Mikael Niemi: Popular Music

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

They're an earthy lot up there in the Arctic circle vodka belt, sweating in their saunas, biffing their children, picking at their scabs, drinking home-made potato alcohol until their noses run, they fill their pants and fall over unconscious, their brain cells dying "like swarms of midges".

A tough place for a boy to prove himself in, you might think. Even apart from the rough, competitive male culture, nature itself is a mighty, freezing force that sends ice-flows crashing down the river, and darkness and light take turns at round-the-clock vigilance.

Yet by the time you've read this story, and it won't take you long because you won't be able to put it down, you'll wish you also had had a childhood like this ... fecund, this full of risk and danger.

Popular Music is set in Pajala, right up in the north of Sweden, near the border with Finland. This happens to be the home of the author, but nevertheless his story is a fictional memoir - a crazy, obscene, bittersweet story of growing up which often segues into dark surreality, where a boy who gets accidentally shut in a boiler remains there year after year, emerging to find his real self has already grown up. Or where his friend's grandmother emerges from her grave, a penis between her legs and in a most vengeful mood.

It's a story where, as in childhood, even ordinary events can inflate into awesome magic: boys who go skiing in the long Arctic night hurtle through the sound barrier, smashing the air "like a mirror".

Our narrator is Matti, variously aged anywhere from 6 to around 15. The story moves along in thematic chapters, rather than strictly chronologically, its mood shifting from hilarity to tenderness and, sometimes, heartbreak. But if you had to sum it all up, it's "about" a boy growing up in a small, isolated place through the 1960s and 1970s, gradually developing his sense of the huge, inevitable world beyond - and what better symbols of that could there be than a tarmac road, and rock'n'roll?

"It was a long way from Pajala to the rest of the world, and when Swedish Television eventually got round to broadcasting one of its rare pop concerts, it was a recording of an event several years earlier with Elvis Presley. You simply had to take whatever was on offer ... The electrical signals were routed via the Kaknas Tower in Stockholm and set off on their long, meandering journey over Sweden ... And there he was. Elvis ... Dad groaned and made a point of marching out to the garage. Mum pretended to knit, but she couldn't take her eyes off this sweaty stud in his black leather jacket. Sis bit her nails down to the quick, and wept into her pillow all night long. I wanted a guitar."

Matti goes down to the basement and cuts himself a guitar shape from a piece of hardboard, attaching a few elastic bands, and a string to hang the thing over his shoulder. It's a short step from there to obsession, rocket-fuelled by a Beatles single that goes off in their lives like a powder keg. "Ollyu nidis lav," Matti and his friend Nilla screech to each other in their garage, eventually graduating to real instruments and even a real, school-hall audience.

At the risk of making it sound dull (it never is, not for one sentence), this is also a lesson in the politics of Sweden's margins: Pajala, Matti realises, is "a northern appendage, a few barren bogs where a few people happened to live, but could only partly be Swedes. We were different, a bit inferior, a bit uneducated, a bit simple-minded. We didn't have any deer or hedgehogs or nightingales. We didn't have any celebrities ... All we had was masses and masses of mosquitoes."

The story opens some years in the future of all these wild happenings, as Matti, all alone, ascends Mt Annapurna in Nepal - the highest point he has ever been in his life, and therefore the perfect spot to look down upon the past. In a moment of humble gratitude he bends to kiss an iron plate sunk into the mountainside, on which is written a Tibetan text exuding solemnity.

Of course, in those icy conditions he instantly sticks fast, something a boy from Pajala should have remembered sooner. It's a wonderful metaphor for the perils and pitfalls of remembering and writing, almost a "Dear reader" message from the author about his desire to write about places, people and events that must lie in his own background, and his realisation that the only way to do it is with a certain amount of piss-taking.

There on the mountainside, Matti pees into a cup and pours the contents over his stuck mouth. A few seconds later he is free. "At last," he says, "I can start my story."

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