Everything you think is true, but not necessarily in the way you think.”
Everything you think is true, but not necessarily in the way you think.”
Christoffer Carlsson’s The Invisible Man from Salem, on its very outset, seems like any other crime novel. A disgraced ex-officer, Leo Junker – having disrespect for the system, unlucky in love and generally world-weary — gets involved in a murder case. Even though he is suspended, it is him who leads the case and gets himself into most dangerous situations and one-to-one combat with the culprit. At least that is what one would feel after reading the blurb on the rear of the book.
However, the interesting thing about Carlson’s The Invisible is that despite it being a ‘crime fiction’, the murder takes a back seat and Junker’s teenage past takes the centre stage. The search for the motivations behind crime rules the narrative than the crime itself. A woman is shot dead in his apartment building. He sneaks into her room, examines her body and while he has no idea who the woman is, the necklace she is holding takes him back to his childhood and tumultuous past in Salem.
There are various parallel narratives going on in this book — Junker’s earlier case, his teenage past, and the present day murder. The major part of the story is told by Junker himself in a first person narrative. So, the reader only gets to see and hear what Junker does. Everyone and each situation is presented to the readers with a single perspective, that of Junker’s.
An anonymous diary-entry also appears after every five-ten chapters. One thinks the entries are Junker’s and could not make much sense out of it. It is only later we get to know that those were written not by Junker, but for him by his childhood friend John Grimberg, or ‘Grim’. Gradually, the various plot threads converge as the storyunfolds providing context to the present day narrative.
In Salem, social and racial tensions run high and children are forced to grow up fast. “We didn’t grow up thinking to question the way of things. We grew up knowing that no one would give us anything if we weren’t prepared to take it from them.”
There comes a moment in the book, when the readers forget that they are reading a crime novel. As mentioned before, Junker’s teen years’ chapters dominate the narrative. Life takes different turns for Junker and Grim, the two childhood friends, and they grow up along opposite paths. One becomes a police officer, while the latter finds himself buried deep within the world of mistaken identities. One can say that Grim becomes the protagonist as the story unfolds as he is the “invisible man from Salem”.
Carlsson’s The Invisible is also a comment upon the correction homes where juveniles are sent for petty crimes. It is mentioned several times in the novel that the “young offenders’ institutes closely resembled prisons”, although they are supposed to be “youth summer camps” organised by the Social Services. There is no privacy for the ‘clients’ residing there. Living in a poverty-stricken suburb, with almost no financial support from his family and the absence of any counsel from the Social Services, Grim is forced to choose a path of fraud. “Who do you ask for help Who are you supposed to turn to And is it really my responsibility ” asks Grim in one of the chapters.
The Invisible is an interesting read. By giving a thriller touch to a social realist story, Carlsson makes it an easy and enjoyable read. The story has been intelligently and intricately plotted. However, some parts of the novel like the final confrontation of Junker and Grim and the action scenes that follow could have been much more enthralling. This might be because the book was originally written in Swedish and then translated to English. The novel is the first in a trilogy of the “Leo Junker Mystery”, which will be followed by The Falling Detective.
