Amat gets his ice at five in the morning, before the town is awake, because his mother mops the rink floors and nobody stops him. He is the fastest skater in Beartown and the poorest boy in it, and both of those facts are going to matter more than he knows. Backman spends roughly a hundred and fifty pages on details of that kind before he lets the story turn: the mortgage on the rink, the sponsors who expect a say, the old coach being pushed out, the hockey mother who runs parent opinion like a small government. It is a slow build, and plenty of readers say so out loud. It is also why the second half detonates.
The novel opens with a teenager in the forest in March holding a shotgun, then declines to explain for four hundred pages. In between, Backman runs a dozen or so viewpoints through very short chapters, cutting from a fifteen-year-old girl to a club general manager to a bar owner to a boy who cannot say out loud who he is. His narrator keeps stepping out of the scene to state a flat general truth about how towns work, how hatred is easier to organize than love, how a community decides in advance which of its children are worth protecting. Those passages are why some readers press this book on everyone they know and why others feel lectured. I came down on the first side, mostly, though he reaches for the aphorism a few times too often.
Then the junior team wins its semi-final, there is a party at the star player's house, and a fifteen-year-old is raped upstairs. Backman writes the assault directly, and it is hard to read; a content warning here is not over-caution. What follows is the novel's real subject. A town discovers it cannot protect both its future and its daughter, and it chooses, by ordinary and completely recognizable logic, the future. Sponsors do arithmetic. Parents take sides in the supermarket aisle. Maya's father, who walked away from a life in North American hockey to come home and rescue this club, learns exactly what his life's work is made of. Almost nobody in these chapters behaves like a monster. They behave like people with mortgages.
The character work here is the best Backman has done. Benji, the enforcer who fights so his best friend never has to, carries something the town would tear him apart for, and Backman hands him six or seven scenes worth the price of the book on their own. Ramona pours drinks in a pub nobody has redecorated since about 1980 and gets three pages that stop you cold. Amat's mother, Fatima, speaks maybe twenty times and holds more dignity than anyone else in the book. And yes, there is a great deal of hockey. If team sports leave you cold, the opening third will feel like sitting through somebody's practice, which is where a number of readers set it down. The hockey is load-bearing, though. It is the machine the town uses to decide who counts, and you have to watch it run to understand the bill it sends.
Why you should read
- Fans of A Man Called Ove ready for something far darker
- Readers who love a sprawling small-town cast
- Anyone drawn to fiction about loyalty and complicity
- Book clubs that want an argument rather than agreement
What to expect
- A slow first third that builds the town before the plot
- Very short chapters and a dozen rotating viewpoints
- A directly written sexual assault and its long aftermath
- An omniscient narrator fond of aphorisms
Backman refuses the ending you brace yourself for. No courtroom, no confession pried loose at the right moment, no speech that repairs a town. What Maya does with her fury in the last stretch is stranger and more particular than justice, and it belongs to her rather than to the plot. Four hundred and thirty pages about junior ice hockey in a shrinking Swedish forest town have no business hurting this much. Beartown manages it by taking every resident seriously, down to the man who clears the rink lot at four in the morning so a poor kid can get on the ice.
