Blackwater

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Kerstin Ekman, Joan Tate

Used from £4.65

Pages: 434 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 0385481780

Pub: Doubleday

Pub date: 1996-02

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1254644

Reader Reviews:

Dreary (0/0 people found this helpful)

What a disappointment. I started with high hopes after an intriguing opening 50 pages that contained a novel setting, some quirky characters and a distinct style.

Many, many days later I turned the final page without caring in the least about the final revelations, heartily sick of the monochrome characters (only one, Birgir, manages occasionally to heave himself off the page into anything resembling full-bodiedness) and still waiting for even one of the promised thrills.

By the end, the writing had descended into parody: a tedious over-use of the third-person pronoun no longer added to a sense of mystery but increased the gap between reader and characters; over-eager metaphors trampled on top of each other; clipped sentences tried unsuccessfully to suggest gravity.

Scandanavia has produced some great crime writing. On this showing, Ekman has not added to it.

A very different kind of thriller (7/7 people found this helpful)

This is an extraordinarily complex and ingeniously plotted novel, and to categorise it as a thriller or a crime novel is only to touch the surface of the different aspects of its complexity.
'Blackwater' begins from the point of view a woman called Annie who, awoken by her daughter Mia, who is in her early twenties, returning home in the middle of the night, convinces herself the man with her daughter is the same man she saw eighteen years previously and whom she has always believed to be guilty of the brutal stabbing of two tourists sleeping in a tent. Annie herself had been the first person to discover the bodies of the tourists, on Midsummer Evening, when arriving with Mia, then a little girl, to pitch in her lot with a commune in the desolate north of Scandinavia.
The novel then slowly recreates the disturbing circumstances of the murder through a long and very complex combination of flashbacks seen from different points of view, before returning, at the opening of Part II, to its starting-point and the subsquent revival of interest in a double murder whose motives had never originally been explained (and a murderer who had never been caught).
The plot itself is watertight, but the postmodernist narrative techniques deployed are complex, and sometimes deliberately misleading: information is crucially withheld in order to develop and slowly increase an atmosphere of suspense which gradually becomes overwhelming.
Yet there is much more than suspense and unsolved mystery here. The characters are complex, and all of them have something to hide, or at the very least shady areas of their pasts which they are unwilling to contemplate. The commune itself is something of a failure, and the projected relationship there between Annie and Dan, the boyfriend who, ominously, fails to meet here on her arrival, is the fruit of one of many
misunderstandings in the story. And the wilderness itself functions like a late twentieth-century equivalent of those ominous hostile landscapes in the novels of Thomas Hardy.
Yes, I can sympathise with certain reviewers' frustration: it is a novel which the reader is at certain points tempted to give up. But this is because Kerstin Ekman cleverly allows the reader to be affected by the futility and monotony which characterise many of the characters' lives. But take my word for it: although the first part is (deliberately) slow-moving and ponderous, this is because it is like a spring being slowly wound up in preparation for the revelations in store in the second part.
And the translation, by the late Joan Tate, is of impeccable quality and, presumably, a quite monumental labour of love. This is one of those very rare novels where mystery and narrative mastery meet, and as such is very highly recommended to all those who end up feeling slightly unsatisfied when they get to the end of all those more run-of-the-mill whodunnits.

A Bit Tedious (0/5 people found this helpful)

In 1974, Annie Raft takes her daughter Mia to small-town Blackwater in northern Sweden, to meet her lover Dan at a commune. When Annie searches for Dan, she instead finds two dead bodies, and spots a man leaving the scene - the same man connected with Mia years later. I read it all, but found it a bit tedious. (C+)

A terrific novel (5/5 people found this helpful)

I would agree that "Blackwater" is very slow, painfully slow in the first half and certainly not everyones cup of tea. I admit that I very nearly gave up on it, but I am so glad I did not ! The second half moves along a lot faster and so much more is explained. The characters and plot develop superbly.

This is not the easiest book to read, and I found the Swedish charcters and place names very hard to get to grips with. The plot is complex and interwoven, jumping from character to character and across time.

The novel is also very dark and shows a different side to Swedish life, reminiscent more of an American backwoods lifestyle. The main characters are also fascinating especially one who you think could be a double murderer but ends up in a way as a sort of hero !

Ekman brings different threads and themes together superbly, from the despair of the village doctor, the awkward shyness and moodiness of a teenage boy, the darker thoughts of a teacher turned hippy and the even darker mind of a backwoods loner.

All in all this is a fantastic book. So stick with it, it is well worth it.

a defense of blackwater (5/6 people found this helpful)

Wow, I totally disagree with just about everything in the previous review! It's true that this isn't a fast paced book at all, but it's only boring if you find the human heart boring. It's more an autopsy of ordinary lives in all their dispair and confusion than a classic murder mystery. (Ops, that last sentence DOES look like a load of pretentious tripe, but that's not poor Kerstin Ekman's fault, that's just pretentious old me.) Maybe not a barrel of laughs, exactly, but there is something very wry and humane about Ekman's observations that makes it comforting in the way only authentic things can be. I mean, this doesn't offer a rose-tinted view of the world, but it doesn't paint it all in black either. Contrast this very pragmatic view of human beings with Ekman's a mystical fascination with nature and the result is just excellent. Honestly, read the first chapters and I'm sure you'll agree...

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