(courtesy Harpers Collins Publishers Australia)
There is something so heartwarming about looking at life in a whimsical way.
In an age when everything is so full on and so serious and unrelentingly intense – this can be both a good and a bad thing but either way, it exacts a toll – having someone tell a story with an idiosyncratic eye cast across it and a sense of happy mischief and fun, is so good for the soul.
One of the foremost modern day proponents of this mirth-inducing novelistic art is Jonas Jonasson, an author whose latest novel, The Distinctly Competent District Councillor, underscores with satirical whimsy and a penetrating gaze what can be achieved with this particular approach to long-form writing.
For a start, any idea that comedic writing is lacking in emotional depth or thoughtful impact should be dispensed with immediately.
It’s tempting to think that a novel like The Distinctly Competent District Councillor, which provides giggles and guffaws and a general sense of comedic bliss pretty much throughout will be some flimsy piece of narrative flim-flam, good for some much-needed, skillfully-delivered fripperous fun but not much else.
But it is much more than that, casting quite a long net that rather gleefully skewers local politics, venal ambition, corporate machinations, wheeling and dealing and a whole host of business manoeuvres that look benign on the surface but come with some skullduggerous accoutrements below the surface.
The evening was getting late — time for some shut-eye in her own IKEA bed. Julia Bäck had made a decision. Tomorrow, she was going to call Hamburg. The new mayor got up from the sofa and switched off the aquarium light with a final word to her only companion: ‘If this works out, you’ll have to learn to not talk in German as well.’
Jonasson’s cleverness as a writer is that he makes all these cleverly intelligent look like organic parts of a great comedy whole, diminishing neither and building a solid, impactful story in the process.
The Distinctly Competent District Councillor might only be a deftly told 132 pages long but in that novella-length piece of writing exists both the capacity to make us laugh, get us thinking and trigger us to feel something.
It’s a masterful act and Jonasson pulls it off with aplomb, telling the story of a beleaguered Swedish town called Halstaholm which is fighting a “Rust Belt” shrinking of its economic base, and all the resultant things that happen such as a shrinking population, reduction in services and a general all round diminishment in general urban wellness.
It’s a town in precipitous decline and the only one who seems willing to try and arrest the plunge into the urban decay void is newly-installed mayor, Julia Bäck who is determined to save the town she loves before it, quite simply isn’t there to save.
Sure she cuts more than a few corners to make this happen but don’t ends justify the means?
Not necessarily; it’s rubbery ethics at the best of times but when Julia gets wind of the fact that the German Traumbett mattress conglomerate is looking to set up a factory in Scandinavia so they can finally crack the one market in the world where they have failed to make an impact, she throws all caution to the wind, not just skirting the law but driving a giant mining truck right through it, and with gusto.
(courtesy official author site)
She is an unstoppable force who finds in the heir apparent to Traumblett, Konrad Kaltenbacher, a man who is possessed of a savvy business mind but also a kind heart who is willing to look beyond the black-and-white immovable certainties of the bottom line, though that still matters to him of course – he is kind, not a business delinquent – and to entertain Julia’s enthusiastically full-on throw-it-all-and-see-what-sticks-to-the-wall approach to securing the factory that could save Hastaholm.
But what Julia hasn’t fully considered, though she does in time, is that someone else might want to revenue and job such a factory could bring and that someone is Ingela Franzén, Stockholm City Council’s lead member for finance whose job is not only spot opportunities but to make sure it comes the Swedish capital’s way.
Her right hand man is Kenneth Carlander, a womanising alcoholic who, when he’s actually on the job, which is not always to be fair, is willing to do whatever it takes, and he means whatever it takes, to successfully prosecute on a brief he’s given.
Much of the serious merriment of The Distinctly Competent District Councillor arises from Kenneth’s sleazy way of doing business coming hard Julia’s well-meaning but corner-cutting way of landing the deal, the former mercilessly hard of the heart and the other well-meaning but legally dubious.
In-between them is Konrad, an astute businessman who has to assess each proposal on its merits but who finds himself charmed, as do his two daughters, all of them missing his dead wife, by Julia who is aiming for the factory but might just capture a business mogul’s heart in the process.
‘Maultaschen,’ he said. ‘But where’s your companion gone?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Konrad truthfully. ‘ I think reality just came and got her [Julia].’
It is happily astonishing just how much happens in such a short book.
The Distinctly Competent District Councillor is a morality play, a comedy of errors, a slapstick British-influenced comedy full of idiosyncratic characters and good intentions, a community fest of oddball hilarity, a damning indictment of ethics-free business practices and a rom-com, and blissfully happy of it all, it never feel even the slightest bit overstuffed or over-busy.
It’s a real gift to throw so much into the narrative pot and still have it feel lighthearted and buoyantly entertaining, and Jonasson clearly has it with The Distinctly Competent District Councillor never once feeling like it is sinking beneath the weight of all its perfectly-placed constituent parts.
Rather it feels exactly as is no doubt intended – a brilliantly funny piece of comedy writing that like all good writing of its ilk entertains even as it damns, diverts and delights even as it concentrates the mind on the good and the bad in the world and the hope that the good might just prevail.
Jonasson’s stories are goodhearted fables and The Distinctly Competent District Councillor is no different, a joyously funny but heartfelt and thoughtful story of characters in search of connection, a city needing a factory and justice looking, and finding a way to express itself, and readers happily consuming it all and left amused and thoughtful in equal measure by the end.