Squalor in paradise
Andrew Brown
CRUEL AWAKENING by Chris Mosey C. Hurst, £12.99, pp. 208 he argument of this book can be simply put: Sweden is a ghastly place, populated by emotional cripples whose self-esteem is dwarfed only by their incompetence. Olof Palme, the assassinated prime minister, seemed one of the worst of them when he was alive but now he is dead we can see that the rest surpass him.
Anyone who has been more than about six weeks in the country feels like that; some people can develop the condition more quickly. But is it an excuse for a book?
I should declare an interest here. I knew Chris Mosey, not very well, during the seven years in which I lived as an adult in Sweden. In those days I probably thought him soft on the general ghastliness of the place and people. I later came to know the diplomat here whom Mosey blames for suppressing. an earlier edition of his book, and earlier this year delivered a heartfelt panegyric at his funeral service. A general extermination of Swedes is not a policy I can recommend.
But how to defend them? The first point is that the Swedes themselves do not think their country is perfect. In so far as you can generalise about `the Swedes', you will find a rather smaller proportion of them con-
vinced that they live in a perfect society than you could of Englishmen. They used to think more of it. Before the assassina- tion, they used to think theirs was the most advanced society in the world, and that everyone else would inexorably follow their development; but that is rather different from supposing that they had already reached perfection or even that they were on their way there.
I think that Mr Mosey set out to tell this story of the end of innocence, but his book has been through numerous vicissitudes. The version that appeared in Swedish some years ago was apparently much ruder than this one, and went into more detail about Palme's private life. But a number of English lawyers and — who knows why? — Lord Rothschild — are blamed for sitting on much of the original scandal-mongering. Its place has been taken by a brief history of Social Democracy in Sweden. Then there is an account of Olof Palme's child- hood and upbringing, which contained much that was new to me, and owes a great deal to conversations with his respectable right-wing brother Claes Palme, who also turned against Mr Mosey when he saw the use to which his reminiscences were put. Then there is an account of Palme as a working politician, which makes available to monoglot English readers much material otherwise buried away in Dieter Strand's campaign biography Palme Igen.
Finally, and incomparably the best part of the book, there are two hilarious chap- ters telling the story of the hunt for Palme's killer. Anyone who watched the submarine hunts of the early Eighties, in which the Swedish navy proved unable to convince onlookers that the Russian intruders even existed, let alone catch one, or deter them, and, which, when one finally ran aground (the captain being drunk) outside a Swedish naval base, towed it eventually back to the open seas, was in some way psychologically ready for the efforts of the Swedish police to catch the man who shot their prime minister in the centre of the
capital city; but the rest of us were insuffi- ciently prepared.
The pursuit of Palme's killer culminated in the trial, three years after the event, of a man whose alibi was that he had been drinking in a shebeen that night while try- ing to buy some drugs. This, he said, explained why he couldn't remember all his movements. The evidence against him was of a similar level of coherence. Before then, the first break in the case had come when the cartridge cases fired by the assas- sin were found and handed in to the police by passers-by. A fair-minded observer can only conclude that the Swedish Police would have been unable to apprehend the assassin even if he had waited in ambush outside the cinema in a nuclear submarine.
Christer Pettersson, the man who stood trial for Palme's murder, wa§ duly convict- ed, and swept off to jail on a tide of nation- al hysteria. So far, the story is comprehensible to everyone. What happened next was odder: he was released as soon as his case came up to the High Court, went home and toasted his release in a very Swedish mixture of Bailey's Irish Cream and Explorer Vodka. In no time at all he was back on his accustomed park bench: he had spent slightly more than three months in jail after his conviction. This should be contrasted with the experi- ence of Irishmen in this country who also found themselves suspected of murders that had outraged the nation.
Christer Pettersson's story is where any consideration of Olof Palme's significance should start. For this useless and pointless loser, who had read all of the Odyssey at the age of ten, appears since the age of 14 to have had no purpose in life beyond get- ting out of it. He supplemented his income from petty crime with social security; stabbed two men with a bayonet, one fatal- ly, in separate argUments: he might have been invented by Anthony Burgess to show the importance of evil and squalor in par- adise. Yet he was acquitted. No matter how his immoral life might outrage every precept of Swedish morality, injustice outraged it more.
This preference for justice over morality is cold; and it excludes both foreigners and natives, and seems to undermine much of the purpose of being human. Mosey is right to say as much. But it is not an ignoble preference. It is not inferior to its opposite: would Sweden have been a better place if Pettersson had languished in prison so that Swedes could enjoy their catharsis?
The real fault with this book's argument is that it assumes that there might be a perfect society, in which no really painful bargains must be struck with fate, and then excoriates Sweden for being imperfect. But there is no such society, and that Chris Mosey attacks Sweden so savagely for being imperfect suggests that he has lived there far too long.
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