Farther Away: Essays (22 page)

“The people who do this aren't poor,” Zhou said. “It's not subsistence—it's custom. My goal is to educate people and try to change the custom. I want to teach people that birds are their natural wealth, and I want to promote ecotourism as an alternative livelihood.”

The migrant birds that make it unscathed past Laotie Mountain are mostly bound, of course, for Southeast Asia: a region well on its way to being clear-cut and strip-mined into one vast muddy pit, since China itself is hopelessly short on natural resources to supply the factories that supply us. The Chinese people may bear the brunt of Chinese pollution, but the trauma to biodiversity is being reexported around the world. And it does seem like rather a lot to ask of the Chinese people that, while working to safeguard Laotie Mountain and achieve breathable air and drinkable water and sustainable development, they also pay close attention to the devastation of Southeast Asia, Siberia, Central Africa, and the Amazon Basin. It's remarkable enough that people like Shrike and Hai-xiang Zhou and Yifei Zhang exist at all.

“To see something being destroyed and not be able to do anything about it, it's sad sometimes,” Shrike said to me. We were standing by a badly polluted river outside Nanjing, surveying a landscape of new factories in what had been wetland two years earlier. But there was still a small area that hadn't been developed, and Shrike wanted me to see it.

An actual Swedish person, my college roommate Ekström, introduced me to this book. He gave me a mass-market edition on whose cover was a cheesy photograph of a raincoated man in mod sunglasses pointing a submachine gun into the reader's face. This was in 1979. I was exclusively reading great literature (Kafka, Goethe), and although I could forgive Ekström for not understanding what a serious person I'd become, I had zero interest in opening a book with such a lurid cover. It wasn't until several years later, on a morning when I was sick in bed and too weak to face the likes of Faulkner or Henry James, that I happened to pick up the little paperback again. I was married to another writer by then, and I was devoting a lot of energy to the morbid avoidance of colds, because whenever I got a cold I couldn't write or smoke, and whenever I couldn't write or smoke I couldn't feel smart, and feeling smart was pretty much my only defense against the world. And how perfectly comforting
The Laughing Policeman
turned out to be! Once I'd made the acquaintance of Inspector Martin Beck, I was never again so afraid of colds (and my wife was never again so afraid of how grouchy I would be when I got one), because colds were henceforth associated with the grim, hilarious world of Swedish murder police. There were ten Martin Beck mysteries altogether, each of them readable cover to cover on the worst day of a sore throat. The volume I loved best and reread most often was
The Laughing Policeman
. Its happily paired authors, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, had wedded the satisfying simplicities of genre fiction to the tragicomic spirit of great literature. Their books combined beautiful, deft detective work with powerful pure evocations of the kind of misery that people with sore throats so crave the company of.

“The weather was abominable,” the authors inform us on the first page of
The Laughing Policeman
; and abominable it remains thereafter. The floors at police headquarters are “dirtied” by men “irritable and clammy with sweat and rain.” One chapter is set on a “repulsive Wednesday.” Another begins: “Monday. Snow. Wind. Bitter cold.” As with the weather, so with society as a whole. Sjöwall and Wahlöö's negativity toward postwar Sweden—a theme in all ten of their books—reaches its delirious apex in
The Laughing Policeman
. Not only does the Swedish winter weather inevitably suck, but the Swedish journalists are inevitably sensationalist and stupid, the Swedish landladies inevitably racist and rapacious, the Swedish police administrators inevitably self-serving, the Swedish upper class inevitably decadent or vicious, the Swedish antiwar demonstrators inevitably persecuted, the Swedish ashtrays inevitably overflowing, the Swedish sex inevitably sordid or unappetizingly blatant, the Swedish streets at Christmastime inevitably nightmarish. When Detective Lennart Kollberg finally gets an evening off and pours himself a nice big glass of akvavit, you can be sure that his phone is about to ring with urgent business. Stockholm in the late sixties probably really did have more than its share of ugliness and frustrations, but the
perfect
ugliness and
perfect
frustration depicted in the novel are clearly comic exaggerations.

Needless to say, the book's exemplary sufferer, Martin Beck, fails to see the humor. Indeed, what makes the novel so comforting to read is precisely its denial of comfort to its main character. When, on Christmas Day, his children play him a recording of “The Laughing Policeman,” in which the singer Charles Penrose gives out big belly laughs between the verses, Beck listens to it stone-faced while the children laugh and laugh. Beck blows his nose and sneezes, enduring an apparently incurable cold, smoking his nasty Floridas. He's stoop-shouldered, gray-skinned, bad at chess. He has stomach ulcers, drinks too much coffee (“in order to make his condition a little worse”), and sleeps alone on the living room sofa (in order to avoid his nag of a wife). At no point does he brilliantly help solve the mass murder that's committed in chapter 2 of the book. He does achieve one valuable insight—he guesses which cold case a deceased young colleague has been reworking—but he neglects to mention this insight to anyone else, and by failing to perform a thorough search of his dead colleague's desk he inflicts a month and a half of avoidable misery on his department. His most memorable act in the book is to prevent a crime, by removing bullets from a gun, rather than to solve one.

