Popular Music - Mikael Niemi

It’s strange the way this book has been marketed. The publishers are trying to push this as a charming Hornby-esque novel of small town life and adolescence through pop music. That’s not completely wrong, but it is only one side of the thing.

So it’s about a boy growing up in the far north of Sweden in the ‘60s. You’re thinking “Heartbeat on ice”; stop thinking that. I mentioned before that Eastern Europe is this hemisphere’s Latin America. I was wrong - I should have looked to Scandinavia. They have an aural tradition, trolls, perpetual daylight in the summer and nighttime in the winter; a hard existence, and with the Northern Lights, a sense of magic. Frequently this novel takes a turn for the fantastic - whether or not you enjoy these diversions depends on your tolerance for this kind of thing. Generally I disapprove, too frequently they are deus ex machina, but the balance is about right here.

This is not the social democracy of liberal dreams. Pajala, where the novel is set, is near the Finnish border, and many of its inhabitants speak a Finnish dialect. They are also largely alcoholic, stoic, suspicious and above all, macho. Essential to male behaviour is an avoidance of knapsu, things-that-women-do, unmanly pursuits. Into this world comes pop music, enthusiastically embraced by at least some of the town’s youth (the description of the first time they hear the Beatles is fantastic - in all senses - making us feel again the shock of this now familiar, wallpaper music). There are structural problems to Popular Music - it is a little too episodic - but, there are fantastic moments. Here is a description of why singing in English is certainly knapsu:

“a language much too lacking in chewability for hard Finnish jaws, so sloppy that only little girls could get top marks in it - sluggish double Dutch, tremulous and damp, invented by mud-sloshing coastal beings who’ve never needed to struggle, never frozen nor starved. A language for idlers, grass-eaters, couch potatoes, so lacking in resilience that their tongues slop around their mouths like sliced-off foreskins.”