16 SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020“LIKE I SAID,a doctor needs to reach a ver-
dict based on the evidence at the crime
scene. But as things stand, everything
points toward the same explanation: that
your ex-husband, Jack, has killed your
daughter.” So begins “The Golden Cage,”
similar in name to two early-20th-century
paintings: one of a shackled female, an-
other of a high society woman confined to
the household, a prisoner of the patriarchy.
In the latter, the woman stares longingly at
partygoers outside, envious of their free-
dom. The title of Camilla Lackberg’s latest
novel could not be more apt.
When we meet Faye, she seems to have
a life others would envy: a happy marriage
to Jack Adelheim, millionaire entrepre-
neur and chief executive of the thriving in-
vestment company Compare; an apart-
ment in an affluent part of Stockholm
where, when it comes to décor, “absolutely
no expense had been spared”; designer
clothes; afternoons spent hobnobbing
with the elite; a perfect child.
The more discerning eye can see, how-
ever, that though Faye lives a lavish life-
style, her personal freedoms are nil. She’s
dependent on Jack, who is handsome and
refined, a man from the upper crust who
believes image is everything. What he
wants from a wife is obedience, reverence,
beauty. His wife appears happy to oblige.
Faye, a once prodigious student at the
Stockholm School of Economics, where
she met Jack and his future business part-
ner, Henrik, is no doormat. In fact, Com-
pare’s immense success is due largely to
her own insights into the company, as well
as personal sacrifices made so that Jack,
and consequently her marriage, could suc-
ceed.
But as the company flourished, Faye’s
contributions to Compare were quicklyomitted: “Her part in the story didn’t fit the
media image of the two young, daring, in-
domitable entrepreneurs, Jack and Hen-
rik.” Instead, Faye was relegated to the
role of submissive housewife, her rank in
her husband’s life dropping below his
career. Jack himself changed, from
“the carefree golden boy” whom
Faye met in school to a man who
is self-absorbed and unkind.
In time, his cruelty becomes
unbearable.
As it happens, marrying Jack
Adelheim isn’t the first misfor-
tune in Faye’s life. A troubled
past, revealed intermittently,
tells of Faye’s former self, Matilda, sub-
jected to cruelty at the hands of her father,
a volatile man who left his family in ruins.
Shortly after graduating from high school,
Matilda escaped Fjallbacka, the small fish-
ing village where she was raised, and
moved to Stockholm to restart her life. “My
new identity as Faye gave me strength,”
she says — a declaration proved true when
a scorned lover threatens to reveal Matil-
da’s deepest secrets. Only then does Faye
make known what she’s capable of, an actthat foreshadows what will happen when
Jack’s callous depravity pushes her over
the edge. In short, men who hurt, entrap
and objectify women and girls will be
shown no mercy by Faye Adelheim. Her di-
vorce from Jack and the subsequent
creation of a company aptly named
Revenge are only the beginnings
of a shrewd and unforgiving plan
she’s hatched in this novel of fe-
male empowerment and tri-
umph over the patriarchy.
It would be remiss not to men-
tion the theme of sisterhood in
this smart, unflinching novel,
seamlessly translated from the
Swedish by Neil Smith. Women in it are
rarely pitted against one another, but are
instead united by common experience.
Their friendships are empowering in and
of themselves, and the dispensability of the
opposite sex — except perhaps for sexual
pleasure — speaks volumes. Honest, solici-
tous men are few and far between but,
when they do appear, Lackberg sings their
praises, suggesting a war waged not
against all men, but only those who encum-
ber and exploit women. 0The Keys to the Kingdom
In this thriller, a woman takes matters into her own hands.
By MARY KUBICA
MARY KUBICAis the best-selling author of six
psychological suspense novels, including her
latest, “The Other Mrs.”
THE GOLDEN CAGE
By Camilla Lackberg
Translated by Neil Smith
352 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MAGNUS RAGNVIDCamilla LackbergFOR A GROUPof boys in a bleak, unloved
town in England, lucid dreaming has an ob-
vious appeal. At 15, they have noticed that
none of the adults around them seem par-
ticularly happy, and that their own lives
are unlikely to be much different. Once
they learn to become aware during a
dream, the boys can then decide its course:
“You can do anything you want, live any
experience you want, make your dream
world exactly how you want it to be. Any-
thing you can think of can be real.”
In “The Shadows,” lucid dreaming acts
as a sort of fire accelerant on adolescence.
The boys seize on it in a bid to avoid the
compromised world of adults, and their
own constricted circumstances. You can’t
really blame them. As our protagonist,
Paul, explains: “Teenagers were not ratio-
nal, was the point, and the world was not
always kind to them.”
Their ringleader, Charlie, is a mannered,
articulate outsider, with the confidence to
stop a school bully by saying, coolly, “I
dreamed about you last night,” which, as it
turns out, is a fairly alarming thing to hear
during a fight. His intensity is magnetic,
but becomes ever more worrying.
Charlie has a plan to escape into a luciddream forever — though that will require a
sacrifice, a murder. Afterward, Charlie and
his accomplice, Billy, lie down in the woods
and take sleeping pills, convinced they will
wake in “the land of dreams.” Billy is found
hours later, covered in blood, clutching his
dream diary and a knife, but Charlie has
vanished. Is he still alive? Or did the plan
somehow work?
It is to Alex North’s credit, in this as-
sured thriller, that both options seem plau-
sible. Now in his 40s, Paul returns home af-
ter a copycat murder in another town. As
the narrative shifts between past and
present, the boys’ motives for wanting to
escape, and their connections to one an-
other, become deeper and more compli-
cated.
North has an eye for moments of skewed
dailiness, describing a man in “a battered
old fatigue coat, the shoulders worn away
like feathers,” and a forest where mines
have collapsed, “leaving the trees leaning
at angles, forming shattered crosses above
crumbling pits.” These visual details are so
effective that the more explicit beats of
foreboding feel extraneous. The set-piece
scenes — that school fight, a visit to a sus-
pect’s house — are beautifully paced and
surprising. As in his debut, “The WhisperMan,” North is aware of how a good horror
novel can subtly rearrange a reader’s sur-
roundings, charging them with menace,
and he nods to the tradition with refer-
ences to “The Monkey’s Paw” and “The
Shining.”
Another schoolmate, Jenny, mentions
having read every book by Stephen King,
“most of them two or three times,” and
cheerfully submits a story to her creative
writing club about a man eaten by his dog.
Jenny is self-sufficient, capable and wry,
and enormously winning. When she re-
appears as an adult, sipping white wine in
a leather jacket and expensive boots, we
are delighted to learn that she has become
a writer, but uneasy about why, exactly, she
has published her books under a pseudo-
nym.
This is absorbing, headlong reading, a
play on classic horror with an inventive-
ness of its own. In the third act, a revelation
upends both the entire narrative and its
emotional valence. Such a major double-
cross is risky. Somehow, though, the twist
comes across not as a metafictional, autho-
rial intervention, but as the work of a char-
acter struggling to survive a grinding loss.
As with all the best illusions, you are left
feeling not tricked, but full of wonder. 0Dream Team
Bored adolescents turn to lucid dreaming — and murder.
By FLYNN BERRY
THE SHADOWS
By Alex North
336 pp. Celadon. $26.99.
FLYNN BERRYis the author of the novels “Under
the Harrow” and “A Double Life,” and the
forthcoming “Northern Spy.”
THE HEADS OF STATE