A Review of Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s “Secret Passages in a Hillside Town”
Magical, but Childish
I’m a fan of the work of Haruki Murakami for many reasons — though his work can be both hot and cold — but one of them is that he can take the ordinary and make it seem entirely magical. For instance, he can have a conversation between two people about something as banal as ears and have it be elevated into the profound. Well, Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen is a writer from Finland whose work, in this case Secret Passages in a Hillside Town, strives to be another Murakami, but fails miserably at doing so. The reason is that he writes about childish things through the prism of a childlike adult, and the result is strikingly juvenile. Secret Passages in a Hillside Town strives to be magical, but, largely, the magic just isn’t there — it’s hidden away in ponderous passages about lost love reclaimed.
The story is about a middle-aged man named Olli Suominen, who is a book publisher in a small town in central Finland. He’s married, though not necessarily happily, and he has a penchant for losing umbrellas at the worst possible times. He is respected, though. He is a member of his parish’s church council and has joined a film society, both things being pretty insignificant to the plot of the book. One day, he gets a Facebook friend request from an old flame that he hasn’t seen for 30 years — a person who has successfully written and published a non-fiction bestseller on film studies, and sooner than you can give two shakes of the literary magical wand, this woman named Greta winds up in town with Olie courting her for her next book and, of course, possibly a little more than that.
The book flips back and forth between the present day and childhood memories of a time when Olie and four other friends were having daring adventures exploring caves hidden beneath the Finish town, foiling thieves and such. This part of the novel tries to recreate the magic of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five book series for children, but is just so silly and inconsequential to the thrust of much of the book that one has to wonder why it’s there in the first place. Tellingly, this part of the story falls away in the book’s second half, which is more of a love story between two unlikely people more than anything else.
I want to be as spoiler-free as possible and not give away the big secret of the book, but it’s a bit of a doozy. Surprisingly, it works and the story told from this character’s point of view is touching and profound, which is a marked shift from a lot of what else is in the book. It’s like a short story has been grafted into this novel, and it is so different in some respects from the rest of it in tone and seriousness that it’s a bit baffling. Clearly, this is the story that the author desperately wants to tell. Why didn’t he just tell it straight away and not pad things out for it?
The book — which, by the way, is being marketed as science-fiction, but isn’t really unless you count the dreamlike sequences of this volume — also pulls the move of having multiple endings, which means that large swaths of the book toward the end repeat themselves in order to make adjustments to the different endings that the author provides. This is superfluous material. Also, the Choose Your Own Adventure-style of the book’s final act is just unbelievable in terms of how things generally play out. I should also mention at this point that in Secret Passages of a Hillside Town there’s a double kidnapping that’s utterly unbelievable. Why doesn’t one person who is impacted by this go to the police? It’s not explained. The author just assumes the reader will go along for the ride, even though the reader may be kicking and screaming as the author drags them along.
That all said, as a novel that’s about recapturing the magic of a long-ago romance, it does partially succeed. True love is not blind, and with the big reveal that comes about two-thirds of the way into the work, one is touched and moved by this blindness. However, that’s really the only thing that this book has going for it. The characters are generally one-dimensional — especially the group of kids that Olli hangs out with as a youth — and the book is, overall, just pretty silly. It tries to be serious and profound, but then the author’s yen for being childish kicks in and we learn that Olli is seriously contemplating publishing a children’s book on sex ed tentatively titled I Have a Fanny, and You Have a Wee Wee. (Or something like that.) Groan.
In the end, Secret Passages in a Hillside Town is a book that tries to take itself seriously, even though it has juvenile humour in it. Maybe something got lost in translation, but this attempt at Facebook romance (meaning that sections of the book take place with characters at computers, which is about as exciting as watching people text in real-time) leaves a lot to be desired. Seeing that the book was originally published in Finland circa 2010, and is only getting an English translation now, there are things about how Facebook works (and technology in general) that already feel dated and antiquated. You can certainly do more with Facebook now than just accept friend requests and write on each other’s timelines. Basically, Secret Passages in a Hillside Town has moments when it tries to elevate itself from the muck. Those moments, though, are too few and far between. If you were thinking of taking a pass on this book, you can resoundingly do so. There are far better books written about this sort of thing, and the author usually goes by the name Haruki Murakami. Enough said.
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s Secret Passages in a Hillside Town was published by Pushkin Press on September 18, 2018.
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