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“Sometimes the entire community feels like a philosophical experiment: If a town falls in the forest but no one hears it, does it matter at all?��

Beartown is proudly a hockey town �� and not much else. A small dying remote provincial Swedish town, where jobs are disappearing and people are moving away, and the future looks bleak. With one exception - hockey. Not just a local obsession of a town with nothing better to do, but a promise of a better future.

You see, the town has a decent junior hockey team with a star player that is destined to go far. And a lot more that superficial entertainment can hinge on the team’s success.

“So how important can the semifinal of a junior tournament be? Being the best junior team around would remind the rest of the country of this place’s existence again. And then the politicians might decide to spend the money to establish a hockey school here instead of over in Hed, so that the most talented kids in this part of the country would want to move to Beartown instead of the big cities. So that an A-team full of homegrown players could make it to the highest division again, attract the biggest sponsors once more, get the council to build a new rink and bigger roads leading to it, maybe even the conference center and shopping mall they’ve been talking about for years. So that new businesses could appear and create more jobs so that the townspeople might start thinking about renovating their homes instead of selling them. It would only be important to the town’s economy. To its pride. To its survival.��

The problem begins when the hope of Beartown, a star hockey player Kevin is accused of raping team manager’s daughter Maya. And this shatters the previously predictable and quiet life of Beartown, exposing the rifts and the cracks in the proverbial ice and putting neighbors against each other.

And it’s hard to play hockey on cracked ice.

“Difficult questions, simple answers. What is a community?
It is the sum total of our choices.��

How far will you go to try to save the town’s hoped-for future? How far will you go to protect who you perceive as your own? Would you be willing to let the uncomfortable - and criminal - behavior slide for what you may think is a greater good? What matters more - the well-being of one girl or well-being of the town? Can you even phrase a choice like that?

“She’s fifteen, above the age of consent, and he’s seventeen, but he’s still “the boy�� in every conversation. She’s “the young woman.��

It’s a fascinating look into the soul of a small town, a community both close-knit and yet torn apart by the weight of resentment and guilt and power balance. The unifying pull of a shared goal and the fierce rejection of those whose goals may differ. The seduction and danger of forming a shared identity that excludes those perceived as a threat to that identity. The darkness that lies within us. The entitlement that money or strength or status or accident of birth bring. The danger of dropping all your hopes and expectations and blame on shoulders too young to handle them.

“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.��

This is ultimately the story of “Us�� against “Them�� (yes, that also is *almost* the title of the follow-up novel, why’d you ask?). The thin but stark line that divides the two. The reverberations of choices that put you with “Us�� or with “Them��. The danger and pain and destruction that comes from the divide.

“It doesn’t take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.��

Everyone thinks of themselves as good people. Nobody goes through life thinking they are “bad guys��. We are excellent at justifying our actions, weaving our narratives that are ultimately redemptive towards our choices and actions. When these choices must be confronted, when a mirror is shoved to our faces and we are forced to take a closer look, warts and all, �� well, it’s unsettling and can be met with rage and hostility.
—�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ���
This is also a story about loyalty. The painful question of what constitutes loyalty and what constitutes betrayal and what constitutes decency, and knowing right from wrong. The loyalty to those who you mark as your own versus those who you mark as outsiders, those that don’t belong to your circle, your town, your team.

The loyalty that in Beartown is really a synonym for toeing the line. But the question is �� who sets that line?

“There are few words that are harder to explain than “loyalty.�� It’s always regarded as a positive characteristic, because a lot of people would say that many of the best things people do for each other occur precisely because of loyalty. The only problem is that many of the very worst things we can do to each other occur because of the same thing.��

This book is a slow character study, a character ensemble that shows us the good, the bad and the ugly of Beartown’s soul. The children and the adults. The coaches and the players. The rich and the poor. The winners and the losers at the game of life. Adults who can get so engrossed in a game played by their children in this hockey town that little else matters.

The standout for me was, of course, Benji. Benji - the difficult young man with big heart and heavy secrets, who does not hesitate to choose between loyalty and decency, and who is destined for either something really good or the darkest possible end �� and I’m hopeful about where he eventually lands.

“When Benji heads out into the last snowfall of the year and the door closes softly behind him, the bass player thinks how true that is. Benji isn’t like him, but he’s not like the people who live here either. Benji isn’t like anyone else at all. How can you not love someone like that?��

It’s an unsubtle book. You never doubt who you are supposed to sympathize with and which side there is to take. The capital-M Message is delivered over and over again. But subtlety is not the point here. The point is human decency, and Backman delivers on that front.

I also have to mention the translation. A hallmark of any good translation is making readers forget that they are reading a translated work �� and I certainly forgot that it was not a book originally written in English. And that’s the highest praise for a translated work.

4 stars.
—�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ—��

“Late one evening toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

This is the story of how we got there.��

—�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ—��
My review of the sequel, Us Against You, is here: /review/show...