‘It’s dark and I can’t see a thing, but the scent of Sixten’s coat finds its way in, causing something inside me to shift. To be rearranged.’ Do you suddenly stop worrying about death? Some thoughts based on reading When the Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén.
The following lines of free verse came to me, as I thought about this prompt question and reflected on reading When the Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén, a story of the giving up of life by elders through the consciousness of one such older man, thinking of his wife now in care with dementia and not recognising him, and his best friend, Ture, whose queer sexuality is more than a question of hiding but involves so significantly within it the hidden and lost. And these losses are mediated by dogs to which he has related and lost, the last included (called Sixten), whose life enables death to be welcomed as a reconfiguration and ending about which there is nothing to worry about.
I was afraid of the dark, once Worried about what it hid. Death in fact hides nothing in its dark That darkening of the senses does not take away, Promising nothing in return: That’s a blessing.
But before we get to that I want to note that I would not have read this novel had I not been going to the Edinburgh book Festival ( a fact I wrote about in a blog – see it at this link) and had I also not be going there to see Patrick Gale talk about his novel Love Lane (about which I have blogged about long before that (use the link here). In that latter blog, I summarised thus about an element of that novel – the relation of men to their expressed needs. This is part of what I said (Love Lane, by the way as well as holding the prison at Wakefield where Mike is governor also has a cruising are for queer men):
But Mike may end his life frequenting Love Lane’s world lit only by fireflies. How can we know? The issue remains that closeness and tenderness are needs that may not be as urgent as sexual desire expressed to the point of felt erection but they do matter. Both Gale’s popular female and queer audiences know that this is the case and it is why they love him. Others just light a pipe or a cigarette and suck on it quietly.
Of the men who suck on their pipe this novel contains a few. But again I digress (perhaps!) for seeing Gale at Edinburgh also involved seeing a co-speaker and novelist of whom I had not heard previously, Lisa Ridzén. It is embarrassing to attend an event where there are two writers in attendance where you know and have read only one, whom you admire a lot. Usually I try and read the other and hence today completed the translation (from Swedish) of Ridzén’s debut novel, When the Cranes Fly South. And starting this blog, still with a few tears in my eyes from the novel that I am still trying to suppress, about the manner in which the novel displaces worriers and worry, around that august theme of facing death. I want to write about that because there is something liberating about this novel in the acceptance of the way it is, in our world, whether related to loss or the preparation or flight of cranes south that we hear about periodically throughout the novel before they leave at the end.
For me the most tearful thing was the way the theme was mediated through a lifetime in a man’s life of relationship with the scent and feel of dogs: notably and most importantly there are two; one, the narrator, Bosse or Bo, knew as a boy – a dog called Buster – who old and fading is shot by the now dying man’s father and is remembered in dreams as if it was now, the other the dog he took into his life as an older man already, the elkhound, Sixten, who everyone knows he can no longer care for, everyone but Sixten and Bo, in his most bloody-minded moods, which are not all there are of him unlike his own remembered father.
A Swedish elkhound
But beyond that is the relationship to another elder, Ture, that had survived their adult lives. As I read a little about the reception of the novel, I discovered that Patrick Gale himself reviewed this novel for The Guardian and that he acknowledged the role of Sixten and Ture. Of the latter he writes:
His one close friend, Ture, a man local gossips have down as a “confirmed bachelor”, has also reached the stage of being cared for around the clock, but the two old men enjoy regular catch-ups on their geriatric-friendly mobiles.[1]
That man in the shadows is not so far from some of those – including men married to wives they love or otherwise – in Love Lane. But Ture’s story is full of unknowns – for at his funeral Bo and his son meet a man from Gothenburg, whose story and relationship to Ture is told as a story, so that, even at the end, Bo feels there is much he does not know about Ture (that there may have been a hidden sexual partner), despite the fact that he knows that he is attracted only to men and that he visits other cities to find them and believed that was all there was to know. Why did Ture not confide this? The question remains explicitly unasked, and the answer becomes a new element of supposition when Bo felt both old men were past masking their real selves, but clearly were not. Issues like that that fill wormholes in the fabric of relationships run through this novel.
