Rating: 1/5
Review
Very disappointing
I am in a small minority, it seems, because I really couldn’t get
on with The Cabin and eventually gave up before I finished it, which
is a very rare thing for me.
The Cabin is a
Norwegian police procedural and the first of the series that I have
read (and the last, I suspect). A prominent politician dies and
Wisting is sent to investigate what is left in the man’s holiday
cabin, which leads to a dark, twisty story relating to some older
cases. The trouble is that the storytelling just seemed plodding and
tedious to me, with lots of detail which could have been interesting
but read like a boring litany, some clumsily signalled Significant
Events which the police don’t immediately spot even though it’s
made pretty obvious to the reader, and so on – and the prose is
lamentable in places. I don’t know how much of this is due to the
author and how much to the translator, but the effect is pretty
ghastly. In just the first few pages I picked out some terribly
clunky writing like “’Let’s sit down,’ he said, gesturing
with his hand,” some horribly stale usages like “This promised to
be an investigation on a totally different level from what he was
used to,” and some positively unforgivable, crashing clichés like
“Amalie usually chattered nineteen to the dozen.”
It got no better and
I’m afraid it became too much for me after a while. I’m very
surprised to have such an unfavourable response to an author who was
admired by Marcel Berlins and I am sorry to be so critical, but the
truth is that I found The Cabin so poorly written that I couldn’t
get through it.
(My thanks to
Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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