40. The Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country, Helen Russell
Stressed London magazine journalist decamps to rural Denmark after her husband is headhunted for a job at Lego. While there, she sets out to investigate Danish life and WHY the Danes are so happy (famously the happiest nation in the world TM).
I'm trying to find a way of writing this that doesn't sound bitchy, but you can tell that Russell works for a lifestyle magazine. She can write pages about furniture, clothing and what food Danes eat at local festivals, but chooses in most cases not to dig too deep. The book is set out in 12 monthly chapters and each month you get a bit of the story of how she and her husband settled in to Denmark, followed by an investigation of some aspect of Danishness, usually a combination of her friends' opinions and an interview with an "expert".
The relocation story is interesting - despite Russell's rather breathless sixth-former-ish writing style (too too many "jokes"about pastries and handsome blonde men), she writes honestly and sometimes funnily about the challenges of navigating life in a foreign country with a notoriously difficult language. And yes, although there's a lot of it, it IS interesting to know how Danes decorate their houses, how they celebrate special occasions, what the rules are for recycling, what they do in the evenings.
The parts about Danish society and happiness felt like a missed opportunity. Russell starts with some interesting facts, which then lead on to a bit of speculation on how certain laws or aspects of the Danish character lead to observable effects on Danish life - so, for example, if tax is very high for high earners, there's much less reason to stay in an unpleasant but highly-paid job, because you don't take home much more money. This, according to Russell, means that Danes are much more likely to choose a job because they like it, and their levels of job satisfaction are higher. She backs up her arguments with facts and figures but so often this leaves you with loads of follow-up questions which don't fit into Russell's neat monthly parcels of information (I do appreciate that the book I was hoping for would have been sprawling and probably much less readable!). "Yes, but...." I kept thinking. Has this always been the case? Did they make these laws BECAUSE these things were already important in Danish society and if so, why? What was it like 100 years ago and if things have changed hugely, what were the reasons? Tellingly, I frequently found myself reading interesting facts out to my husband but then completely unable to answer any of his follow-up questions.
Russell also sticks, mainly, to cheerful or quirky aspects of Danish society and steers clear of anything too challenging. We do get a little insight into the reasons why nordic countries might have worryingly high rates of violence against women (high rates of overall violence, gender equality means men less likely to consider violence against women to be a particular stigma, women more likely to report), and some discussion of why the Danish lifestyle is not particularly healthy (good quality free healthcare means they take their health for granted, apparently, so drink, smoke, eat fatty foods etc with abandon). But why on earth, having met a group of less privileged immigrants through their state-sponsored Danish evening classes (a Ukrainian women who works in a fish processing factory, a group of Filipino women working as au pairs) does she not interview them, find out what their lives are like in a country that she tells us repeatedly is ethnically homogenous and where people "look at you with pity for not having been born Danish" (approximate quotation - I don't have the book to hand)?
This is a lovely book if you want to daydream about relocating to a cosy hygge paradise of designer furniture, luxurious public amenities and cinnamon rolls (and let's face it, we all need a bit of cinnamon-scented escapism right now). Not the book you want to learn anything more serious about what Danish society is like and why.
41. The Last Hours, Minette Walters
I heard Minette Waters interviewed on the radio ages ago about this book and it caught my interest. Like me, she lives in Dorset, near where the Black Death landed in England for the first time. She was inspired to write a historical novel set in the 14th century, as the Black Death starts to spread through the county. I hadn't expected to read about it while we were in a period of pandemic and isolation ourselves.
I'd like to say that this wasn't terrible but to be fair, it was pretty terrible. The main characters are either terrible or saintly. The secondary characters are mostly interchangeable. Beyond the window-dressing of clothing and weapons, the period isn't well evoked and the attitudes, knowledge and speech are modern and clunky. And, for my taste, there's too much salacious talk about sexual violence (yeah, I can imagine it was probably a fact of life for lower class women but this was why I gave up on Game of Thrones - it's not a titillating plot device). I DID like the fact that it's set in a place near me but if it had been anywhere other than Dorset I think I would have given up. Sorry.
Thank you all as always for amusing and interesting reviews. I already had Love After Love on my TBR but have added The Wedding and Fierce Bad Rabbits.