Bo’s relationship to Ture feels central. The sentence prior to the one of Gale’s I quoted above is about Bo’s wife, Frederika, whom at the novel’s current time ‘ no longer knows who he is and has been taken away to a dementia care home, imposing on Bo a kind of living bereavement’. But even the separation of the two relationships important to Bo leaves out some unknowns. At one point Bo remembers a time when, son Hans being away staying with others, he invites Ture to his home and wants everything to be good for him, for Frederika to make a good roast and so on. We get this deliberately underwritten scene:
‘Why does everything have to be so nice, just for him?’ you asked with your back to me, as you kneaded dough at the kitchen counter.
‘We always cook a good piece of meat for guests, don’t we?’ I asked, my eyes on the back of your head.
‘Pff,’ you replied, slapping the dough down with far more force than usual. We stood quietly for a minute or two, and I couldn’t work out why you seemed so annoyed. The cool autumn nights had arrived, so I made my way over to the stove and threw another log on to the fire.
‘A grown man who collects figures of mythical beasts?’ you snorted after a moment, turning around and fixing your eyes on me. You were waiting for an explanation, but I had no idea what I was supposed to explain.
I shook my head and closed the stove door. I thought that collecting little china figurines and hand-carved Storsjö Beasts was a bit strange too, but it also didn’t matter. Not enough to get worked up over, anyway.
‘What does he even want from you?’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, though I worked it out the minute the question left my mouth. I knew there had been plenty of rumours about Ture while you were growing up in Hissmofors, but he had never tried anything with me. He was a good friend, and that was that. ‘A load of rubbish, that’s what that is,’ I snapped.
You quickly turned around and started kneading the dough again.
I don’t know what you were thinking, but I got up from where I was crouched down in front of the stove, went through to the porch and came back with a few logs. How would it look if people started listening to all the local gossip?
‘Mmm,’ you mumbled, so quietly that I could barely hear you. ‘I just think you should be careful.’
I went back out to the porch, and pushed my feet into my boots to go outside and stack more wood. Still had a whole heap left to do, and it wouldn’t be long until the snow arrived.
Even accounting that this is a translation (by Alice Menzies), it is fine dramatic writing that bases its definite conflict in the unspoken that is guessable and in the unknown, such the breaks between its short paragraphs seem pregnant with the unspoken. Bo is a wonderful creation, for he often fills in the reasons for another’s response to him, as he pieces together the experience that Frederika must have had, though she never speaks it, of the gossip of the town, Hissmofors, from which she and Ture originated, and then directs his angry response to the person as if they had said much more than they did or represented that other source of injustice or hatred. This is true of life generally surely, given a sensitive enough receptor of experience such as Bo. But Bo’s ability to stop all thought and accept the continuing routine of his life and the natural cycles of the seasons on which that continuum is based. That dough takes a lot of beating and suppressed emotion from Frederika. And we certainly know here that Frederika too has complex emotions that cannot be summed up by communal homophobia and the suspicions that causes to arise. And those figurines of mythical beasts seem suddenly the focus of too much queer thought. This underwritten prose of dramatic silence and unstated material, and sometimes unknown material is typical. It starts with the start of the relationship.
Ture selects Bo, a man from the shop floor of the firm in which he is a senior manager, from amongst other men to choose as a potential friend to meet up with for reasons that never get stated nor openly thought about. Federika’s intense distrust and dislike of Ture at first (that we saw above), starts with contempt at the man’s belief in the Storsjö Beast ( a fantastical ‘unanimal’ produced from ‘tinkering by two trolls’, and in appearance ‘a cat-headed creature with a black serpentine body’ – although there were other versions), but then semi-expressed in terms of his supposed and conjectured queer sexuality that is not named, that in the time-scale of the novel’s flashbacks soften.
The Great Lake-Monster. Photograph by Andreas Eriksson – Självtaget, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4302731
Of the original prejudice based in Hissmofors communal gossip or of what drives the process of softening, we never get to know, nor is anything of it raised in discussion. Yet the story of meeting Ture Lindmann for the first time, as Bo remembers it, is full of unknowns and unusual features about which it is usual that people speculate or call ‘queer’, however they mean that term. Amongst a group Ture pays minimal notice of Bo. But after work when Bo is alone and hence outside of the ken of others, Ture approaches him unseen, from behind, taking advantage of Bo’s less sophisticated style and class. Clearly he has picked Bo out from the crowd and this becomes the start of what both of them see as a best friendship, involving hunting trips in a cabin in the woods, later with Bo’s son Hans, who treats Ture as a special person. Here is a part of the introduction:
At the end of that day, as I was walking back to my bike with weary arms, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
‘It’s Bo, right?’
