But there are always dark hearts, like the killer's in this book. Our existence is a fight for gain, says the killer's heart, and whoever cannot kill his neighbor has no right to an existence. Killing is, after all, only hastening the inevitable. Death allows no exceptions, which is good, because life is pain and suffering. As in most of the novels he's in, Harry Hole dwells with this philosophy a while, and, to tell the truth, nothing comes to disabuse either him, or the killer, or us of it. That, too, is morally horrific.
Evil afoot again in Norway
Jo Nesbø's "Leopard" is exceptional: In its suspense and its vicious treatment of women.
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Story continues below.
It's all so black and white, just as our binary human minds want to believe: " 'Everything starts with love. Hatred is just the other side of the coin.' " And of course, it's a dog-eat-dog world:
Confirmation that from the selection of men who wanted her - in practice, any heterosexual man with good eyesight - she had chosen him. Confirmation that he was the leader of the pack, the alpha male, the male with the first claim to mate with the females.
We are told that serial killers, and the vicarious thrills they give their readers, "experience the joy, the ecstasy, of sadism."
The Leopard is a great novel, and if it doesn't presage the end of Western civilization, I don't know what does.
Susan Balée's "Charles Dickens the Show (But-Don't-Tell) Man" is a featured essay in the Winter 2012 issue of the Hudson Review.
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