Kirat not only frees herself, there is power in speaking the truth, but she also asks important questions of those who are there not only to protect us, but whom we also expect to help deliver justice when things do go wrong. Currently Kirat is a sole voice in the wilderness, but I do not believe she will be on her own, for very long.
Ulstein is to be congratulated for a pacey and twisty police procedural, which could have easily been a paint-by-numbers scandi-noir missing girl story. Instead we dance back and forward between the present day search of Iben Lind, and people and places from twenty years before a town away.
For even the most hardened of true crime fans there are some crimes that we edge around, because they are too disturbing, too difficult and too horrible to look full in the face. There are other crimes that stick in the mind, become a landmark in memory and culture, the names involved becoming bigger than the person they used to be attached to and instead filled with emotion and meaning which is hard to quantify or contain.
Much sexual abuse by women is not reported, because of taboo's around sex and gender. We are yet, as a society, to find a comfortable middle ground where women can be "a bad person," and take part in things which are totally definatively criminal, but also have occasional redeaming charactorists and behaviours, or be a victim of abusive people herself.
It is shame, and it's opposite, pride and indifference which are at the core of this story. It highlights that the shame of infertility can be profoundly damaging, and the inflexible gender ideas around it, procreation and parenthood fence people in. It was Karbaat's pride and indifference to the mothers, fathers and children he was creating that was the catalyst for the whole thing.
The narrative is deceptively simple, in many ways because to really see the story you have to consider it from so many points of view, consider that what was decidedly make believe to one character was decidedly real to the world in which another lives. That in many ways we are mainly people who just happen to intersect with each other for a short time. It is impossible to truly know how other people really see the world or ourselves. It is so often time that is the only thing that gives us real perspective.
In a system that is largely run by private business it was probably inevitable that sooner or later the profit-before-all fake-it-till-you-make-it narcissism of many businesses considered successful today would finally also hit American health care. As ever, while rich people play at saving the world, the ordinary among us are the ones who pay the price in our lives.
This kind of elitism and snobbishness has always existed in the arts. However what the many who tightly cling to this sense of superiority do not realise is that it is only very recently that realism has crept into literature - think about Homer, Beowulf, Shakespeare with his Wyrd Sisters, Titania and Oberon. Human beings have always enjoyed a good does of the mysterious, miraculous, mythological and the unexplainable in our stories.
Mark pays a heavy price for his cowardice, his inability to face up to reality and do the mature, adult thing in a difficult and tense situation. I feel that Mark might be paying this price for the rest of his life, but Meredith pays a heavier price for her involvement with Mark.
Bentley talks admirably and openly about the impact the operation had on his mental health, and the lack of aftercare and support that he got from the force. One of the most psychologically fascinating parts of Operation Julie is how Bentley manages not just his dual identity, but how his experiences in Wales, and getting closer to the people who were involved in the making and selling of LSD changed him as a person. It feels obvious that Bentley could not finish the job and simply go back to who he was before, he needed to find a new self, and that was no easy feet.
True Crime Fiction 