Review of FERGUSON by Carl Johansen (New Release)

 2 Stars

What did I just read?  It certainly isn’t a book I can recommend.

Dennis Ferguson, recently widowed and recently retired, befriends Nasrin Kirmani, an Iranian refugee, and her husband and son.  Nasrin keeps challenging Dennis, asking what he will do about the injustices in the country:  “’We can all do something, Dennis. . . . What will you do?’”  When the family disappears, he decides to act.

This novel does not read like a novel.  It reads like a diatribe against President Trump and his supporters:  “’the president is a confirmed racist, and . . . the ruling party is systematically undermining the Constitution, the courts and the free media’” and “relations between leading countries within NATO were getting progressively worse, and the president threatened to use nuclear weapons against Iran” and “’The US is now ruled by an openly authoritarian president, backed by the majority in Congress.  The KKK and Neo-Nazis march with the president’s blessing’” and “’The greatest achievement of this presidency and the Republican Party has been to make truth irrelevant’” and “the president’s party had spent years dismantling laws and institutions, as well as the very political culture of tolerance and forbearance itself, so that it had now become impossible to exercise democratic, legal oversight over the escalating corruption and authoritarian execution of power under the current administration.”  Personally, I might agree with these observations and even enjoy the description of a senator from South Carolina as “roach-like,” but I expect a novel to show the president’s tyranny, not just have a character talk on and on about his shortcomings. 

Though clearly based on the current political situation in the United States, with a president “staging a number of these rallies . . . as part of the re-election campaign,” events then become part of a dystopian future where “clashes between various groups of protesters and the police had so far caused hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries” and where “student activists [are] knifed in dark back alleys” and where “political murders were framed as the fight against terror” and where immigrants fall “’victim to one of the militias or White Power groups we suspect are behind a number of recent killings and disappearances.’”  The final scene is certainly downright dystopian.  Is the author speculating about the future should Trump have won re-election?

At the beginning, the protagonist spends time reading Plato’s The Republic.  Paragraphs and paragraphs are devoted to detailing what he reads.  Anyone expecting a novel will soon find him/herself reading a not-very-concise summary of Socrates’s views of justice.  Presumably this reading and Nasrin’s prodding influence Dennis to act, but I find it difficult to reconcile the passive, uninvolved citizen at the beginning and the man of extreme action at the end.  Dennis keeps repeating how he is experiencing only “less-than-obtrusive grief” after the death of his wife of forty years, yet he experiences such anger and grief when people he barely knows disappear?  His change is anything but convincing.

Style is a real problem.  The book is very dense with exposition.  A paragraph may go on for pages!  The constant use of questions becomes annoying:  “To what degree were one’s thoughts and the words used when thinking them shaped by one’s surroundings?” and “To what degree was it the music itself he’d craved, independent of the message it carried?  How much had the message conveyed by the music influenced his life and the person he had become?  And if it had, what form had this influence taken?” and “But where did all that leave the soul?  And how did such a system process feelings?  Where [sic] they purely impulses too, passed between electrified primates through coded messages?” and “What was life?  Was it inextricably linked to reproduction, or did it have an intrinsic value beyond bringing new life into the world?” and “Was there such a thing as a universal truth?  A deeper reality behind everything else?”

 I read a galley and this book is a translation from Norwegian so perhaps these account for some of the grammar issues where motive is used instead of motif and where verb tense is incorrectly used.  Some things just make no sense.  When paramedics arrive in his home, Dennis asks how they got in because the door was locked, and he is told, “’We have all sorts of keys, you know’”?!  Then when he refuses to go to the hospital, he imagines the paramedic’s concerns:  “He sensed that she was still weighing up the pros and cons.  The risks against the costs, the bonus from the insurance company versus the chance of being sued.  She would certainly be insured, you wouldn’t get a job as an authorized health worker without insurance, but you still had to pay the deductible.”  An EMT receives bonuses from insurance companies?  The white light in a mall is described as “a flat light, as flat as the floor he was walking on, and as square as the shop facades, the roof, the walls”?  A book store employee asks him to write down the name of the author and the book he wants?  And then when there is no available copy of The Republic, she offers him books by a famous crime writer?  Is this a comment on the stupidity of people who work in bookstores?  Jesus’s parables must be understood “’as divine inscrutability explained in words and images everyone can easily understand’”?  And what does inscrutable mean?!

This book needs major revision and editing.

Note:  I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.