The third book in The Oland Quartet, The Quarry by Johan Theorin, follows the same sort of pattern established in the first two. While we have some of the same characters reappearing (the Davidsson family, in particular, Gertlof is the anchor or common thread that loosely links these marvellous tales), each novel centres on newcomers or new characters to the island and a mystery and/or tragedy surrounding them.
In this book, the newcomers are the Morner family: Pers and his two children. Pers inherited a cottage by the quarry from a character who played a minor role in the first book and briefly appeared in the second, Ernst, who made unusual and sought-after sculptures from the rock hewn from the quarry, and was a good friend of elderly resident, Gertlof.
Arriving to celebrate Easter, divorced Pers is looking forward to some time with his children, teenage twins, only his daughter is sick with an undiagnosed but debilitating illness and is placed suddenly in hospital, while his son seems more interested in his Gameboy than spending time with either his father or ailing sister. When an urgent call comes through from Pers’ estranged father, Jerry, who recently had a stroke and finds it difficult to communicate, Pers is forced to leave the island and go to his aid. When he arrives to pick him up in his office in the woods, what he finds is destruction and death.
Returning to Oland, Pers begins to realise that whoever is targeting his father is after anyone associated with his infamous parent’s former business and that he must look to the past to discover who it is that’s out for revenge before it’s too late…
In the meantime, his daughter’s disease and prognosis worsens, he meets the other residents old and new who also have houses around the quarry and their own secrets and histories – some of whom will impact upon him and his family as well.
Segueing again between past and present in order to create a slow reveal of the truth, Theorin masterfully controls the narrative. I love the way he blends local myth into the story and the childhood need and desire to believe in the fantastical – and for a whole variety of reasons. I also enjoy how he spares us that sometimes painful adult awakening to reality – well, he doesn’t spare us so much as gently let his characters and thus, the reader, down.
Beautifully written, the island and its distinct seasons, the characters that populate it, and the history that’s leeched into its alvar, sands and now quarry, come alive in this spell-binding book.
Echoes From the Dead by Johan Theorin is such a marvellous, evocative and yet also oppressive book to read. Set on the Swedish Island of Oland, it tells the story of Julia Davidsson whose six-year-old son, Jens, went missing on the fog-bound alvar (marshes/fields) of the island over twenty years earlier. When her mostly estranged elderly father, who has abandoned his home on the isle and thus independence for the comfort of a nursing home, is sent her son’s sandal in the post, it not only reopens wounds Julia has never allowed to heal, but sends her back to the island she left all those years ago and the memories it holds in order to discover the truth of her son’s disappearance.