I turned around and there he was, grinning at me. Ture’s teeth were so straight and white, and his moustache so neatly trimmed into a barely noticeable strip, he looked like some American actor.
‘Yup,’ I said with a nod, not knowing what else to say.
‘Y’know, it’s been a long time since I was last around here. Grew up in Hissmofors, but I’ve lived in Gothenburg for a good while and I’ve been out on the road,’ he said, doing up the top button on his coat. ‘So now I’m looking for friends. You fancy coming over to my place in town sometime?’
Gothenburg Pride rally 2027 available at https://www.gaytravel4u.com/event/west-pride-gothenburg/
It is difficult not to make something of the suave appearance of Ture Lindmann, the look of an ‘American actor’, a life-role where good looks in a man mattered and signify elementary attraction. It’s an early mention of Gothenburg (but definitively a much more anonymous place than where he has come to now, and where later Bo just assumes Ture meets men anonymously for sex when he visits. But his newness is a thin fact on what appears to be an arranged date at ‘my place’ between people of a different class and social circle. Bo dresses for the part. Their conversation turns to the Beast, that registers certainly as a kind of queer disturbance in Bo, a salutation to the uncanny that is so unconventional it might appear to Bo as ‘madness’:
‘You ever seen the Beast, then?’ he asked.
‘The Beast?’ I repeated, suddenly unsure. Maybe he really was mad after all.
‘You know, the Storsjö Beast,’ Ture explained, taking a bite of his almond tart. ‘I find it so interesting. Have done ever since I was a lad. I saw it while we were out on the steamboat one Midsummer.’
Ture pushed the remaining mazarin towards my cup.
‘Don’t be shy. They’re fantastic.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, lifting it from the plate. ‘I’ve never given the Beast much thought, to be honest.’ I took a bite of the little tart, which was so delicious it took me by surprise.
‘I just don’t know what they were thinking when they tried to catch it,’ said Ture. He seemed genuinely perplexed, even a little irritated. ‘Why would anyone want to hurt it? I mean, it’s never done us any harm, you know?’
He went on, telling me about all the different times he thought he had caught sight of the mysterious creature, and I found myself thinking that it was a little like being a child again, when Mother told me fairy tales about trolls in the forest. It gave me a comforting feeling deep in the pit of my stomach, and for a moment I forgot where I was.
None of my other friends from the mill were anything like Ture. There was just something about him that meant I didn’t have to try too hard, in the same way that I’d never needed to put on any airs around you.
As we read and reread this, Ture’s invocation of sympathy, perhaps even empathy, for the misunderstood Beast must seem to have a purpose, though none is ever explained nor revealed. Ture is associated with a boys fascination with tales told by a mother of the Swedish uncanny, ‘trolls’ and the like, that knit the two together in a bond of easy sympathy – a profound feeling of comfort in like natures knowing that they need be nothing other than they are. It is a feeling similar to Bo’s feeling for his own wife, the ‘you’ that he addresses here. But it is a resolution that does not cover up entirely those wormholes of which I spoke earlier. A wonderful passage is that in which Bo remembers his sexual closeness to Frederika once, prompted when one of the paid carers that visit Bo, Johanna, changes his bedding. Sexual closeness has ended since Frederika no longer knows who he is and because time is not just a natural cycle but also a serial motion towards necessary endings that, involving loss of bodily functions, are also harbingers of bodily death in toto. Into this passage memories of Ture intrude too opening up many unknowns, that resolve into a ‘Sixten-shaped hole’:
Johanna changed the bedding earlier, and I run a hand over the fresh sheets. Fiddle with the corner of the beige duvet cover and try to remember the last time you and I made love. The physical side of things slowly ebbed away into something different. I remember thinking about it, but I never said anything. What could I have said? We could no longer do it the way we used to.
I don’t even remember the last time I held you. Instead, the memories of you waving your arms and pushing me away have taken over. An embrace that quickly turned into a terrified look on your face.
‘What are you doing?’ you would shout, pushing me back.
As though I was a stranger who had hurt you. As though we hadn’t been living together for almost sixty years.
