Erlendur stood over the grave in the freezing cold, searching for a purpose to the whole business of life and death. As usual he could find no answers. There were no final answers to explain the life-long solitude of the person in the urn, or the death of his brother all those years ago, or why Erlendur was the way he was, and why Elías was stabbed to death. Life was a random mass of unforeseeable coincidences that governed men’s fates like a storm that strikes without warning, causing injury and death.

I read two of Arnaldur Indriðason’s novels a couple of years ago. Both were pretty depressing; of the two, Silence of the Grave was both bleaker and better. After that I said I needed a break from “grim nordic noir” for a while, and I don’t think I’ve read any since (except The Terrorists for class, which isn’t actually that grim in spirit, despite the severity of its social criticism). After I finished Arctic Chill yesterday, I felt, again, that I’d had enough for a while: it is even more relentlessly unhappy than I remember the other two being, in ways that are pretty well summed up by the quotation above.

Arctic Chill struck me as more perfunctory, as a crime novel, than Silence of the Grave: it doesn’t try to do as much that is interesting or meaningful or literary. It does focus on an important topic: the victim’s mother is an immigrant to Iceland from Thailand, and his death immediately raises questions for the police, and for the media, about whether it was motivated by racism or hostility to immigrants. During their investigation, Erlendur and his team turn up plenty of both attitudes, sometimes casual, sometimes virulent, and thus the novel joins other recent European crime fiction (including Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers and Ian Rankin’s Fleshmarket Close) in examining the tensions and prejudices stirred up by changing demographics in supposedly “liberal” societies.

Though the particulars of the case were reasonably well developed, in the end I didn’t think Indriðason did much of interest with either the form of the novel or the resolution of the case: the crime does not ultimately reveal anything in particular about racism or immigration, for instance, instead turning more or less on random chance and pointless hooliganism. On the other hand, that outcome is consistent with Erlendur’s conviction that life has no meaningful patterns. There are some other thematic threads that add unity to the novel, too, particularly the recurrence of missing people, including  Elías’s older brother, the woman at the center of Erlendur’s other case, and, in the past, Erlendur’s brother, who was lost in blizzard in their childhood. His body was never found, and throughout Arctic Chill Erlendur is haunted by memories and questions about this personal tragedy which has defined the rest of his life in terms of loss and remorse.

I’m never tempted by mystery series that have what strikes me as an unduly cheery aspect: the ones that come with brownie recipes or crossword puzzles or starring cats or dogs. Crime is a serious business, or should be. It hardly makes sense, then, for me to complain that Indriðason takes it too seriously. I think what I want is more of a payoff for the misery: if not a glimmer of hope that life can be more than random “injury or death,” at least more layers to the characters or the social commentary. Arctic Chill just seemed formulaically gloomy.

He no longer heard any tales, and they became lost to him. All his people were gone, forgotten and buried in deserted rural areas. He, in turn, drifted through a city that he had no business being in. Knew that he was not the urban type. Could not really tell what he was. But he never lost his yearning for a different life, felt rootless and uncomfortable, and sensed how his last links with the past evaporated when his mother died.

I finished my second Arnaldur Indriðason novel, Silence of the Grave, last night. The Girl on the Train  is supposedly a “page-turner” but I read Silence of the Grave with much more rapt attention: it’s smarter, darker, and infinitely more gripping. It was almost too dark: there’s always something uncomfortable about being entertained by suffering, and at the center of Silence of the Grave is a tragic account of an abusive relationship in which the brutal physical violence is almost less harrowing than what the victim’s daughter calls the “soul murder” it causes. “She turned out to be like these bushes,” the daughter reflects about her mother:

They’re particularly hardy, they withstand all kinds of weather and the harshest winters, but they’re always green and beautiful again in the summer, and the berries they produce are just as red and juicy as if nothing had ever happened. As if winter had ever come.

The hope that things will turn green and flower and bear fruit again is hard to sustain in this relentlessly grim novel, not only through the history of this tortured family and its eventual, inevitable, cataclysm but through the time we spend with Inspector Erlendur and his family in the present. I noted that in Jar City I didn’t get much sense of Erlendur as a character. Here Indriðason made up for that, most notably through a bleak monologue delivered by Erlendur to his comatose daughter. This speech reveals in both words and tone much more about him, especially how he came to be the man he is, in the place he now has in the world. (There’s also a painful scene with his ex-wife that made Wallander’s family life seem positively tranquil.) The novel’s various elements all illuminate the ways in which families cause each other pain: the case under investigation may be an extreme, but the question the beaten wife asks applies to all of them: “What makes people like that?”

Inevitably, Erlendur’s work forces him to confront the causes as well as the consequences of people’s capacity for cruelty. That hardly makes for light reading, but I’m impressed that Indriðason presents this difficult material without turning us into voyeurs — which was my experience of reading The Girl on the Train, that it stimulated a kind of tasteless curiosity about how bad things were or might get. There’s nothing prurient about Silence of the Grave. There’s nothing slick or glamorous about its violence or its story, either. Indriðason lets it all be ugly, which is horrible but also true. I might be reluctant to read another of his books, though, if he hadn’t ended this one with just a hint of hope.