Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [159]
The people of Norbotten came to the conclusion that I didn’t like them, so they were certainly not going to like me. To their great irritation, I had already been granted a plaque and an engraved portrait on the main street in the town of Piteå, and there was a lot of discussion about digging it up and getting rid of it; after all, in their eyes I had slandered my hometown. Eventually the fuss died down, though, and a year later I was awarded the finest accolade an author could wish for – the cultural prize of Piteå District (pretty much the equivalent of the Nobel Prize).
But the truth is that I love Norrbotten and its people. They’re my context, my backbone. I grew up there, my first daughter was born there, I started working as a journalist there.
In the mid eighties, I lived in a two-room apartment on Lövskatan in Luleå, in a block that was right next to the railway line. All night long the trains carrying iron ore from the mines to the north would rumble past my bedroom window on their way to the blast furnaces at Swedish Steel, a few hundred metres down the line. I thought the area I lived in was incredibly . . . well, I was going to say beautiful, but most people would probably disagree. Maybe fascinating is a better word – powerful, overwhelming. Swedish Steel in Luleå is one of the most modern and imposing plants in the world. It’s practically alive, breathing and pulsating right round the clock. Blast furnace number 2 looms like a huge, illuminated monster over the Gulf of Bothnia: you can see it from anywhere along the coast around Luleå.
I used to go for long walks with my little daughter along the railway track. The other mothers would go to the playground, but I would take my poor daughter in her pushchair all the way out to the West Gate, just because it was so impressive. For a change we would sometimes go the other way, down to the iron-ore harbour to look at the cranes.
My daughter grew up to be a very independent young woman. (She also just happens to be called Annika, and she has kindly lent her name to the heroine of this book. Her surname comes from my favourite boss on the Expressen newspaper, Bengt Bengtzon, the most brilliant, capricious and unnerving boss I’ve ever had.)
I first got the idea for Red Wolf back in December 1996. I was editor-in-chief of a newspaper called Metro Weekend, a morning paper published on Saturdays and Sundays. The first issue had appeared just three months earlier, and in only twelve weeks we had gained more than 60,000 subscribers. It was a great success, in both marketing and sales terms. Then came the fatal blow.
The Minister of Culture, Marita Ulvskog, pushed through a government proposal that came to be known as the Metro Weekend Law. It meant that my paper could no longer be distributed along with the other morning papers. She was using her power to close down a new, successful paper. I couldn’t believe it. I thought things like that only happened in dictatorships. The fact that something like this could happen in a democracy like Sweden came as a huge shock.
There I was, with a newsroom full of highly skilled people who had left other jobs because they believed in the idea I was promoting, and they had done a fantastic job. And along comes a government minister and destroys us with a stroke of her pen. All of my staff had to leave at once, but they were talented enough to get new jobs quickly.
The whole episode was a bitter lesson in how power operates in Sweden.
Naturally, since then I’ve thought a lot about what might have made the Minister of Culture do something as undemocratic as closing down one particular newspaper. How it all came about is a long story, and it started when the Metro newspaper was first distributed free