CBR 17 BINGO: Family, because family relationships (police officers Jim & Jack; Anna-Lena and Roger; Ro and Julia; the bank robber and the robber’s children) are motivating factors for the characters
Back in 2017, I was, like everyone else, charmed by A Man Called Ove, so when I saw another novel by Fredrik Backman in a Little Free Library, I snapped it up. It started strong when, on the first page, I smiled at this paragraph, “This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is. Especially if you have other people you’re trying to be a reasonably good human being for.”
That’s the set up for a story about a failed bank robbery that turns into a comedy-of-errors. The day before New Year’s Eve, a gun-wielding robber walks into a bank and demands a relatively small sum of cash. Unfortunately, it’s a cashless bank (I swear, I did not even know that was a thing), so the robber goes away empty handed. Spooked by the cashier threatening to call the police, the robber runs into the next building, goes up the stairs, and bursts in on an apartment viewing. Now it’s an unintended hostage situation. This bank robber/hostage taker is not an experienced criminal, though, so things quickly go off the rails in a non-threatening, humorous way.
The novel shifts back-and-forth between the situation in the apartment and the aftermath, where father-and-son police team Jim and Jack try to get to the bottom of the case. It seems the robber completely disappeared after the hostages were released, in spite of police being staked out near the exit. Interspersed in the narrative are excerpts from the police interviews with the various hostages: a chipper real-estate agent, a retired couple looking to flip fixer-uppers, a lesbian couple expecting their first baby, an 87-year-old woman, and a banker who doesn’t seem to have any interest in buying the apartment. Oh, and a weird guy with a rabbit-head costume. It’s all very silly. Except that there are also some serious undertones about suicide, which Backman somehow manages to not make jarring or flippant (an admirable feat).
I didn’t love this book because, for the first half, all the hostage characters were annoying. It’s played for laughs, but I found them irritating, especially in the police interviews. Add to that the fact that the police officers are small-town guys who aren’t used to dealing with such serious matters, and I grew frustrated with the whole gang of them. As the story unfolds, we find out there are reasons why the characters are being so idiotic, and by page 200 I felt more sympathetic toward them. But, 200 pages is a long time to push through annoyance before getting to the payoff.
I admired certain aspects of the novel. Backman challenges our expectations about various characters–for example, Anna-Lena seems to defer to her husband Roger in everything, but we find out there’s much more to her than meets the eye. Jack is quite a capable police officer, and even his father Jim understands more than he lets on. The banker, Zara, has reasons for visiting apartments she has no intention of buying, and they aren’t sinister (as one would expect from a banker).
Anxious People includes folksy wisdom, as when Jack recalls his mother telling him, “We can’t change the world, and a lot of the time we can’t even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we do what we can to help whenever we get the chance, sweetheart. We save those we can. We do our best. Then we try to find a way to convince ourselves that will just have to . . . be enough.” There are just enough of these types of observations to be thoughtful without being too saccharine.
From the Author’s Thanks at the end of the novel, one gathers that he lost someone close to him through suicide. I admire that Backman was able to channel this loss into a humorous novel, and I feel a bit of a jerk for not enjoying it more in light of that information. I enjoyed the second half and would give it a mild to moderate recommendation based on that. If you have a higher tolerance for annoying people, you might like it even more. Oh, there are also lots of jokes about people from Stockholm, which I guess is common practice for Swedes!