Red Wolf

A Word from the Author

I spent several years wondering how to set a novel in the northern Swedish region of Norrbotten. I wanted to show the unique isolation and majestic strangeness of the place. You really are on the roof of the world up there, and that was the feeling I wanted to convey. I was born there, in a small village called Pålmark, between the tiny towns of Piteå and Älvsbyn. (Pålmark actually isn’t even a village; just a dozen houses spread out along three kilometres of road leading to the thorp of Holmträsk.)

In many ways it turned out very well. Red Wolf was probably my best novel up to that point. It became an international success, and was actually the twelfth best-selling book worldwide when it was first published.

But there was one group of people who didn’t appreciate the book quite as much: the inhabitants of Norrbotten itself. They said I had portrayed the people there as provincial, the landscape as bare and tundralike, and they definitely didn’t agree with me describing the location as cold and dark.

I thought that was a perfectly understandable reaction. Someone was finally describing their corner of the world in a novel – a medium that could cross national boundaries – and the people of Norrbotten wanted a description taken from some tourist brochure: a nice, shiny picture of how great everything was. But here I was, telling things the way they really were.

The people of Norbotten came to the conclusion that I didn’t like them, so they were certainly not going to like me. To their great irritation, I had already been granted a plaque and an engraved portrait on the main street in the town of Piteå, and there was a lot of discussion about digging it up and getting rid of it; after all, in their eyes I had slandered my hometown. Eventually the fuss died down, though, and a year later I was awarded the finest accolade an author could wish for – the cultural prize of Piteå District (pretty much the equivalent of the Nobel Prize).

But the truth is that I love Norrbotten and its people. They’re my context, my backbone. I grew up there, my first daughter was born there, I started working as a journalist there.

In the mid eighties, I lived in a two-room apartment on Lövskatan in Luleå, in a block that was right next to the railway line. All night long the trains carrying iron ore from the mines to the north would rumble past my bedroom window on their way to the blast furnaces at Swedish Steel, a few hundred metres down the line. I thought the area I lived in was incredibly… well, I was going to say beautiful, but most people would probably disagree. Maybe fascinating is a better word – powerful, overwhelming. Swedish Steel in Luleå is one of the most modern and imposing plants in the world. It’s practically alive, breathing and pulsating right round the clock. Blast furnace number 2 looms like a huge, illuminated monster over the Gulf of Bothnia: you can see it from anywhere along the coast around Luleå.

I used to go for long walks with my little daughter along the railway track. The other mothers would go to the playground, but I would take my poor daughter in her pushchair all the way out to the West Gate, just because it was so impressive. For a change we would sometimes go the other way, down to the iron-ore harbour to look at the cranes.

My daughter grew up to be a very independent young woman. (She also just happens to be called Annika, and she has kindly lent her name to the heroine of this book. Her surname comes from my favourite boss on the Expressen newspaper, Bengt Bengtzon, the most brilliant, capricious and unnerving boss I’ve ever had.)

I first got the idea for Red Wolf back in December 1996. I was editor-in-chief of a newspaper called Metro Weekend, a morning paper published on Saturdays and Sundays. The first issue had appeared just three months earlier, and in only twelve weeks we had gained more than 60,000 subscribers. It was a great success, in both marketing and sales terms. Then came the fatal blow.

The Minister of Culture, Marita Ulvskog, pushed through a government proposal that came to be known as the Metro Weekend Law. It meant that my paper could no longer be distributed along with the other morning papers. She was using her power to close down a new, successful paper. I couldn’t believe it. I thought things like that only happened in dictatorships. The fact that something like this could happen in a democracy like Sweden came as a huge shock.

There I was, with a newsroom full of highly skilled people who had left other jobs because they believed in the idea I was promoting, and they had done a fantastic job. And along comes a government minister and destroys us with a stroke of her pen. All of my staff had to leave at once, but they were talented enough to get new jobs quickly.

The whole episode was a bitter lesson in how power operates in Sweden.

Naturally, since then I’ve thought a lot about what might have made the Minister of Culture do something as undemocratic as closing down one particular newspaper. How it all came about is a long story, and it started when the Metro newspaper was first distributed free of charge at metro stations in Stockholm. The big morning papers in Stockholm, Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, looked on scornfully. Svenska Dagbladet had actually been invited to buy a part share in Metro, but had turned the offer down flat.

Metro turned out to be the biggest success ever in Swedish media history – that much was apparent after only a couple of months. The smiles were soon wiped off the faces of the bosses of the more traditional morning papers, and when we (I was news editor at Metro) announced that we were launching another paper, Metro Weekend, Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter were ready for us. The owners gave fine speeches about how their main aim was to protect freedom of speech and democracy, but their words turned out to be hollow.

The two papers presented the Minister of Culture with an offer she couldn’t refuse: Metro Weekend would be closed down, or else the two big papers would see to it that Dala-Demokraten and a raft of other small regional papers, most of them with social-democrat leanings, would no longer be distributed to their readers. The focus on Dala-Demokraten was well-chosen, because the Minister of Culture had herself been the paper’s editor-in-chief before she entered government. So the decision was straightforward.

Things progressed quickly. Only a couple of months later she pushed a change in the law through parliament. Every other party apart from the Centre, who were offered some form of financial inducement, opposed the amendment.

A few days later we were closed down.

Of course this made me think about what power can be used for. Marita Ulvskog could justify her decision in political terms, and there was an ideological motivation behind it, but what if someone in a position of power was concealing a big personal secret? And what would happen if someone else found out? What sort of black-mail might then be possible? I wanted to show that power always carries with it the potential for corruption.

Annika Bengtzon makes it a personal crusade to uncover the abuse of power, but what happens if her own life is threatened? If her husband is on the point of leaving her and their children? What would she be prepared to do then? Would she be prepared to abuse her own power as a journalist in order to save her family?

This time I allowed her to do exactly that.

Liza Marklund

Stockholm, June 2010