A web of lies

The strength of the novel lies not only in its original plot but equally in the delineation of the characters and the suspense that is built up in relation to the principal characters’ careers and personal troubles.

By Kristine Kabel

A web of lies is spun around the lives of the principal characters in this intelligent scientific crime novel Dinosaurens fjer ('Dinosaur Feathers'). This is author Sissel-Jo Gazan’s fourth novel, and it takes its point of departure in her own experience of a strained research environment at the Institute of Biology at the University of Copenhagen. The struggle to find the truth and the struggle for survival in a working life characterised by cut-backs and random prioritisations has its human victims, but the screw is given another twist in the world of fiction when a paleoornithology researcher is suddenly found dead with his tongue sliced off and his corpse full of thousands of parasites.

With this as a point of departure, the reader is led into a very tense, multifaceted story. Facts regarding a scientific dispute are presented during the investigation in parallel with the private attempts of each of the principal characters to arrive at the truth of his or her early childhood. The young woman, Anna Bella Nor, is the central figure in the novel and the title, ‘Dinosaur Feathers’, refers to a dispute she has just written a thesis about from a theoretical scientific angle at the beginning of the novel: are birds direct descendants of dinosaurs or are they two different species? A stubborn Canadian researcher maintains the latter, while more and more finds of prehistorical skeletons with feathers, for example, have convinced most of the scientific world of the former. This also applies to Anna Bella Nor herself and her tutor, but when the tutor is found dead in his office with his own bloody tongue on his shirt front, and when the post-mortem examination reveals that the corpse is swarming with live, microscopic animals, the dispute is suddenly seen in a different light. But the macabre death of the researcher still appears to be a mystery. Was it murder?

With the glitter of anger constantly visible in her eyes, Anna Bella Nor roams the streets of Copenhagen and the corridors and halls of the university with her hooded sweater pulled up around her ears like a genuine feministic anti-hero, trying to understand what is going on at the same time as she is preparing to defend her thesis. At home, she is alone with a two year-old daughter and struggles to cope with her bad conscience about not being able to be with her enough. When her good friend from the institute is also suddenly found dead, murdered in his own home, loneliness closes in and the sinister atmosphere thickens.

Detective Superintendent Søren has been officially assigned to handle the investigation of the two murders. He is Anna Bella Nor’s mild-mannered counterpart, but is also a lone wolf in his private life. His parents died at an early age and his grandparents have never told him the truth about what really happened. Nor is he particularly good on the subject of truth himself. As an adult he became a victim of fate in an unpredictably painful manner but he keeps his private life to himself. Everybody is excluded. Professionally, however, he does very well. Ever since he was a child, he has had a formidable ability to find missing things and solve riddles. “I knit backwards”, is his explanation.

But it is no easy matter to untangle the threads of this baffling case, which also takes the reader through Copenhagen’s goth and fetishistic milieu, out to frigid suburban surroundings, and naturally to the university world. The point of view changes rapidly throughout the story between Anna Bella Nor, Detective Superintendent Søren, and the Canadian researcher, and conceals the solution to the mystery from the reader until the very end.

The strength of the novel lies not only in its original plot but equally in the delineation of the characters and the suspense that is built up in relation to the principal characters’ careers and personal troubles. We gradually gain an insight into the Canadian researcher’s problematic life, while Anna and Søren search their pasts in parallel, and discover the truth behind the lies as they build up more self-knowledge in an unsentimental process that also makes it possible for them to bring old friends back into their lives and thereby weather the storm – although they will probably never be out of it completely.

As a scientific crime novel, ‘Dinosaur Feathers’ is reminiscent of Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and particularly of Peter Høeg’s Smillas fornemmelse for sne (‘Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow’), both of which have a distinct psychological strain. But the book is perhaps first and foremost about the typology of truth.  


Translated by John Mason

Dansk version