Crime fictionReviewA debut vividly depicts acts of cruelty in lawless 18th-century Stockholm – but are its shocks gratuitous?

As aficionados of modern Nordic noir in print and on television we have grown familiar with the endless night of northern winters, stark landscapes that conceal unspeakable acts of cruelty, flawed and damaged protagonists compelled to battle their own demons as they pursue the perpetrators. In The Wolf and the Watchman, his first novel and a bestseller in his native Sweden, Niklas Natt och Dag takes the contemporary Scandinavian crime story and gives it a startlingly gruesome historical twist.

It is Stockholm, 1793. On a dark autumn morning Mickel Cardell, a watchman, is roused from the bar table where he sprawls after a heavy night’s drinking. A corpse is floating in the Larder, a lake once fringed with elegant houses, now a putrid depository for industrial and human waste. Fished from the water, the body, a young man’s, is discovered to be little more than a torso, its arms and legs missing, the eyes and tongue cut out. Cardell, a one-armed veteran of Sweden’s devastating war with Russia, knows a great deal about amputation. It does not take him long to realise that the dismemberments have been inflicted not post mortem but meticulously, agonisingly and one by one over the last few months of the victim’s life.

The beleaguered chief of police prevails on Cecil Winge to investigate the murder. Winge is a fiercely rational lawyer who believes that “everything may be solved by strength of mind”: in the final stages of consumption and physically weaker every day, he is also a man in a hurry. Meanwhile Cardell, who agrees to assist him with the case, is tormented not only by agonising pain in his phantom arm but by violent panic attacks, another legacy of his traumatic war.

Blighted by poverty, pestilence and political paranoia, late 18th-century Stockholm is hardly less damaged. Near-bankrupt after years of brutal foreign conflict, the city is in the hands of a corrupt and self-serving elite. Sweden’s king has been recently assassinated by an aristocratic cabal; not so far away, revolutionary France is running with blood. Life is precarious, unpredictable and very cheap. In the rotting slums, amid heaped-up hills of human excrement, cutpurses and syphilitic prostitutes ply their trade and drunken beggar-soldiers brawl.

A strong stomach is required as the evocatively named Natt och Dag (in English, Night and Day) unfolds his dark tale. In lawless Stockholm violence is a commonplace, Cardell’s wooden arm proving a particularly effective weapon, but, while there is no shortage of bloody punch-ups, Natt och Dag’s true business is with the twisted depths of the human imagination. What begins as a historical take on the police procedural slowly expands to include the stories of two apparently unconnected characters: the first a surgeon’s apprentice lured into debt and depravity; the second a girl condemned to the workhouse where the sadistic guard derives sexual pleasure from tormenting the inmates.

Harrowing sea battles, botched public executions, savage whippings: Natt och Dag spares us nothing

The result, a prize winner in Sweden, is an unconventional mashup: part murder mystery, part gothic chiller, part noirish picaresque and entirely, unrelentingly grisly. Harrowing sea battles, botched public executions, savage whippings, hands burned to stumps by potash and lime: Natt och Dag spares us nothing, detailing horror after horror in his unflinchingly muscular prose. Betrayal is everywhere, trust repaid with chicanery, innocence with false accusations. Powerful men get their kicks from screwing “the disfigured and deformed”. Gleams of beauty and tenderness are quickly snuffed out. “Humans are lying vermin,” one character observes, “a pack of bloodthirsty wolves who want nothing more than to tear each other to pieces in their strife for power.” Natt och Dag gives us little in this novel to contradict his assessment.

In the end, though, it is the novel’s lack of depth rather than its grisliness that undoes it. Natt och Dag unspools his story backwards in a structure reminiscent of Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost, but The Wolf and the Watchman manages neither the finely drawn characterisations nor the fiendishly clever plotting that marked out Pears’s masterful novel. While Anna Stina, the young girl unjustly accused of whoring, is a sensitive creation, Cardell and Winge remain frustratingly two‑dimensional, evolving little over the course of the novel. The historical digressions that pepper the text are vividly conjured but also slow the pace. Several plot twists prove unconvincingly convenient.

Most problematically, the psychological climax of the story lacks the profundity that would justify its excesses. It is not enough to know that people who are cruelly treated go on to be cruel. The best contemporary Nordic noir plumbs the depths of human depravity not to shock gratuitously or titillate but in an attempt to grasp what such depravity tells us of the human condition, to shine a light into the darker reaches of the human soul. Brutality without humanity, without understanding, reduces us all to collaborators and voyeurs.

Clare Clark’s In the Full Light of the Sun is published by Virago. The Wolf and the Watchman is published by John Murray Publishers (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.

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