Beartown

We are the bears! We are the bears! We are the bears, the bears from BEARTOWN!

I'm going to need to get around to reading A Man Called Ove because this is my second disappointing encounter with Fredrik Backman, even though everyone raves about him. I really didn't like Beartown: it puts stereotypical characters into a contrived situation, and by layering on a manipulatively emotional crisis, it pretends to explore a moral situation that, in fact, has no shades of grey: I'm trying not to give anything away, so I will say cryptically: Just writing “The town is this way, so when something happens to challenge the status quo, you can kind of see how people would ignore what's right to preserve what is” doesn't actually set up a moral quandary – the reader knows what's right, and I would suspect that in 2017, so do all of these characters, no matter where they live. Take away the exploration of a moral quandary, and there's no reason for this book to exist. In addition to not liking the plot or the characters, the line-by-line writing was weak (and, perhaps, this was just weak translation). To begin, nearly every chapter begins with an aphorism:

It's only a game. It only resolves tiny, insignificant things. Such as who gets validation. Who gets listened to. It allocates power and draws boundaries and turns some people into stars and others into spectators. That's all.

Beartown begins as a story about a small town, deep in the woods of Sweden, where hockey is everything: entertainment, economic engine, the ticket out of nowheresville. We meet the players on the Junior team who are carrying the burden of the whole town's dreams as they advance to the semifinals of the National Championship, and watch as they are treated like gods everywhere they go (at home, at high school, about town), and obnoxiously, take that as their due. Backman stresses that this is just the way it is in Beartown: you either get it or you don't understand hockey. I may not live in the woods of Sweden, but I am Canadian and hockey saturates our culture, too. So when one of the players commits a crime and the community rallies around him as though the game is more important than any one individual, I just didn't buy it: I may not personally be a hockey mom, but I work with one whose entire social life revolves around her sons' games (she and the other moms call themselves “The Funbags” and follow every game with wine and cheese), and I work with another woman whose son was drafted into the NHL last year – and neither of them would clean up a crime scene to protect their sons' hockey careers. Cue another mawkish aphorism:

Soon Maya won't be Kira's little girl anymore, and then Kira will become Maya's little old mom. It doesn't take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything.

And a questionable sense of humour:

The president is sitting at his desk eating a sandwich the way a German shepherd would try to eat a balloon filled with mayonnaise.

And I just didn't like the writing. At one point, Backman writes of “neither this, nor this, nor that” (as though you can use “neither” with a list of three things), or when Amat and Zacharias reconcile and it says that “Amat hangs his jacket on the same hook where he's hung it every day since he was old enough to reach up there for himself” – put aside that that should be “tall enough” instead of “old enough”, Amat had obviously not been hanging his jacket there every day for the two weeks that they weren't talking to each other; and when I'm rolling my eyes at the small details, I definitely can't buy into the larger picture. More things that made me roll my eyes: Sometimes Backman introduces a detail that is only important in its own chapter. In one, he writes that offering someone a cup of coffee is this buttoned-up town's way of saying “Will you be my friend?” And later in that same chapter, one woman is taking out the garbage and no one in the neighbourhood offers her a cup of coffee, while another woman doing the same has several doors fly open followed by several offers – not only is this too painfully literal a plotpoint, but it's never revisited; no one ever offers the first woman that cup of coffee later on when she is redeemed. Another chapter begins with noting that when children first learn to hunt, they are told the difference between predators (who have forward facing eyes) and prey (whose eyes are spaced apart to look for danger), and that two girls who heard this “lesson” then spent the afternoon looking at themselves in the mirror, trying to decide which type they were. Later in this chapter, an intense man enters a room and it's written that his eyes face forward. Also, after listening patiently to Kira's problems, it is noted that her work colleague has eyes that are spaced far apart (I have no idea why she would be the “prey” in this conversation). I hated this. And I hated that this woman is only, and repeatedly, referred to as Kira's colleague, and I hated that there's a character who is only and repeatedly, referred to as a man in a black jacket. 

This is already more than I wanted to write about a book that flat out annoyed me, so I will end by saying that I do not recommend Beartown (but will add that I work with another woman – a retired teacher who found it all plausible – who loved it).