‘I miss it,’ Ture said once, back when we were still able to go down to the park to watch people and eat ice cream. Every now and again, he would subtly nod in the direction of men he’d taken a fancy to. To show me, I assume.
I lower my hand to my crotch. Soft and lifeless. Nothing happens when I touch it these days, but that doesn’t really bother me. I turn over in the hospital bed, on to my side. Cross my legs, then quickly roll on to the other side. My legs don’t seem to know where to place themselves, and my left hand suddenly feels unnecessary.
It’s always there, the Sixten-shaped hole. A nothingness that has amplified the emptiness you left behind. It’s strange, but when Hans took Sixten I started missing you even more. Almost as though it was you he’d taken.
You have to quote this novel in long passages if you are to have any sense of its magnificence. Otherwise the other facts about as stated by Gale – that it has no story, so to speak, overweigh one’s sense of what it might be. But here, the topic of sex is complicated by being subsumed into a lot of losses, things that are ‘missed’, as Bo misses his wife, their sexual lives in the past, and the response of his own ‘crotch’ to these thoughts so he ties this to the one mention of the fact that he and ure had talked about some issues of sexual loss for Ture too, though not the identity of the young man from Gothenburg who later attends his funeral. As you read this passage these losses elide into each other coming to be about Sixten in the end – the feel of his warm body pressed against Bo in his bed, the feel he dies having.
But the passage plays with unknows. Why would Ture include Bo in his nods to beautiful men: ‘To show me, I assume’. Since as assumption is not knowledge, that merely opens up gaps – what is Bo shown, and Why? How does it relate to the comprehension of the total of male sexuality. We can never know and perhaps never should. This is not a novel where we discover the roots of homosexuality in homosociality, as perhaps Love Lane is, but one which is all openness, indetermination ( I link to definition here since my spell-checker refuses the legitimacy of this word) and the acceptance thereof, falling into the closeness and shared mutual warmth of bodies, the holes filled by dogs. To me this is beautiful.
The alternative is the worrier – that person who fails to find the ability to suspend the need to resolve all unknowns and let them be. Hans is such a man, as Gale says, but so is Frederika of Ture at first – and perhaps so is Bo at points where he has no ability to contain what he feels in some kind of acceptance of what is, whether we understand it or not. Is it so bad to stop worrying about the absurdity of there being a Storsjö Beast, and accept the myth and even collect the figurines. Is it better to do so than worry about the outside chances of being found queer for that reason or indeed worry about being so? Gale ties worry to where I think it belongs in life, in the analysis of conventional patriarchal masculinity and its extended ideology. But rather than look at that myself, I will just quote Gale who is ‘good enough’ on the issue, in a manner that I could not better:
Bo is haunted by a peculiarly male anger – the scarring, remembered rages of his father and his own bursts of rage at his increasing lack of independence that somehow stops him telling Hans what he really feels. As Bo’s end draws near, he faces the twin challenges of keeping his beloved Sixten at his side and overcoming his masculine conditioning so as not to die with love unexpressed. (my emphasis)
In fact though I could not think that out better, I do find it over-resolved, as though this was a novel with a ‘moral’ that can be summarised like that implied in the words I emphasised in the quotation. It is all much more embodied in the reality of the imagined person the resolution this novel has. I would take a slightly different tack – but not so clear a one as Gale’s. But you must read the novel for yourself. Bo’s father is a wonderful creation – a more convincing patriarch than, even, the Agamemnon of Greek myth.
Love and death, those grand themes, are the object of worry – even of institutions based on a rationalisation of worrying, the state care system. Hans becomes a Tory to Bo’s great sadness, talks of people adopting responsibility for themselves and not awaiting the state’s beneficence, and being, he thinks, weakened by it, but while Bo has lived his life as a Scandinavian liberal, a believer in welfare states, he takes it taking away his responsibility, whilst Hans colludes with that object – of removing all risk, even positive risk. Yet the issue is that we either do or do not respect the fact that death is an experience that should, and in fact always will, belong to the person dying. Of course without his carers, Hans and grand-daughter, Ellinor (surely meant to stand for the author who based the novel on the notes left by her grandfather’s paid carers after his death) that ‘good death’ Bo experiences – with Sixten brought in to lie on his bed whilst he passes, would not have happened. But that is an assumption. As Gale writes:
The plot, such as it is, involves Bo becoming ever frailer and Hans threatening to have Sixten rehomed, now that walking a dog in rugged terrain has become too perilous for a man prone to falling over. However, almost from the first page, Bo’s first-person, present-tense narrative is enriched by repeated dreamlike digressions. These take us out of the grim present realities of adult nappies, phlegm cups and frozen ready meals into stories of a country boyhood overshadowed by a cruel and brutal father, the happy marriage into which young Bo escaped, the adorable little boy Hans was before he somehow turned into an overweight, fretful bully, and Bo’s long friendship and regular fishing trips with the ambiguous Ture (my emphasis).
