Having so enjoyed Beartown and its sequel Us Against Them, I was hoping for more of the same, but Anxious People appeared to be more in the style of The Man Called Ove and My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry; with more of the comic bent. Backman’s writing style is extremely distinctive, and for those who enjoy it, Anxious People is an example of essentialising this style even further. There is a lot of repetition, the story is unfolded bit by bit, slow step by slow step, and far from those authors who write frustrating stories where things don’t tie up, even at the end, Backman’s threads all tie up, in circles, and loop round each other over and over again, in fact.
So much so you have to realise that this necessitates the willing suspension of disbelief; it requires that complicity between author and reader, or at least for the reader to extend this indulgence towards the author, if the reader is going to enjoy the reading experience. Backman is the kind of storyteller who sets up a very particular relationship with the reader. The forbearing reader has to permit the storyteller to take them by the hand and lead, every step of the way. Backman will develop the story only at his own pace, releasing information to the reader in a careful trickle. But it is always well thought through and well planned, and deliberate and intentional.
The basic story line is ostentatiously that of a bank robber who, foiled by trying to rob a cashless bank, and bent on escape, rushes into an apartment which was open for viewing; being pursued, the bank robber has to take its occupants as hostages. The first page tells us
A bank robbery. A hostage drama. A stairwell full of police officers […] This story is about a lot of things, but most about idiots.
p1
About a hundred pages in, it tells us again,
This is a story about a bank robbery, an apartment viewing and a hostage drama. But even more it’s a story about idiots. But perhaps not only that.
p98
About 200 pages in, it tells us yet again,
This is a story about a bridge, and idiots, and a hostage drama and an apartment viewing. But it’s also a love story. Several, in fact.
p215
Each repetition adds something new.
There are of course several stories unfolding in parallel, which readers can expect will dovetail. Near the start of the novel, we are already told of this momentous event:
A man was standing on a bridge. Think about that now. He had written a note and posted it, he had dropped his children off at school, he had climbed up on to the railing and was standing there looking down. Ten years later an unsuccessful bank robber took eight people hostage at a viewing of an apartment that was for sale. If you stand on that bridge you can see all the way to the balcony of that apartment.
p11
And once again nearly a 100 pages in:
Ten years ago a man wrote a letter. He posted it to a woman at a bank. Then he dropped his kids off at school, whispered in their ears that he loved them, drove off on his own, and parked his car by the water. He climbed on to the railing of a bridge and jumped. The following week, a teenaged girl was standing on the same bridge railing.
p98
This event is momentous for many of the characters in the novel – for the woman who receives the letter, for the girl who stood on the bridge but did not jump, for the teenaged boy who tries to save both man and girl from jumping; the event resonates into the present, serendipitiously somehow involving all those in the hostage situation. Even the police investigating the ‘crime’ are part of this society and thus their lives are also touched by this event.
In typical Backman style, all the characters are revealed to be less curmudgeonly, less annoying, less cynical, less stereotypical than they at first present themselves as being. They turn out to be far more decent than they themselves may imagine, and find out they are far more loved than they dared hope. In fact, many will learn to love each other by the end of the novel, in platonic and romantic relationships. It is definitely a feel-good novel, with a lot of comedy thrown in, with humorous social observations that reveal perhaps some of the author’s own values and angsts:
All winter had to do was roll in with a bit of freezing weather and take all the credit, like a man who’s spent twenty minutes next to a barbeque but never served a full meal in his life.
p230-231
Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.
p57
’How interesting’, Zara said in a tone that only the child of a telesales operator would interpret as an invitation to go on talking.
p232
It is impossible in this review to spell out the relationships the characters have to each other, because those would all be spoilers. Backman would want to be given the privilege of revealing this kind of information at his own pace, in the novel. But suffice to say, the reader very early on learns to expect that everyone, however unrelated they may seem, will end up related to the lives of the other characters, to such an extent that credibility is just a bit stretched – but it is that kind of book, and so, one has to give it a lot of leeway. It is all in the spirit of telling a good story; feasibility is not really the point. And in the end, it is as Backman’s books nearly always are, a rewarding reading experience, and a fair bit of fun too. And if more recommendation is needed, it is infused as many of his books are, with the redeeming qualities of kindness to fellowmen and love and life just being a lot better than one dared expect.
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