The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

This book, one of the last few of years' top international bestsellers from Swedish author Jonas Jonasson, was a disappointment. I read the first couple of chapters in a bookshop in Oxford when the English translation first came out, thinking any novel with a title like that must be amusing and intriguing, and it seemed it, so two years later I picked up a second-hand copy and finished it, coming to realise more and more throughout that it wasn't that great of a novel. I committed nonetheless.

   Anyway, plot. This follows two streams, both the adventures of our eponymous apathetic seemingly-sociopathic man named Allan Karlsson. In the present day, it is his hundredth birthday, and dreading the patronising celebrations that will be foisted upon him by the staff at the old peoples' home, he climbs out the window and strolls off - promptly embarking upon a haphazard adventure involving a suitcase full of £5,000,000 cash, inept criminal gangs, a lonely police inspector, a completely unnecessary elephant, and several bland characters who tag along for no real reason. Also we uncover Allan's past, which there is a lot of given his centenarian status. In true Forrest Gump style, he had a rough youth before stumbling through a series of improbable scenarios of the sort that would make a history student wince. He helps invent the atom bomb, spies for both the USA and the USSR, helps several revolutionary causes and assassination attempts and hinders several others, running into Franco, Stalin, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, de Gaulle, Churchill, Kim Il-Sung and a young Kim Jong-Il, Mao and a spattering of other 20th century international figures along the way (including Albert Einstein's fictional idiotic half-brother). Despite vehemently eschewing all political opinion and striving for nothing more than vodka and small talk (there is a lot of very overt and boring announcement of both), Allan manages to massively influence the course of events across the globe in his long quiet lifetime. It's extremely silly. To some degree the silliness of it didn't bother me much, because the story is a classic farce; the events are meant to be ridiculous, and they are, and the romp carries itself quite well in the end. This is not a book that one comes to anticipating a serious, challenging, or remotely feasible plot, and if you know what to expect then the story's relatively amusing - but I still didn't really like the book overall, for three main reasons.

   Firstly, because Allan Karlsson is an awful human. He refuses ever to even think about "politics" (his catch-all term for things involving people not currently getting drunk with him) and therefore has no idea of the implications of things he's doing, and in search of vodka, small talk, and not being shouted at, he manipulates situations and sparks ideas that influence horrendous events. He befriends dozens of people throughout his adventures and at least half of them die and he doesn't give a toss. This would all be excusable if the author had made him an interesting character out of it, but he hasn't. Allan could be a grand nonchalant "screw it why not" type of anti-hero, but because he is (as all the characters are) so badly fleshed out, our protagonist just comes out flat and uninteresting - but I'll stop there lest I stray into my third point's territory too soon.

   Secondly, there are several underlying attitudes in the book which simply ooze annoying ignorance. I already mentioned Allan's political apathy, but that's insidious throughout - events, topics and ideas of immense importance are dashed aside as if by a child who doesn't want to read 1984 for a Y8 English project because it's boring and complicated. Alongside this is a deep cynicism of humanity, which I'm fine with, but it is completely misplaced. The third-person narrative stoops far too often to expose the motives of the characters, and does so terribly, because even in serious situations, policemen and politicians and spies and military commanders are all given over to motives that are selfish (duh) but completely foolish and petty. If you're going to write in cynically omniscient third-person about various character motivations, at least bother to think of some believable ones. Also, there are persistent streaks of misogyny and xenophobia throughout the book. Xenophobia because non-northwestern-European cultures are described tactlessly, almost mockingly, and where actual xenophobic statements do arise it's hard to decipher if they reflect a character or the author, because they certainly contribute nothing to the advancement of the scenes they're uttered in. Misogyny because there are literally only two female characters who play any significant supporting role whatsoever: one of them is the comic relief imbecile (sidenote, she has an Asian name which she is later made to change to "something easier to remember"); and the other is the love interest for another supporting character (she literally doesn't do anything else except own a bus, an elephant, and swear a lot to fulfill the butch lady caricature - ooh, and she isn't even given a name beyond "The Beauty" until about 50 pages after we've encountered her).

   Thirdly and finally, it's just really badly written. Part of me wants to blame it on maybe-it's-just-a-bad-translation and it's-probably-funnier-in-Swedish but no, the badness goes deeper than mere language. As I said, the characters are incredibly boring and have no personalities beyond their circumstance, the plot is heavy-handedly contrived (which it's meant to be, but it feels it), and it simply isn't funny. There were moments when I laughed reading it, but more at the sheer ridiculousness of the story as I can't recall a single actually witty sentence in the novel - it's a farce but it isn't a comedy, and it definitely isn't worth reading. Unless you happen to like badly-written vaguely-bigoted attempts at historical-crime-comedy capers - if you do then go for it, this book was written for you! Jonas Jonasson must've had someone in mind, after all.

Edit [August 2014]: a film of this book has come out recently. It's probably better. This is one of the very rare examples where the film is probably better than the book; the best thing about it is the farcical-romp nature of the plot, which I expect can be captured more fully onscreen without any of the horrendous prose narration prickling one's enjoyment of it.