In The Month of the Midnight Sun: A Dark Mystery Set in 19th Century Sweden

I first learned of In The Month of the Midnight Sun by Cecilia Ekbäck when it was nominated as a Book of the Month on a Goodreads group.  When I looked at the summary, I discovered that this historical murder mystery contained Sami characters.  The Sami is what the indigenous inhabitants of Lapland call themselves.  I had read and loved a thriller dealing with Sami characters translated into English as Forty Days Without Shadow by French author Olivier Truc.  I reviewed it on this blog here.  Truc has written two more Sami thrillers that haven't been translated into English.  So I leaped at the opportunity to read more in English about  Sami characters from an author whose parents come from Lapland.  See Cecilia Ekbäck's bio on Goodreads here.  In The Month of the Midnight Sun isn't available from U.S. sources.  So I purchased it from Book Depository, and this is my honest review.

                               

This is the second novel by Ekbäck.  The first, Wolf Winter takes place in Lapland a century earlier.  So In the Month of the Midnight Sun can be read as a standalone. I haven't read Wolf Winter and based on my experience of  Ekbäck's second book, I'm not certain that I ever will.

Ekbäck's style is very literary.  She states in a Q & A  appended after the text that all three narrators are deliberately portrayed as unreliable.  This is appropriate in a noir novel, but I am not all that fond of noir.   We do find out whodunit and there is a form of justice, but there was also terrible injustice.  I found the book rather dark and tragic which isn't my preference.

The viewpoint characters are complex enough to be interesting, but they aren't always sympathetic.  Each one is an outsider who has been victimized by conventional attitudes, but they are also invested in the beliefs of 19th century conventional Swedes to at least some extent.   I found it particularly sad that Biija, the Sami viewpoint character, was so Christian that she was deaf to the spirit of  her deceased shamanic husband.

The female character that I found most interesting was Adelaide who had founded a local sect of  Christian mystics with no clergy who I thought seemed somewhat similar to the Shakers.  They are referred to as separatists because they had separated from the official Church of Sweden which was Lutheran.  I discovered through research that Sweden had a
Tolerance Act for religious dissenters such as Adelaide and her followers.

Attitudes toward the Sami were quite negative.  There was a reference to a Sami revolt that had taken place four years before the events of  In the Month of the Midnight Sun called the Kautokeino Uprising. Ekbäck's Author's Note discusses it briefly, but I found a fascinating page about it on a University of Texas Sami culture site here that deals with its causes and various theories about this revolt in depth. 

I learned quite a bit about the Sami in the 19th century, and 19th century Sweden in general from this book, but I finished it feeling depressed.  I would only recommend it to people who enjoy rather literary Scandinavian noir.