Sweden: Foreign Policy and Unreliable Narratives

Abstract

The dislocation of expected patterns in fiction may sometimes have a salutary effect for the reader — and by employing what might appear to be an improvisatory approach to writing, the conditioned response of the reader may be propelled into terra incognita. Some will welcome this — even demand it — others will hanker for more linear fare. Crime writing functions by organising and controlling fictional forms in a more rigorous fashion than, say, literary fiction; the presentation of a concealed pattern or hidden logic presents a metaphor for the protagonist’s psychological journey. The disruption of expected patterns automatically forces a closer attention to the text by the reader, along with an impulse to wrest order from what appears to be a series of haphazard events. Such strategies may function as training for a new rigour on the part of the reader.