The game and the shame

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This article was published 06/05/2017 (3403 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Beartown, the latest from Swedish novelist Fredrik Backman (author of the international bestseller A Man Called Ove), is both a biting indictment of toxic sports culture and an ultimately tender novel about a small, remote hockey town.

When a teenage girl is raped at a party celebrating the triumphs of the local junior hockey squad, Backman’s fictional, titular hockey town is forced to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

How backwoods Beartown deals with the situation — as a collective of confused families and conflicted individuals — is at times enlightening and heartbreaking, frustrating and appalling.

“What is a community?” Backman asks pointedly and obliquely throughout Beartown. “It is the sum total of our choices.”

Beartown is populated with as rich a cast of characters as you’d expect to find at a bustling small town rink or community centre.

The most well-rounded characters — tough-guy Benji or awkward, fleet-of-foot and lovesick Amat, for example — are complicated and conflicted, while others (like spoiled first-liner William Lyt and his domineering hockey mom, Maggan) can come off a little more than two-dimensional.

Yet, much like the players that fill the best rosters, each has their own role to play and does so in the context of the novel.

As the events in Beartown unfold, Backman examines how shame and silence can destroy a person, a team or a whole community.

Each of Backman’s principal characters grapples with the question in their own way — some more satisfying and convincingly than others — while challenging the reader to do the same.

Throughout, Backman explores the forces that drive people into committing themselves, heart and soul, to a team. Some are driven by ambition, some by the ambition of parents.

Others come to a team as a means to escape outside pressures or to become a part of something greater than themselves.

“It’s the last place where the collective functions, where the team takes precedence over the self,” Backman writes, before stepping back to ask what may be the novel’s central question. “So, how far are you allowed to go to protect your universe?”

Although the story and central themes are heavy, Beartown isn’t entirely dark and dreary.

Barkman’s writing shines when he shares tender, often unseen moments between a father and daughter, mother and son, or between two best friends. Backman also writes passionately about the game itself.

“Hockey is just a silly little game,” he writes. “We burn and bleed and cry, fully aware that the most the sport can give us, in the very best scenario, is incomprehensibly meager and worthless: just a few isolated moments of transcendence.

“But what the hell else is life made of?”

Perhaps not for the faint of heart, Beartown is a moving novel, with a powerful message and memorable characters.

As is with most hockey literature, Beartown is about far more than a game played on ice. While unflinching, at times it can become overbearing.

The writing can get bogged down, occasionally failing to find the back of the net or fully catch its stride. But at its best, it is a graceful and hard-hitting, compassionate and unapologetic examination of sports culture and the people who breathe life into an otherwise meaningless game.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer, a reporter for Canstar Community News and a beer league hockey fanatic.