RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: Sweden's biggest exports reveal shocking truths about the country  Sat Apr 24, 2010 8:23 pm | |
| Crime fiction is now one of Sweden's biggest exports, revealing shocking truths about the country, writes Stephen Armstrong.
Part of Sweden's problem overseas is that everyone thinks we're like Abba and IKEA," says Magnus Betner, a Stockholm stand-up comedian. "We're a nation of beautiful people singing happy songs in stylish modernist apartments.
"But that's not how we Swedes see ourselves. We have a very, very dark side, and I think you're only just finding out about it now."
Betner has just been booked into the Edinburgh Festival where, consciously or not, he is part of a subtle cultural invasion by one of Europe's oddest nations.
Everywhere you turn – in film, music, literature, fashion and design – there is a powerful Swedish presence.
Now there is a surge of interest in Swedish crime fiction, helped by the BBC adaptation of the Wallander series by Henning Mankell, starring Kenneth Branagh as the grumpy police officer and shown here on Channel Seven.
Mankell's compatriot, Stieg Larsson, died from a heart attack before seeing his international bestselling Millennium trilogy catapult him to the rank of second-bestselling writer on the planet.
The film adaptation of his The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is playing in Australia. The producer of No Country for Old Men, Scott Rudin, has just signed a deal to make the Hollywood version.
Many millions have followed the story of investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and chaotic, freewheeling computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. And what they find may shock them.
Larsson, as with Betner and Mankell, spends much of the time pulling apart the stereotype of happy-ever-after, perfectly educated, socially democratic and joyfully tolerant Swedes enjoying wild sex lives and perfectly cooked meatballs. The Millennium trilogy tracks Blomkvist and Salander's attempts to uncover murders by rich neo-fascist families as well as state-sanctioned sexual abuse, paedophilia and rape.
Larsson was a campaigning anti-Nazi journalist. Mankell was a well-established mainstream author before he created Wallander. He did so to investigate paedophile rings at the heart of Sweden's security services and expose public and institutionalised racism.
Wallander and Blomkvist wade through some of the extremely unpleasant undercurrents beneath Sweden's tranquil social order. In Larsson's and Mankell's stories, both characters encounter neo-Nazis and corrupt agents of SAPO, the Swedish security and intelligence service. In their version of Sweden, racism is rife, violence against women is commonplace and the trafficking of children for sex is facilitated by highly placed lawyers and doctors.
One would be forgiven for dismissing these plotlines as fantasy. After all, in 2007 Sweden was rated best practising democracy by The Economist, least corrupt nation by Transparency International, most equal in gender relations by the World Economic Forum, and most generous donor of overseas development aid by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
In 2007 the US State Department recorded 6192 cases of child abuse in Sweden by November of that year. It also reported homophobic crime was on the rise, and tens of thousands of rapes and domestic violence incidents in a population of just 9 million.
A report from the group Global Monitoring in 2006 on the commercial sexual exploitation of children found systemic faults in Sweden, including allowing child pornography to be viewed, although not downloaded, and failing to care properly for children caught up in sex trafficking.
Little of this would come as a surprise to Larsson, or his creations Blomkvist and Salander, who encounter all of this and more.
Certainly the country practised forced sterilisation of women deemed unfit to be mothers until as recently as 1975. Branded low class, or mentally slow, they were kept in Institutes for Misled and Morally Neglected Children, where they were eventually "treated".
The founder of IKEA and Sweden's richest man, Ingvar Kamprad, revealed his youthful Nazi sympathies in 1994, confessing to a friendship with Per Engdahl, the openly pro-Nazi leader of the neo-Swedish movement. Kamprad claimed he could not remember if he had joined the Nordic Youth, Sweden's equivalent of the Hitler Youth.
He apologised to staff in an open letter: "Perhaps you find something in your youth you now, so long afterward, think was ridiculous and stupid."
So have we got Sweden wrong? Is it still essentially a nation of Vikings?
Mankell bristles at the suggestion. "I would like to emphasise that Sweden is a very decent society to live in. But we could have been better today if we had been different before – if we hadn't thrown a few babies out with some of our bathwater.
"We know that if our system of justice doesn't work, democracy is doomed. I think we are worried about that, so maybe that is why detective stories are so popular in Sweden.
"Until recently it was a very cold, isolated culture. Our art can't bring about social change but you cannot have social change without arts."
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