Those dreamlike digressions are not unlike the end, held in the spaces between dream, day-dream and waking life, such that sensations as well as thoughts and actions might well be imaginations, even though he may not have had consistently an imaginative nature, one of things Bo notes about Ture, in relation to Beasts and all that. When he asks Ture about Why Hans worries so much and he doesn’t, Ture says:
‘You’re the opposite,’ he observed. ‘That type of stress doesn’t affect people like you.’
I didn’t ask him what he meant at the time – we started talking about something else – but now I’m wondering: people like me? What kind of person am I?
It’s classic Ture to say something like that, analysing or whatever it’s called. His imagination takes him all over the place, and sometimes he just makes things up.
Of things ‘made up’, fiction is born, whilst still claiming, since fiction first existed that fiction holds truth that linear series of ‘facts’ do not. This novel is one where Bo’s imagination ‘takes him all over the place’ in space-time, literally – when he walks Sixten and loses him to his doggy elk-hunting predilection, and imaginatively where memory and fiction meet. Take this wonderful passage where Ingrid, his favourite paid carer, asks Bo why he was out posting a letter to his wife who would be unable to read it:
‘You said you went out to post a letter to Fredrika the other night. What did you write?’
‘Oh,’ I say, though I feel the weight on my chest lift.
Ingrid’s eyes are still on me.
‘It was a dream,’ I say. ‘Or a memory, really. I guess you could say I dreamed about a memory.’
I cough and spit into my cup. Ingrid hands me a piece of kitchen roll.
You have to include the gritty reality of the last sentence I quote here, but this novel is about how the dream-imaginary relates to memory, and memory relates to the spoken and then the transcribed interpretation of direct experience and current beliefs. And it is all that that makes the ending of the novel tearful to me. At last Bo owns Sixten – not because he had fabulous paid carers and a loving family, though these must never be discounted (I once was a worker with carers after all) – but because Sixten takes over the darkness of the failing senses in death and presses his hot body in reassurance against Bo. To ask if that experience is ‘real’ is trivial. What Bo owns is the redeeming imagination. If I pay to anything to be available to me when death comes, I pray to and for that. Here’s a couple of head and tail extracts from the full passage:
I hear the clicking of claws and smell his familiar scent before my palm even registers his soft fur.
‘Do you really think he knows?’ Hans asks.
‘I’m sure of it,’ says Ingrid.
…
It’s dark, and I can’t see a thing, but the scent of Sixten’s coat finds its way in, causing something inside me to shift. To be rearranged. I feel his damp nose digging beneath my palm, and he presses himself against my body. Everything is crystal clear.
A window opens, and I hear the cranes gathering to fly south.
Imagination is that which reconfigures and re-arranges as much as it invents, and in doing so it accepts truths that worriers, who cannot intervene into their worry and insistence on responsibility to a thin and narrow self , to accept. I cried because it was beautiful but also because, for an atheist like myself, it offered hope that death could be significant without magical thinking going beyond its remit and becoming the ideology that is institutional religion and dogged insistence that there HAS TO BE an afterlife. Or –
I was afraid of the dark, once Worried about what it hid. Death in fact hides nothing in its dark That darkening of the senses does not take away, Promising nothing in return: That’s a blessing.
That’s all for now
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[1] Patrick Gale (2026) ‘When the Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén review – a novel anyone will take to heart’ in The Guardian (Wed 30 Jul 2025 07.00 BST Last modified on Thu 31 Jul 2025 12.58 BST) available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/30/when-the-cranes-fly-south-by-lisa-ridzen-review-a-novel-anyone-will-take-to-heart
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