The Son: A Nesbo adrenaline-fuelled trip

Sonny Lofthus is the titular hero of Jo Nesbo’s latest thriller, The Son, which arrives on our bookshelves with much fanfare.

Nesbo has removed Harry Hole — for now — from the line of duty, having shifted more than 20 million in book sales from the 10 bloody adventures of his Scandinavian sleuth.

In The Son, another grizzled Norwegian cop, Simon Kefas, is on the trail of Sonny, who has escaped from prison after 12 years indoors, on a mission to avenge the murder of his father. Sonny’s dad was a cop. He was found dead beside a suicide note, having been stitched up as a mole in the police force. When Sonny finds out the truth about his death, he sets off on a killing spree that will only end, he vows, once the country’s most notorious drug lord is put into the ground.

In a transformation that requires readers to suspend huge chunks of their disbelief, Sonny kicks a 12-year heroin habit, and re-sculpts the bodily frame that made him a national wrestling champion, to help him action his elaborate plan of revenge. He sets about his work of vengeance with the determined, monosyllabic purpose of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie character.

Oslo — with its junk-addled corners, which are serviced by an organised web of international criminals, most hailing from Albania or North Africa — is Nesbo’s most interesting character. Norway, despite its oil-rich position as Europe’s wealthiest country after little Luxembourg, loses more people every year to heroin overdoses than it does to deaths from road accidents.

The city broods, as the narrative action moves along. It is strangely deserted mid-summer, although the people who are left behind are acutely aware that they are “heading for the long night”, soon enough. Nesbo introduces interesting insights about Norwegian society like the fact that this Nordic workers’ nirvana shuts its offices at four o’clock “on the dot for king and country”.

Kefas doesn’t keep official hours, however. He doesn’t do much by the book.

He is another in a long line of benign, old detectives on the cusp of retirement, who arouses suspicion in his commanding officers, but is loved by Kari Adel, the beautiful, young, blonde partner (with pins that seem to stretch forever) who is assigned to work her first case in homicide with him.

Kefas makes gentle fun of the earnest Kari, particularly of her second-hand social commentary.

“The acquisition of public art, as it’s known, is nothing but a hidden subsidy for our country’s mediocre artists,” she sniffs at one stage. “The buyers couldn’t care less about what’s on their walls as long as it matches the furniture and their budget.”

There are a lot of plodding, clichéd features in The Son — the laboured references to the HBO TV series, The Wire; child abuse (or “the type of sins where the clergy seems to be over-represented”); Sonny’s lover’s quoting at length of Leonard Cohen lyrics (Nesbo was a rock musician, as well as a stockbroker and footballer in former lives); and the stock character sketches: Kefas, who has kicked smoking but sucks on tobacco instead, has a pair of eyes that invite people to dwell on the innate kindness, humour and stubbornness that lie behind their gaze.

Perhaps some of Nesbo’s nuances are lost in translation. Nonetheless, his novel, The Son, which weighs in at almost 500 pages, takes enough unlikely turns to clip along at an adrenaline-fuelled pace for all its literary shortcomings.