Okay wow this is going to be long and also The Redbreast spoilers!

Omphalos: The centre, heart, or hub of a place, organization, sphere of activity, etc. From the OED.

Here is a word we don't see often enough. Or really at all.

So, I finished reading Life in the Cul-de-Sac. An introspective work with very well-realized characters. By that I mean, they thought like real people and not like characters in a book. They were very human. The book is composed of a series of chapters, each centering on a family member in a little side street in suburban Tokyo. The households are at different stages in life but they are all experiencing a disintegration, a lack of omphalos. Each person drifts in their own world, brushing lightly against each other. This lends the moments of real connection more weight, while the characters own thoughts keep the perspective just a little unfocused. I find this rather true to life. we are all of us thinking not just of the present but of the past and future and of events that we want or fear will happen and never will. People experience the same thing differently because of the associations and preconceptions we carry with us. It's also an interesting look at a change perceived in modern Japanese life in the '80's. I have no idea how relevant it is today but it's a good read.

And now, on to The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo. I'm going to paste the long, long summary I wrote after finishing it. Everything is laid out including the ending. Just as a warning.

So! The book starts off with an assassination attempt during a presidential visit to Norway and our main character, Harry Hole, shoots the man with the Uzi in the back! But it turns out to be just a secret service agent. So Harry is promoted because nobody wants the public to know just how much both sides goofed up. He discovers someone in Norway recently bought a smuggled in super rifle and he guesses it must be for use in an assassination. Oh, and he has a partner named Ellen who, due to his promotion is no longer his partner but she’s still totally his BFF. And then we start having flashbacks to WWII and some Norwegians fighting the Russians. And we have to keep track of these people because one of them is the one who bought the rifle from the neo-nazi (there are neo-nazis in this but don’t worry they don’t actually have anything to do with the plot). He’s going to kill someone. In the present I mean.

So five guys are there but one gets shot in the head and another runs to the Russians and the others get hit by a grenade although they all survive. One of them, who's identity is hidden by pronouns, (it’s Gudbrand) ends up in an Austrian hospital and falls in love with a nurse who gets blackmailed into marrying a doctor. Anyhow, back to the present. Someone is going to die and Harry kind of acts like a dick though he’s usually just boring and he does a lot of investigating. He figures out that he’s looking for a Norwegian man who fought on the Eastern front in WWII and there were only those five from the flashback left. Well, four. Daniel the super awesome soldier dies because his liquor bottle reflected too much light and a sniper got him. And he spends not nearly enough time trying to track down the one elusive member, Gudbrand. Okay he spends no time trying to track down the one element that’s in the wind and therefore is most suspicious. Harry, not Daniel, Daniel’s dead. It’s important to remember that because the perspective of the old man who bought the gun is very close to Daniel as is the soldier who fell in love with the nurse in Austria, and Gudbrand was Daniel's bestest friend. So…the real question is not who it is but where he is. I don’t know if we’re supposed to know that though.

Harry talks to Juul, a resistance fighter, who knows a lot about these old men. Then he meets a girl! And she’s the daughter of the guy who went over to the Russians, Sindre Faulke! And they both take to each other immediately which gets rid of the pesky and tiring need for character exploration. Oh and an ex-soldier named Dale is killed but we don’t care because at that point we have no idea who the fuck he is. Oh no! Ellen has discovered that her new partner, Waller, who is a racist sexist pig, is the neo-nazi gun-smuggling connection in the super rifle case! She’s completely floored! But she understands her role in this and immediately does everything she can to get murdered horribly while not leaving any clues that could point to what happened. This is so unfortunate because she has fallen in love for the first time in her life and was really happy.

So Harry starts drinking. And Rakel, the girl he likes, is very nice to him and eventually he stops drinking and starts investigating Ellen’s case. But Waaler is ahead of them the crafty bastard. He goes to Olsen, the neo-nazi he got to kill Ellen, and kills him while making it look like a shoot-out. He’s so smart. See this could have been avoided if he didn’t have his skinhead clients calling him on his personal cell phone and ordering highly illegal weapons but the mistake was so easy to clean up why bother paying for two phones. It only took two bodies. Olsen is hard to feel sorry for since he’s a murdering asshole but it’s unfortunate for him because he was thinking of turning his life around and becoming an electrician.

Oh no! Some asshat named Brandhaug that we’ve occasionally had chapters based around has decided that he has to “have” Rakel! So he blackmails her and sends Harry to Sweden. That totally parallels the thing that happened with the nurse in Austria in 1944, complete with references to Daniel and Bathsheba! Then Brandhaug gets killed by the old man with the super rifle and it’s all good again. Harry comes back to investigate that and starts talking to the old soldiers again and eventually goes to Austria where he learns about Gudbrand and the nurse and how Gudbrand murdered the doctor before fleeing the country. So he is still alive and psychotic and conceivably out there somewhere! And now Juul the resistance fighter's wife, who had originally been the fiancée of Daniel the super soldier, is kidnapped and executed with the super rifle. Harry thinks Oh my God Juul has MPD and when they get there he’s committed suicide. Phew! So that’s over.

But what’s this? There’s a photograph of Rakel’s mom and it’s the Austrian nurse from 1944! And she was married to Fauke! Who is actually Gudbrand! He’s the one with multiple personality disorder! Good Fucking Hell you have got to be kidding me what is this shit. MPD I don’t even…Except it’s more like voices of dead people in his head and suddenly he’s an expert marksman like his dead soldier friend Daniel. So Harry takes way too long to read the memoirs Gudbrand left in his apartment which means we have to read them too and because Harry is a dick and kind of short sighted he dismisses Weber the forensics guy, who helped him verify the Gudbrand/Faulke connection, even though Weber offered to call in reinforcements. But Harry, being the smart cookie that he is, decides to take the gun he requested from Weber and sit in the apartment carefully reading the memoirs. But oh shit! Gudbrand is going to enact a last execution for what he saw as the great betrayal of the Norwegian Eastern front soldiers! He’s going to kill the previous crown prince’s son! Who I assume is an adult I don’t know much about the Norwegian royal family! And it’s on this exact day, May 17, Liberation day at the parade that’s taking place right now! Boy, it would have been useful to have colleagues standing by or maybe to have his cell phone. Wait, he does have his cell phone he just used it.

But there’s no time! So he hops in his crappy old Escort and floors it going down the wrong lane with his hand on the horn and he scrapes alongside a train and he’s swerving and skidding and there is a group of children in his way so he quickly goes up onto the grass and drives to Palace Square. He flashes his badge and finds his new partner but wait! Because of a dead tree there’s a direct line of sight from the SAS hotel to the balcony. He runs around screaming “Fuck! Fuck!” a number of times so you know this is serious business that only he can deal with and he gets to the hotel and gets to the room Gudbrand is in, brandishing his gun along the way. And the old man is there and he’s very sad and dying of cancer and Harry talks him out of shooting by using the name of Gudbrand’s grandson, Oleg. Later Gudbrand dies in the hospital from his illness but nobody outside the security department knows what almost happened. Harry’s boss tells him that they have to keep the incident hush-hush and Harry gets all cynical about politics and has me wondering what’s wrong with the knobhead and whether he wants all of Norway to know that his girlfriend’s dad is a crazy, murdering asshole. And then Harry and Rakel and Oleg live happily ever after. Until the next book I’m sure.