THE REDBREAST
by Jo Nesbø
Harvill Secker, £11.99; 521pp

IT IS A FACT that Sigmund Freud (accompanied by Carl Jung) visited New York in 1909 before his famous lectures at Clark University in Maryland. It was his only trip to the US and he came away with a poor opinion of Americans.

Jed Rubenfeld has used that visit — and many accompanying real-life events — as a basis for a clever fictional mystery in which Freud plays a central role, using his newly developed principles of psychoanalysis. The night of his arrival, a rich society girl is discovered in a Manhattan hotel, strangled after being subjected to sexual indignities.

The following night Nora Acton, a beautiful 17-year-old heiress, is found tied to a chandelier. She’s been assaulted, but is alive — though she has lost the power of speech and cannot remember the attack or attacker. Enter Dr Stratham Younger, a disciple of Freud’s.

His task, with the master on hand to offer constant advice, is to use his psychoanalytical learning first to persuade Nora to speak, then for her to start remembering her traumatic experience, ultimately identifying her assailant. Naturally, he falls in love with his patient. The police are not happy with these new techniques. Rubenfeld has clearly carried out meticulous research — on Freudian psychoanalysis and its inventor, on Freud-Jung relations, and also on the New York of the period.

His portrayal of its social divisions, its louche, rumbustious energy, and its skyscrapers reaching higher and higher, have a vivid authenticity. He’s adept at weaving real-life famous and notorious characters of the city with his invented cast. The result is an unusually intelligent novel which entertains, informs and intrigues on several levels.

Last year, Jo Nesbø’s excellent The Devil’s Star introduced to English readers Oslo’s often drunk and usually insubordinate police inspector Harry Hole (though it was his fifth appearance in his native Norway — the order of publication here bears no relationship to the original sequence). The Redbreast (the third Hole novel, published in 2000) explains that he had been promoted not for his brilliance as a cop but as a politically-motivated reward for shooting a possible assassin of the visiting US president (even though he turned out to be an American secret service agent).

Hole is shunted off to surveillance duties, to find out what Norway’s neo-Nazi circles are planning. At the same time an old man plots a final reckoning over events that had taken place during the war. A group of Norwegian soldiers fighting on the German side had become involved in a complicated story of passion, lost love, betrayal and murder. Now, more than a half century later, Hole’s inquiries lead him to dark wartime secrets and the hunt for an octogenarian killer. The Redbreast was recently voted Norway’s best crime novel yet.

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