Stephanie Jones: Book Review - I’m Travelling Alone by Samuel Bjørk

A wry, self-aware vision of crime and punishment in Scandinavia, I’m Travelling Alone made waves in its writer Samuel Bjørk’s home country of Norway when it was published there in 2013. The fiction doesn’t pertain only to the book; Bjork is the pen name of Frode Sander Øien, also a playwright and singer-songwriter. His first novel has now made its way to the English-speaking world thanks to a masterful translation by Charlotte Barslund, who confers a relaxed tone to a conversation-heavy text and even captures the odd note of Brit slang (“you numpty”).

I’m Travelling Alone is no love story, but it’s anchored by a male-female duo with great mutual affection and professional regard who re-team in pursuit of a serial killer targeting six-year-old girls. That age is significant: six years before the story begins, a newborn girl, whose haemophiliac mother died during the birth, disappeared from the maternity ward of a hospital in the city of Hønefoss, never to be found.

After two little girls are found dead of overdoses of the same barbiturate, wearing identical dresses not their own, senior investigator Holger Munch summons his former colleague Mia Krüger to assist. Bjork has an aptitude for crafting fleshy, compelling characters, and Munch is the emotional and figurative fulcrum of the narrative. Regarded by his colleagues, if they thought about it, as a “fat amiable nerd”, he is described as a talented investigator and a fair boss, protective of his brain (no coffee, alcohol or other mood-altering drugs) but not his body (he maintains a crushing cigarette habit and a careless attitude to diet).

He is an unwilling lone wolf, his wife having left him 10 years ago – for a teacher, that aspect of her abandonment being most galling to Munch – and his relationship with his daughter Miriam bordering on estrangement. The light of his life is his granddaughter Marion, a thriving six-year-old (it’s no spoiler to note that Bjork uses detail very deliberately).

Mia Kruger, whose hyper-intelligence and general intolerance of humanity connote more than a passing resemblance to Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, is interrupted by Munch while planning her suicide, scheduled for the anniversary of her twin sister’s death. Ironically but not unpredictably, her investigative descent into the depths of other humans’ madness promises salvation from her own.

The primary duo’s abettors include a bashful computer whiz and a compassionate worker at the care home housing Munch’s mother, and Bjork mostly keeps a firm hold on a multitude of characters and locations. The novel’s weak point, if it has one, is a subplot involving a Heaven’s Gate-style fundamental religious sect that hooks to the main storyline, which is sturdy enough without it. It doesn’t quite veer into The Da Vinci Code self-flagellating acolyte territory, but the possibility threatens.

Bjørk can make virtually any character or scenario believable, and has an evident fascination with the psychology of humans and how they react to trauma. It will be a pleasure to see how this manifests in his future work, and meanwhile, I’m Travelling Alone constitutes not only a superb debut but one of the most diverting and satisfying crime novels of 2015.