One striking thing about Sjöwall and Wahlöö, as mystery writers, is how honestly unsmitten they are with their main character. They let Martin Beck be a real policeman, which is to say that they resist the temptation to make him a romantic rebel, a heroic misfit, a brilliant problem-solver, an exciting drinker, a secret do-gooder, or any of the other self-flattering personae that crime writers are wont to project onto their protagonists. Beck is cautious, recessive, phlegmatic, and altogether unwriterly. By nonetheless rendering him with exacting sympathy, Sjöwall and Wahlöö are, in effect, swearing their allegiance to the realities of police work. They do occasionally indulge themselves with their secondary characters, notably Lennart Kollberg, the “sensualist” and gun-hater in whose leftist tirades it's hard not to hear the authors' own voices and opinions. But Kollberg, tellingly, is the one detective who feels ever more estranged from the police department. Later in the series, he finally quits the force altogether, while Martin Beck dutifully persists in rising through the ranks. Although much is made (and rightly so) of Sjöwall and Wahlöö's ambition to create a ten-volume portrait of a corrupt modern society, no less impressive is their openness to discovering, book by book, via the character of Martin Beck, how stubbornly Other the world of police work is.

As long as the mass murder remains unsolved, Beck can be nothing but miserable. He and his colleagues pursue a thousand useless leads, go door to door in freezing winds, endure abuse from fools and sadists, make punishingly long drives on wintery roads, read unimaginable reams of dull reports. To do police work is, in a word, to suffer. We readers, not being Martin Beck, can laugh at how awful the world is and with what cruel efficiency it visits pain on the detectives; we readers are having fun all along. And yet it's the suffering cops who, in the end, produce the beautiful thing: the simultaneous solution of a very old crime and a horrific new one, a solution that turns on a delicious piece of automotive arcana, a solution that's been lying almost in plain sight all along.
The Laughing Policeman
is a journey through real-world ugliness toward the self-sufficient beauties of good police work. The book is fueled by the tension between the dystopic vision of its authors and the essential optimism of its genre. When Martin Beck finally does laugh, on the final page, it's in recognition of how unnecessary all the suffering turns out to have been. How unreal.

There's so much to read and so little time. I'm always looking for a reason to put a book down and not pick it up again, and one of the best reasons a writer can give me is to use the word
then
as a conjunction without a subject following it.

She lit a Camel Light, then dragged deeply.

He dims the lamp and opens the window, then pulls the body inside.

I walked to the door and opened it, then turned back to her.

If you use comma-then like this frequently in the early pages of your book, I won't read any farther unless I'm forced to, because you've already told me several important things about yourself as a writer, none of them good.

You've told me, first of all, that you're not listening to the English language when you're writing. No native speaker would utter any of the sentences above, except in a creative-writing class. Here's what actual English speakers would say:

She lit a Camel Light and took a deep drag.

He dims the lamp, opens the window, pulls the body inside.

He dims the lamp and opens the window. Then he pulls the body inside.

He dims the lamp and opens the window and pulls the body inside.

When I got to the door, I turned back to her.

I went to the door and opened it. Then I turned back to her.

English speakers really like the word
and
. They also like to put the word
then
at the beginning of independent clauses, but it appears there only as an adverb, never as a conjunction. The sentence “I sang a couple of songs, then Katie got up and sang a few herself” is actually two sentences run together into one, for propulsive effect. Given a similar sentence containing only one subject, rather than two, native speakers will always balk at using
then
without an
and
in front of it. They'll say, “I sang a couple of songs, and then I asked her to sing some of her own.”

Obviously, written English employs all sorts of conventions seldom found in spoken English. The reason I'm sure that comma-then is not among these useful conventions—the reason I know that it's an irritating, lazy mannerism, unlike the brave semicolon or the venerable participial phrase—is that it occurs almost exclusively in “literary” writing of the past few decades. Dickens and the Brontës got along fine without comma-then, as do ordinary citizens writing e-mails or term papers or business letters today. Comma-then is a disease specific to modern prose narrative with lots of action verbs. Sentences infected with it are almost always found in the company of other short, declarative sentences with an
and
in the middle of them. When you deploy a comma-then to avoid an
and,
you're telling me either that you think comma-then sounds
better
than
and,
or that you're aware that your sentences are sounding too much alike but you think you can fool me by making a cosmetic change.

You can't fool me. If you have too many similar sentences, the solution is to rewrite them, varying length and structure, and make them more interesting. (If this simply can't be done, the action you're describing is probably itself not very interesting.) The only difference between

She finished her beer and then smiled at me.

and

She finished her beer, then smiled at me.

or, even worse,

She finished her beer then smiled at me.

is that the latter two sound like fiction-workshop English. They sound unthinking; and the one thing that all prose ought to do is make its makers think.