Evil afoot again in Norway

The Leopard
By Jo Nesbø
Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett
Knopf. 517 pp. $26.95

The horror, the horror. Joseph Conrad knew the savagery simmering in the heart of darkness, and Norwegian noir-master Jo Nesbø returns and returns to it because his mission is to show readers just how depraved human beings can be, and how noirer than noir a Norwegian author can be in this, our global village of crime fiction.

At the heart of The Leopard is not a leopard, but a Leopold's Apple - a torture device designed by a 19th-century Belgian to scare the diamonds out of recalcitrant black warlords in the Congo. Since anyone who reads this book must get past the first scene, I don't feel bad revealing that it depicts the hideous death by torture of an innocent woman, subjected to a Leopold's Apple by a serial killer. (Visit Google and you'll learn that the Leopold's Apple is a piece of fiction devised by Nesbø himself, not invented by the aforementioned Belgian creep.)

The writing in The Leopard is awesome. The ironic deflations, twisty plot, and grisly action keep a reader riveted to the page. But in its treatment of female characters - especially in its systematic, baroque, Byzantine dismemberment and degrading of their bodies - the novel is, perhaps unwittingly, a moral slough, and it brings up larger, similar issues in the work of other writers, one of them also a Scandinavian. I don't know if there's a link, but I think Stieg Larsson of Dragon Tattoo fame, for all the touted feminism of his novels, actually created Lisbeth Salander so bad things could happen to her.

The link to the Congo in The Leopard is apt. So, too, are the links to other former colonies - Hong Kong, Australia - where Harry Hole, the intrepid, banged-up, but indestructible-as-the-Terminator Norwegian cop, travels. If Nesbø has a mission, it's to have us see the connection between European colonizers and the evil they sowed.