, crime and the police, and many of them are extremely unlikeable.

Also, like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Persson’s novel sometimes goes off on tangents that are related to the plot, but often in ways that are not, at first blush, all that crucial to the plot. It’s somewhat difficult to keep up with all of the diverse characters that Persson introduces, their schemes, their motivations, what makes them tick; and, I honestly felt like putting the book down several times because not all that much seemed to be happening. There were no further deaths, and I knew this was just the beginning of a trilogy, and that even by the end of the trilogy, there would be no actual justice served, because the case of who murdered the Prime Minister is still an unsolved one. These sorts of things made it hard for me to get motivated to continue reading the novel.

Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End is a novel that is fascinating, weighty, and complex. The narrative style and pace seemed to me often ponderous, but it pays off if you read it all the way through to the end. Despite the tremendous amount of details and profiling Persson goes into, I knew that the characters he was writing about represented real historical figures, and he was, while writing a novel, trying to be as factually accurate and detailed as possible. That, and getting wrapped up in what was going on and where the author was leading us, made me want to keep on reading, even though I didn’t particularly like many of the characters. As in real life, who really does like everyone he/she meets?

In his efforts to be thorough and accurate, Persson (who has served as an adviser to the Swedish Ministry of Justice and is Sweden’s most renowned psychological profiler) may have sacrificed pacing, but it is still a novel I’d recommend, if you have plenty of time on your hands to make it through to the novel’s conclusion.