Five
go on a Finnish Adventure : Book review of "Secret Passages in a Hillside
Town" by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen (translated by Lola Rogers)
A few
years back I had read Jääskeläinen’s "The Rabbit Back Literature
Society". That novel had been compared to “Twin Peaks meeting the Brothers
Grimm” and was a dark and cryptic work which hovered rather awkwardly between
outright supernatural fiction and magical realism. I had found this ‘ambivalence’
ultimately disappointing, but the novel was intriguing enough to make me want
to sample the author’s latest offering, recently translated into English by
Lola Rogers.
In its
initial chapters, this novel seemed quite different from its predecessor, apart
from its small-town setting and “bookish” background. Indeed, it starts off as
a gentle, if quirky, tale of mid-life romance. Olli Suominen, the head of a
publishing company based in Jyväskylä, is going through a crisis. Book sales
are not what they used to be and, as far as family-life is concerned, he seems
to be growing distant from his wife and young son. Through Facebook, he gets in
touch with Greta Kara, an old flame who has since become the bestselling author
of an influential self-help guide to “living a cinematic life”. He somehow
convinces her to issue her next book – a ‘magical’ travelogue about Jyväskylä –
through his publishing house. This promises to boost Olli’s business, and
amorous, prospects.
But
Olli’s Facebook exchanges with Greta also rekindle memories of another group of
childhood acquaintances – the three Blomroos siblings and their cousin Karri.
Together with Timi, Olli’s dog, they formed a Finnish equivalent of the Famous
Five. In true Enid Blyton fashion, they spent their summer holidays together,
shared long, glorious, sunny days on riverside picnics and solved mysteries
along the way. Typically, they also explored secret passages. And here things
start to get weird, because unlike the relatively workaday secret passages in
Blyton’s novels, the Toulura tunnels seem to warp reality and cause time to go
completely off-kilter. Unsurprisingly, Olli’s memories of the secret passages
are vague and confused, but we eventually learn that they were the theatre for
shocking happenings experienced by Greta and the Tourula Five.
Whether
you will enjoy the novel from this point forward will depend on how crazy you
like your fiction to be. In my case, I generally prefer novels which follow an
internal logic, however strange their premise. And to be honest, it was
sometimes difficult to understand where this book was going . But it still
hooked me to the last chapter. Or chapters, given that the novel rather
puzzlingly presents us with an alternative ending – probably a nod to
“alternate movie endings” which are sometimes available on certain movie DVDs.
So,
how should we interpret Secret Passages? Should we take it at face value as a
work of supernatural fiction? Or is this actually realist fiction, using
elements of fantasy to give us a glimpse of the workings of Olli’s mind? Is the
book a satire on modern life which, thanks to social media, seems to be all
about living a “cinematic life” worth sharing with the world at large? Or is
this an adult parody of Enid Blyton mysteries, particularly the underlying
gender politics simmering below their surface? Perhaps it’s all of this, but it
makes for a wild and crazy ride.
Paperback, 416 pages
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