Bingo square ‘Golden’: A famous author’s literary legacy looms large–and lucrative.
It is criminal that the work of Eeva Tenhunen (1937-2017) is out of print and untranslated. Described in her day (she published her novels between 1964 and 1987) as ‘Finland’s Agatha Christie’, you can see the influence of the English Golden Age of detective fiction: a country house and its rituals, a disruptive outsider, and a seething bubbling crucible of familial and marital tensions, class and political differences, and deep dark secrets. Tenhunen swaps the country manor for the summer villa, cocktail hour for afternoon coffee with buns, and formal dinners for Saturday evening saunas, but this is no Nordic cosy hygge-fest. (Hygge is Danish, incidentally, but we’re all one big happy Ikea catalogue, so).
For one thing, this is Finland, a country that has never had the security or global power that underpins the nostalgia of Christie’s England: these rituals are both as long-lasting as Finnish recorded history and as potentially fragile as the 1200-ish-km border between Finland and Russia, or indeed Finland and the Soviet Union in the 1970s. For another thing, Tenhunen understands Christie (far better than Kenneth Branagh, e.g.): she knows that a) every nice or peaceful thing, like a summer holiday, is fleeting, fragile, and possibly fatal, b) identity is performed, unstable, and therefore eminently thievable, and c) everyone has a breaking point.
Liisa is engaged to Kari, who is an archaeologist investigating a site in the far north of Finland. In his absence, she visits his family for the summer, to get to know them and also write her dissertation on the work of his uncle, a legendary author named Erik Brenner, known as ‘the Emperor’ due to his near-mythological status in Finnish letters and his role as patriarch of the family. The Emperor is dead, but his work and image and golden legacy are painstakingly preserved by his widow, his second wife Iina, who has already had her name inscribed under his on the tombstone in the family plot. And indeed the plot thickens; what seems to be a convivial intellectual middle-class household is not at all happy. Erik’s son, Erik Jr. is a moderately successful author struggling to break out of his father’s looming shadow, Erik Jr’s wife is recently dead but nobody speaks of her, and other various family members at the villa are either trying to desperately maintain appearances (Erik Sr’s philandering brother and his martyr wife), burn it all down (their rebellious daughter Inkku who doesn’t believe in marriage or capitalism), or smother their own fears (their teenaged son Jari who thinks he knows something disturbing about his adored mother).
Things get complicated when Liisa interviews Erik Sr.’s childhood sweetheart, whose memory is inconveniently long. Then she gets lost in the dark when walking the family dogs in the woods, and senses threat in the footsteps that approach, steps that the dogs recognise…
The title comes from a rhyme from a childhood game that Liisa finds going around and around in her head as she tries to sleep:
The clock has struck twelve
The emperor stands in his palace
Black as a wall
Pale as a foal
Why is a soldier better than a lord?
The one who comes in last
That one is death…
This is a very Christie thing as well–showing up the sinister side of the nursery, the horror that underlies the traditions that we take for granted. It’s a dark novel, domestic noir we’d say now, but it’s also humorous at times, and the foibles of the Finnish middle classes and rural communities, as well as academic life and the detective genre, are gently sent up in a way that is recognisable even today. It’s fucking good.