Nick Pateras | Nemesis
BOOK REVIEW
Nemesis – Jo Nesbø
A rollercoaster made unnecessarilly fatiguing due to oversized cast
Unfortunately, my personal honeymoon with Nesbø’s Harry Hole series came to an expeditious period after doggedly struggling to finish Nemesis. Over the winter break I had raced through The Bat, the first in the series, in just two days and upon conclusion felt a genuine emotional engagement with Hole’s affairs, both personal and professional. That work had jogged my imagination and sparked me to commiserate as Hole tried to manage demons of his past, including an ex-lover who’d acquired real estate deep within his heart.
In Nemesis however, Hole’s persona is characterized by an even more extreme reticence than what I had observed in The Bat, with Nesbø’s narrative of his thinking a shadow of what I’d expect from the fourth episode in the series. The book has Hole simultaneously decrypting two ostensibly unrelated crime cases, one a sequence of bank robberies and the other the murder of an old girlfriend.
“Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is to lose your reason for living.”
The plot unfolds at a typically exhilarating pace with the customary surprises for which Nesbø is so acclaimed, but in building out such a complexly intertwined story, the author falls guilty to introducing too many characters and locations. The map included at the book’s beginning was a forewarning to this excessive approach, a decision with an amplified impact given many names were similar-looking for a non-Norwegian reader like myself. Moreover, the opportunity cost of featuring such a numerous and diverse cast was that it held a ransom on more thorough character development, including Hole himself as underscored earlier. This made it an arduous task to connect with the story beyond the outlook of a nosebleed-section spectator and I was thus relieved when I found myself amongst the final pages.
Though this work was a disappointment, I recognize it to be the outlier against the other two Hole books I’ve enjoyed. I intend to pause on fiction for a time, and when I do return to Nesbø it will be to take up The Snowman, widely regarded as his magnum opus and due to be released as a film later this year. Only then will I feel I’ve exposed myself enough to confidently solidify my opinion on the Harry Hole series.
-NP, February 2017