Review: The Wolf and the Watchman

The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt och Dag
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A dark and disturbing, very well-written and translated, novel set in late 18th Century Stockholm. King Gustav has been assassinated, paranoia is rife and, as the Revolution tears Paris apart, Sweden fears that the violence will spread from France. Against this background a city watchman pulls a body from the fetid lake, a corpse that has had his limbs amputated and his eyes and teeth removed. The watchman, Mickel Cardell, a one-armed veteran of Gustav’s ill-fated war with Russia, is thrown together with Cecil Wings, an investigator who is slowly dying from consumption, in a race to identify the mutilated man and bring his murderer to justice. This may not sound pleasant, and it is not, it is harrowing but also haunting and absorbing. The mismatched investigators are compelling characters and the first section of the book is as good a procedural as I have read recently, albeit a very unusual one.
The novel is however, split into four sections. The second section takes the form of a series of letters as a young dandy chronicles his descent into poverty and squalor. The third section tells the story of a young woman, Anna Stina, mistreated and unfairly condemned to a workhouse prison. These middle sections of the novel are almost as gripping as the main story but, for me, they broke up the rhythm of the plot. The stories are intrinsically linked to the central one but I would have preferred to have had them as more regularly interspersed subplots rather than as distinct, separate ‘parts’.
I knew next to nothing about this period of Swedish history but Niklas Natt och Dag brings the period to life, the sights and smells, the trauma and atrocities. There is a description of a naval battle that is as vivid and frightening as anything I have read on the subject. So, while I have problems with the structure of the novel, its power is unavoidable. It will stay with me for a long time and I thank NetGalley and John Murray Books for the opportunity to read it.

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