24th Feb 2011.
We had clear difference of opinion about Jo Nesbo and Snowman - or to be more precise a difference between those absent and who sent their comments in advance and liked it (particularly Ras and Richard) vs those at the meeting. To be fair, Mark T did start off the discussion with a strong endorsement of the book, but then - as others pulled the author's style and abilities to pieces - gradually lowered his opinion of it. (Such is the power of group pressure!).
In the interests of balance, I'd probably better start with a reminder of what the missing parties liked about The Snowman. Their notes said it "ticked all the police/detective/thriller genre boxes' (Richard), was a "fast moving, ripping yarn with believable characters" (Ras) and (whilst less enthusiastic overall) left Steve "gripped by the imagery and parts of the plot". So - that's the positive comments over!
From those present (which was the rest of us bar Will), there was agreement that it kept us largely interested and the story was (sort of) entertaining, but collectively we were far from impressed either by Mr Nesbo's writing abilities or the credibility of the book as a story that held together - with Neil being particularly critical.
To take the writing abilities first. From Neil's ' it was an undemanding, easy read' to Chris's 'this wasn't the sort of book I thought I'd be reading when I took up the offer to join a book club', there was a strong view that Jo Nesbo was not a great writer. As we explored the Steig comparison, our view was that Nesbo's characters were standard and predictable - as opposed to (for example) the highly original female lead in Steig's books. Though on the more positive side, we has a discussion about how Nesbo had characters that were 'earthy' and flawed and how he took a critical view of society as opposed to Larson's idealistic, left wing/radical heros which was perhaps more realistic. As we bow to Steve's superior knowledge to translation standards, we had to accept that the language quality and creativity is largely Nesbo's - and thus he is responsible for poor writing standards - varying from awful choice of words when trying to write sex scenes (words like 'dick' and 'porking' are not components of erotic literature) through to the more fundamental problem of him having a limited range of 'techniques' to engage the reader.
We almost all agreed that the first seventy or so pages were a really quite gripping read - he created tension and indeed fear on occasions as the first couple of murders were described. But then it became totally predictable - a case of 'oh no, here's another woman with kids, there'll be a death and a snowman any second'. Similarly, the regularity with which people became suspects and were then cleared ended up being beyond a joke. There were several comments about how he failed to explain key points in the story. For example - why did observing his mother being 'porked' by someone (to use Nesbo-lingo) turn the eventual culprit into a mass-murderer (there should have been some exploration of that), or why did Katrine not have bullets in her gun (a key moment but it remained unexplained). Some of the storyline was considered totally predictable - for example we all knew that the handcuffs were going to play a part almost from the first time he brought them into the text. There were differing views on whether it was possible to spot the eventual murderer. Some were genuinely misled, whereas others (including me who can usually never spot the murderer in a whodunit) were convinced from the outset that the sexually gorgeous cop (Katrine) would become a suspect and then be exonerated, the lover and Hole would end up together and thus the extremely nice new partner of his lover was clearly going to be the guilty party, Toooooooo predictable, and incidentally - why did Katrine just totally disappear from the novel for the last quarter of it?
Which leads us to the implausibility of numerous bits of the story - a problem noted by Richard amongst his enthusiasm. To give just a few examples of those spotted by those of us downing the beer in the Devonshire:
The way the police unquestioningly accepted the first dead person as being the murdered with almost no evidence or rationale
The body in the freezer (obviously a major investigation into a missing policeman would not have looked in a freezer in the basement of his holiday home - far to complex a concept for the average Norwegian cop)
Hole just accepting the mould-man into his house, giving him the key (particularly when he was going on about the Snowman being close to him) and then still not questioning it when the Residents Association people said they knew nothing of a mould problem
Hole disarming Katrine with a fishing rod
The six storey dive into the canal
Etc etc
Finally, to end of a positive note, we all thought the mould man bit was a very clever red herring - I think everyone thought that ti would have something to do with the denouement - and the re-appearance at the very end was a nice touch. A question someone (can;t remember who - sorry) asked was whether it was just a red herring or whether it was a metaphor for decay in society, the police force and so on).
6.53
