Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen

Bill Ryan

A s a reader, I find that reading translated literature can be a complicated process. This is largely due to the fact that I myself am sadly monolingual, so that when reading something translated from a foreign language into English, I have no choice but to take the book’s translator at their word. If I’m reading, say, a French novel in English, and the word “exacerbate” is used, I have no choice but to assume that “exacerbate” is the closest and best English equivalent to whatever the French word is.

Sometimes, translation can be an act of great imagination and artistry. Earlier this year, I read A Void by Georges Perec. Perec’s novel is famous for, among other things, never using the letter “e”. This French novel has been translated into English more than once, but the best known, and the one I read, was done by Gilbert Adair. As you can imagine, writing an entire novel in French without once using the most common letter in our shared alphabet poses unique problems for the English translator – the closest and best English equivalent to a given French word that doesn’t have an “e” in it may well have an “e” in it, so another word must be chosen. You get the idea. The point being that in the case of A Void, Gilbert Adair genuinely accomplished something.

I was suitably impressed by Adair’s achievement, but at other times I’ve read a novel in translation and thought that perhaps that translator didn’t possess the artistic flair the job would seem to me to require. Take, for example, the Finnish crime novel Cruel is the Night by Karo Hämäläinen. The premise of the book is this: four Finnish friends meet, after years apart, in the London home of one of them. The two men, Mikko and Robert, have known each other since they were children. Though diametrically opposed politically – even, as far as crusading journalist Mikko is concerned, ethically – the two men are close friends. Except that, very early in the novel, the reader learns that Mikko and his wife Veera made the trip from Finland to England to visit Robert and his wife Elise because Mikko plans to murder Robert. Veera doesn’t know this, but Mikko has brought strychnine with him, and has every intention of using it.

I’ll get to his motives, and the rest of the novel, in a minute. But first, I want to point out a particular sentence from Cruel is the Night that has puzzled and confounded me since I first read it. The novel is written in alternating first-person narratives – each of the four primary characters get their share of chapters, and to tell their sides of things. About halfway through the novel, Mikko, from lack of food, stress, fear of what he plans to do, and so on, becomes severely light-headed. Elise comforts him and offers him a caramel, which Mikko accepts, leading Hämäläinen to write this:

Sucking on the soft candy, I absorbed carbohydrates through the membranes of my mouth.

Ah. So that’s how it works.

Why Hämäläinen chose to explain part of the chemical process that is involved in eating food, I do not know, but I’d love to know if the original Finnish has been translated as precisely as it could have been; and if it wasn’t, what did Hämäläinen mean to say, if it was different? And is that sentence more the work of the author, Hämäläinen, or the translator, Owen Witesman?

I don’t suppose I’ll ever know. But if that line can be blamed on Witesman – and to some degree I believe it can – there is plenty more about Cruel is the Night that can be chalked up to Hämäläinen simply not being a very good novelist. Still, that caramel line, in addition to being pointless and weird, also shows an inability to distinguish between the kind of detail it’s necessary to include in a traditional narrative for the sake of verisimilitude, and the kind of detail that is not merely not needed but is also plainly stupid.

One of the things that drew me to Cruel is the Night is also the thing that most bewildered and disappointed me. The reader is told early on that of these four characters spending a night drinking and absorbing carbohydrates through the membranes of their mouths, only one will survive. We know going in that one murder is planned, but what in the world could happen to leave three of them dead? Darkly intriguing!

Well, in addition to the alternating first person chapters from Mikko, Veera, Robert, and Elise are very short third person chapters, from the point of view of the survivor the morning after this night of murderous chaos. Amazingly, though, in these chapters, the survivor’s gender is revealed. On page 29, out of 313:

The night was gentle. Rather than striking his face, it caressed and welcomed him as he stepped out of the [apartment building]. He didn’t deserve such a warm reception.

How the night can strike one’s face is a bit beyond me, but never mind. The point is that, for the vast majority of Cruel is the Night, the reader knows the sole survivor is either Mikko or Robert. I did wonder if this was a set-up of some kind, and that it would somehow turn out to be neither of them – I just couldn’t imagine Hämäläinen would want to narrow the mystery from four possibilities to two so soon – but as I read on I realized that, no, it was either Mikko or Robert. And since there had to be some note of dramatic irony in there somewhere, narrowing all those options down to just one was fairly simple.

A further disappointment came when it was revealed why any of this was happening. Initially, the reader gets the sense that the obnoxiously self-righteous Mikko wants to kill the obnoxiously arrogant Robert because of some irredeemable ethical trespass (Robert is a rich, and unethical, businessman). This would have been at least somewhat interesting. Unfortunately (for me, anyway, but of course tastes vary) it turns out that Mikko is having an affair with Elise, and Robert is having an affair with Veera. Nobody knows about the affairs of the others, but Mikko wants the young and beautiful Elise for himself, and also believes that Robert treats Elise abominably, and therefore wishes to save her.

Elise is another problem. She’s completely vapid, and is intended to be, but the writing of her narrated chapters is often absurd. Her first chapter ends like this:

The flowers were cheery.

I smelled them.

They were white.

In other words, Elise is just a cartoon character. Her chapters are filled with this sort of thing. She doesn’t read as a person in danger, but rather as someone whom Hämäläinen will eventually label “dead” and then stop writing about her.

There’s some discussion of pop culture in Cruel is the Night, culture that is both Finnish and otherwise, and Hämäläinen is no better here than elsewhere. Again, this is probably just a matter of taste, but circumstantial evidence suggests that one of the inspirations for Hämäläinen to write this – his first and so far only novel – was Jo Nesbø, the globally best-selling Norwegian author of the series of crime novels about investigator Harry Hole. I’ve read Nesbø’s novel The Snowman, in which, at one point, Hole, quite wearyingly and insultingly, instructs his girlfriend on the art of cinema, and the film he chooses as an example of great filmic art is Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction, which nearly made me toss that book aside, unfinished.

I promise that I have nothing against Scandinavia or its people. But here, the anxiety of influence, transferred from Nesbø to Hämäläinen, could not be less interesting, or worth one’s time to examine. For this sort of thing to generate anything meaningful, then somebody – the influenced or the influencer – has to be good at writing novels. Otherwise you’re left with cliché, bad plotting, characters that behave wildly only because the writer needs them to. For the sake, I believe, of making Cruel is the Night in part a black comedy, the story eventually devolves into a kind of murder farce, with Mikko’s vial of strychnine, and Robert’s several vials of cyanide, which he bought for no good reason, bouncing around the apartment in a kind of “who’s got the poison?” comic mayhem. None of it works, it’s all horribly silly, empty of suspense and forward momentum.

The plotting and character problems inherent in Cruel is the Night must be the fault of Hämäläinen. However, as this is a work of translation, the blame for prose itself, which is dull, determined to crank up the suspense levels without displaying any sign that anyone involved has a knack for it, must be distributed evenly among both Hämäläinen and Witesman. Translation is an art, and an artist must be called upon to do the job.

There is something savagely appealing about the premise of Cruel is the Night. Four people meeting, arguing, plotting against each other, over the course of one evening that leaves three of them dead. Good idea. The thing is, if the execution is poor, the premise no longer matters.

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Bill’s thoughts on Facebook.

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)