Ödet och hoppet review

Swedish mediaeval history is an unusual topic, remaining as it does in the shadows of the Viking Age, which was one of my main reasons for choosing this book. The fact it also deals with real people and events, rather than using the setting for completely original fiction (nothing wrong with that, though), worked in its favour. However, the book expects the reader to understand some Swedish mediaeval history, which could be a stumbling block for many non-Scandinavian readers as little explanation is given in the book. If the Hanseatic League and Kalmar Union mean nothing to you, this might be a struggle.

The almost post-apocalyptic feel of the world after the Black Death gave it an unusual atmosphere, but the book got off to a difficult start due to the in medias res nature of its opening chapter. After that, it introduced many point-of-view characters and plotlines too soon which made it difficult to feel grounded and invested in the novel.

Perhaps because of the multiple perspectives and various threads of plot to be set up, the book also started slowly and took a long time to pick up the pace. Hope and Destiny is billed as the first stand-alone part in a suite of novels about the Natt och Dag family, so how much continuity there is between novels remains to be seen. Some plot threads in this novel felt superfluous, such as the family ‘curse’, and one wonders whether these will play a more prominent role in future instalments.

Coupled with the difficult introduction, I misliked the ‘mystery box’ nature of some of the storytelling, i.e. stuff happened without explanation which was explained later. An example right at the beginning is when Finn, the Sture family’s ward and Måns’s adopted brother, kills his travelling partner with no apparent provocation and little explanation given until much later. This frustrated me because I could not follow the character’s thoughts or motivations, nor did the consequences of his actions make sense until a few hundred pages later. Even hindsight provides little explanation for why this was left a mystery; Finn’s motivations could have been explored fully without spoiling any of the plot later in the novel. In fact, my reading experience would have greatly benefited as I felt like I was floundering around without it.

Another aspect of the novel left recondite too long was the relationship between Engelbrekt and Måns. The real Måns killed the real Engelbrekt at Göksholm castle, the Sture family seat, in 1436, yet there is so little to be read about Måns in historical sources. Apart from his role in Engelbrekt’s death, Måns was struck from his history. The question is why? to which the author gave the answer perhaps they were lovers.

A romance between two men in 1430s Sweden, especially among the Catholic nobility, is a fount of conflict and drama, and something I had no expectations of whatsoever when starting the book. Unfortunately, the relationship between the two is mostly only rumours and hear-say. Måns states it outright 150 pages before the end, but in a way easily dismissed as a joke. This was the cause of the final 150 pages of conflict within the family as well as the root cause of a battle, but only at the end was it made explicit that Måns was not joking. Consequently, his father Bengt’s anger and destruction of the new canal his wife was overseeing, and the ensuing armed conflict, felt as though it came out of nowhere.

In a sense, this aspect is true to life from an objective perspective, because that kind of love was silenced and erased. Måns’s romance with another man was central to the plot of the entire novel, but it spent the majority of the page count in absentia. As such, even bearing in mind the possibility Måns was not joking, the final section of the book felt a bit disjointed and Måns’s killing of Engelbrekt lacked the resonance and gravitas it could have had. This robbed the novel of much of its potential, leaving me wondering why it was left in the shadows.