The Bat - Nesbo

 As a huge fan of Stieg Larsson, what’s a reader to do when the Millennium Trilogy ended?  My boss suggested I move on to Jo Nesbo and “Redbreast”.  Just ahead of my beach vacation I stumbled into B&N looking for where to start and found “The Bat”, the first in the Harry Hole series.  A bit confused, since I wasn’t sure where the series began, I purchased it and headed to the beach, partially thinking there was a reason the publisher didn’t translate this one first.  They started with “Redbreast”, that one’s probably the blockbuster, so I resigned myself to thinking I’ll be reading at least two Jo Nesbo novels before deciding if he’s my next Scandinavian crime story fix.  Of course now it look’s like “Cockroaches” lies between me and “Redbreast” but I’ll sort that out later.

Since Nesbo wrote “The Bat” in the mid nineties we are reading it perhaps 20 years later.  As crime stories go he was entering the genre about the same time Larsson was sitting down in the evenings to tap out “Dragon”.  Optimistically, his writing talents show through even though his sophistication as a crime novelist was just beginning...that is assuming his sophistication does in fact increase through the HH series--to be determined.  In “The Bat”, there really is only a single character that he develops...Detective Harry Hole.  Whereas following the first of the Larsson’s series we are left with several major characters with plenty of potential life remaining.  Regardless, Harry is just good enough, bad enough, and broken enough to have had the alcoholism driven out of him, just in time to for another series of misfortunes to drive his love of drink back to the surface.

In a crowded beach house, with distractions a plenty, it’s hard to find a quiet place to read--yet Nesbo was still able to get me to turn the page.  Yet his most compelling element was not Detective Hole, rather it was his adding cultural stories pertaining to the Aborigines of Australia where between the shores of Brisbane and Sydney, the entire story takes place. Granted that’s not an entire continent, only about 600 miles of shoreline, he introduces us to an urban Australia that we miss in most of the stereotypical depictions of the outback.  His snippets of Aborigine culture are conveyed through the story of the “Bat”, the “Snake”, and a few other tales that have been handed down in some 40,000 years of folklore.  I have to assume he has conveyed these ancient stories accurately, despite struggling with a few other facts, a bit more modern.  In particular, during critical dialogue between the two pivotal characters, Harry and Andrew (the detective of Aboriginal descent he becomes friends with) we learn we wouldn’t want to learn astronomy from either of them.  Still learning something, anything, in a novel provides added value to the intrigue and the entertainment.  Of particular value to me was the legal understanding of the term Terra Nullis which basically applies to the lack of legal ownership of the land that the Aboriginal people occupied, because they did not occupy the land full-time.  In essence they continuously migrated, thus, as we in the west like to say (and apparently down under as well), possession is nine-tenths of the law.  The Aborigines never had possession of anything even though they existed on the continent for more than 40,000 years.  Nesbo cleverly ties this concept to this crime motive although it’s not that compelling. 

In the end I’m giving Nesbo 3-Stars for “The Bat”.  It was good enough to finish and good enough for me to want to crack the binding on “Redbreast” in the near future.  Stay tuned.