The Farm by Tom Rob-Smith: Book review

The use of Sweden in fiction as a bleak, dislocated backdrop for murder has become so ubiquitous in recent years, with the high-profile success of writers including Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo, that its uninhabited sand-dunes and baron skies have been at risk of losing their chill. In his new book, The Farm, Tom Rob-Smith breathes new life into the landscape, transcending the traditional crime fiction genre with an intricately-knitted thriller steeped in mythology.

The story begins in London with a phone-call: “Your mother... She's not well... She's been imagining things – terrible, terrible things.” Minutes later, the phone rings again: “Daniel, listen to me carefully... I'm sure your father has spoken to you. Everything that man has told you is a lie. I'm not mad. I don't need a doctor. I need the police. I'm about to board a flight to London. Meet me at Heathrow.”

During the course of the novel, Daniel has to decide which of his parents is telling the truth.

The story is largely told from the perspective of Daniel's mother, Tilde, the ultimate unreliable narrator. Tilde, now in her Sixties, grew up on a smallholding in Sweden in a home to which she never returned following a shocking event that drove her away in her teens.

Decades later, after selling up a successful gardening business in North London, Tilde and her English husband, Chris – Daniel's father - retire to a remote farm in the very south of country, some six hours drive from where Tilde grew up. It is here that Tilde, now emaciated with fear and wild-eyed, believes she has uncovered a dreadful crime - and now the men she is about to expose are after her.

As Tilde sets about convincing her only child – one who is harbouring secrets of his own – of her version of events, the reader is swallowed up in a meticulously-constructed drama centring around the disappearance of the adopted daughter of a local land-owner.

In The Farm, Rob-Smith, who is half-English and half-Swedish and grew up in London, demonstrates the same craftsmanship that saw his highly-acclaimed novel Child 44 claim the Galaxy Book Award for Best New Writer and long-listed for the Manbooker Prize, among its many plaudits.

Meticulously weaving together literary themes of revenge and madness (it is easy to lose count how many woman submerge themselves in bodies of water at various points in the novel), this latest offering is a tapestry of fairytales old and new; so unsettling and oppressive that it blurs the distinctions between sanity and madness, reality and fantasy, leaving the reader guessing until the bitter end.