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akademiskacademic quarter<strong>kvarter</strong>Religion in Scandinavian Crime FictionKim Toft Hansenclose to the outer limits of human capabilities, things requestingomnipotence – this omnipotence is common forGod and the author. / To put it another way: Salandersperformance is so excessive that we must think of them aspure literary fiction or as an expression of something supernatural,divine.” (ibid.)Hence, they continue to locate parallels: “The journalist Dag Svenssonresembles St. John the Babtist” (ibid., p. 17). “In the trilogy, thepolice occupy the role played by the Romans in the gospels” (ibid.).“Mikael Blomkvist is the Peter of the Salander-trilogy, about thatthere is no doubt” – even though we may note that Mikael does notlet down Lisbeth as Peter lets down Jesus. The authors of the articledo, however, underline that Salander’s forgiveness is very hard tolocate: “Where Jesus would say that the smallest offence needs anequal grace as the biggest, Lisbeth says that the smallest offence canand must be punished as hard as the biggest” (ibid., p. 23). The endscene in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2007) where she nailsher murderous half-brother to the floor leaving him to the vindictivebikers instead expresses a retributive eye-for-an-eye logic incontrast with the Christian ethics of turning the other cheek. As faras I can see it is very hard to determine whether or not the parallelsare as obvious as the authors claim them to be. I find their analysisin a way too determined to cross-read the trilogy and the gospels,but I find it very interesting that theologians actually attempt thisreading. This does not in itself tell us a lot about crime fiction ingeneral or Stieg Larsson in particular, but it tells a lot about howcrime fiction is appropriated by the church in order to gain a voiceby way of a popular media phenomenon.God, one point…I return to the relationship between media and religion later. Now,I turn to my second literary example: Håkan Nesser’s novels aboutthe investigator Gunnar Barbarotti. Nesser’s series consists of fourbooks so far, running from Man Without Dog [Människa utan hund](2006) to the recent The Lonely [De ensamma] (2010). Barbarotti is acomplex detective character with a firm belief in rational and empiricalinvestigative methods, but on the side he is trying to proveor disprove the existence of God. He employs a complicated pointVolume03 238
akademiskacademic quarter<strong>kvarter</strong>Religion in Scandinavian Crime FictionKim Toft Hansensystem where he asks God for help in personal matters. If he helpsBarbarotti out God gets a certain amount of points, but if God isunable to help he subtracts points from the system. Basically, thisempirical theology combines investigative methods with a religiousinterest. When we meet Barbarotti in the first novel God is aheadby an insignificant amount of points, but throughout the novelsGod gets ahead. Barbarotti has, though, promised himself thathe would not ask God for help in his investigations, but in the secondnovel A Completely Different Story [En helt annan historia] (2007)– during a particularly complicated case – Barbarotti ends up askingGod for help. And seems to get it! In the fourth novel The Lonely,then, God is up by 20 points. In this novel Barbarotti is confrontedby severe personal problems and while his wife may be dying heends up experiencing and talking to God. This ends his point systemand, by now, signifies – yet with some narrative uncertainties– that Barbarotti has proven the existence of God for himself. MeetingGod is, here, by all means an epistemological transgressionfor the policeman.This experience being personal proof is important in this relation.Barbarotti is not member of a specific religious community: “I havefaith”, he says. “which means that in my view there is a God. Andthat I have a relation to him. But I don’t think that I’m religious inthe regular sense of the word” (Nesser, 2010, p. 453). Consequently,he never goes to church, but he still shows openness towards a spiritualmode of living. In the midst of the investigation in The Lonely,Barbarotti meets a lapsed preacher who has left the Swedish statechurch in order to save his faith. This guy talks about a God thatdoes not live in churches, who is not contacted from the pulpit, butanyhow God is present in his life. By underlining his deinstitutionalizedfaith, our investigator Barbarotti recognizes this mode offaith as well. He chooses an individualistic spirituality and represents– with a phrase from Christopher Partridge – “a religio-culturalshift from organized ‘religion’ toward a more subjective form of‘spirituality’” (Partridge, 2008: 108).Killer God?My final example is A.J. Kazinski’s novel The Last Good Man 3 . Here,a Danish investigator and a Danish physicist are caught up in a mysteryabout a larger number of peculiar deaths around the worldVolume03 239
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