Review – Beartown

This was my final book of the year, and what a way to end 2017! Beartown by Fredrik Backman hasn’t been on my ‘To Read’ list for very long, but I’ve been quite excited about it since it was added.

This novel was one of the nominees for Goodreads Best Fiction novel of 2017, which is how I discovered it (a lot of the nominees have made their way to my ‘To Read’ list..). I was skeptical about the subject matter, but the reviews were consistently glowing and I love a good bandwagon.

Initial Impressions

On the surface, Beartown is about a small town obsessed with hockey, in a constant decline, and placing all their collective hope in the hands of a junior hockey team. And really, the first 30 or 40% of the book seems to be about just that. As I’m not much of a hockey fan, it was a little hard to stick with it, and I’m not sure I would have succeeded without the promise of something more exciting. This promise comes in the form of the first sentence in the novel:

Late one evening toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

It’s a pretty effective hook, and throughout the first half of the book Backman gives tiny hints as to what it might mean, though never anything concrete to satisfy.

Overall Review

First half of the book: B-
Second half of the book: A++

As I mentioned above, the first half of the book is slow and very, very detailed. While I struggled with it initially, I have to admit that Backman did a great job of making me believe in the setting and all the characters. We get to know the characters and the town (and the game) so well, without it being forced on us. I guess what I mean by this is that it’s gradual – he jumps from person to person, and rather than giving a list of their traits, he introduces us to them through their situations and relationships.

It happens slowly, so you don’t quite realize it, but by the time Backman reaches the pivotal event in the story you’re heavily invested in the fate of the town and its inhabitants. I’ll note here that the pivotal event is not, in fact, the incident mentioned in the first sentence. You have to keep reading to the veeeeery end to get there, and each chapter leaves you changing your guesses as to who was on each end of the gun. To be honest though, the beauty of the book isn’t in the mystery, but in the writing and the characters, and in Backman’s way of bringing them to life.

Plot (Spoilers!)

It’s tough to write about this book without giving away some of the plot, but I’ll try to spoil it as little as possible.

Beartown is a town in the middle of the forest, cut off from the rest of the world, struggling with economic decline. Years ago, the town had some fame when one of their hockey teams almost won the finals, and the whole town is hoping for that to happen again. The Junior team (16-18 year olds) has made it to the semi-finals, and the desire to win affects everyone in town, whether or not they’re directly involved.

At a party celebrating the win of the semi-final, a teenage girl is raped by one of the players. When she reports the crime, the final game is compromised, and the town is divided; many people seem more concerned about the fate of the game than that of the girl.

The second half of the book deals with the consequences of the rape and the reactions of the town. Those who don’t believe her have any number of excuses: she’s doing it for attention; she wanted it and changed her mind; she should have known better than to go to his room.

Those who do believe the accusations are troubled by other questions: how will the town recover if the team loses the final? Who is ultimately responsible, the boy, the girl, the sport, the team, the town? (I know, I know, how can a town be responsible for rape?! I found this to be an interesting discussion point, but my review is already pretty long-winded, so I’m going to tack it onto the end in case anyone makes it that far and is still interested!)

And finally, there are those who ask the more intimate questions: how do I protect my children? Can I believe my child? How will life go on? How can the guilty person be punished? Why did this happen?

Writing

The writing is really what makes this book as special as it is. I didn’t really appreciate it until I realized how invested I was once everything started going to shit.

The story is told from multiple perspectives, and focuses more on what the characters are feeling, and how they view themselves, rather than how the outside world sees them. There are some memories, enough tidbits to get an idea of how their perspectives relate to the story, but in the end this is a story about who they are now, not how they got there.

I’ve found a lot of books give us one or the other; a whole life story of the characters, so that you know exactly why they do the things they do (think Harry Potter), or a story that jumps right in, giving you the basics but leaving you to fill in the rest (like Neverwhere). With Beartown, by the time I was halfway in I felt I knew the characters intimately, without knowing the minute details of their lives (though I was certainly familiar with everyone’s relationship with hockey by that point).

As I type this, I’m remembering just how much I actually do know about their backgrounds, so perhaps I’m wrong… but the book truly did just deal with a one month period, giving us the necessary details to fill in the rest.

Regardless, the beauty of it is that when it hits you, it hits you hard. I was able to empathize with each one of the main characters, despite the fact that I cannot relate to them at all, outside of a basic human understanding of tragedy. I should clarify that I can relate to them I guess, but not to the situation, as I don’t have kids, and I’m not an alcoholic or a hockey fanatic, I’ve never been a teenage boy, and when I was a teenage girl I didn’t go to a school that revolved around sports (thank goodness!).

I’m struggling to reach my point, so I’m just going to dive right in:

Backman broke my heart, over and over. The raw anguish, rage, terror of the parents tore through me. The overwhelming frustration and grief of the teenagers took me back to my own youth. I fell right alongside them into that horrible feeling of helplessness, of being powerless against the system, powerless to protect yourself, to protect those you love from the horrors of life.

And yet, despite all that, Beartown offers hope. I cried several times during the book, at the expected times, but also at moments of love and friendship. Backman brough these characters to life for me and by the end I couldn’t put the book down. All in all, definitely worth the read.

Who is ultimately responsible? Continued from Plot section above.. (Potentially more spoilers)

Maybe I’m alone in this (though I hope not), but I firmly believe the rapist is at fault. Regardless of how old he is, how much pressure he was under… And that’s a general statement. In this particular case, he also hit her, tore her clothes, strangled her; there’s no question of responsibility in my mind.  But let’s forget that for a second, if you can.

Perhaps it’s a question of guilt rather than accusation, but there are characters in the book who wonder if the town or the team is, at least in part, responsible for the rape. The whole city is built around a group of young boys. They’re taught that they’re the most important people in town. They don’t have to go to class to get good grades. All they have to do is play hockey, and when they’re good at it, they become these local celebrities. And everyone else becomes secondary.

It’s nice to believe otherwise, but if you’ve always been taught that you can have whatever you want, whoever you want, because you deserve it, because you’re better than everyone else.. is it really that unrealistic to believe you’re entitled to this girl who was into it one minute and changed her mind the next?

Ok, of course it is. But it is worth thinking about, especially with the world how it is right now, with a US President who openly brags about sexual harassment. Combine that role model with a situation like we have in the book… well, you see where I’m going. Something to think about, anyway.