The Winners

 

The Winners by Fredrik Backman

Fredrik Backman is one of my favorite authors. I can pretty much settle in with one of his books and know I’m going to like it, even when the subject is hockey. So now you know. I never understood hockey, it moved so fast (yet I complain about baseball because it moves so slow!) While I expect in Sweden hockey is a huge part of life, here in The Winners, it’s the backdrop to life, a metaphor for any of us especially in the U.S. as we come from one election to the other. There was too much in this that resonated and not well.

The series begins with Beartown, continues with Us Against You and finishes with this, The Winners. In the beginning we are introduced to the towns of Beartown and Hed, small secluded towns separated by a forest and fealty to their teams. Hockey demands much of its players, fans and sponsoring towns. We won’t even talk about the players. There is one team, and that is one’s own. Everyone else is to be beaten. And always on any team there is the star, the one to be revered, protected, emulated, and beaten. And this is high school hockey.

In Beartown, something happens to bring down the promise of the national championship, something that tears apart the town, the hockey club, the loyalties to families and each other. This event changes everything for everyone because now, the people of both towns much choose. Are you loyal to your family? To your team? To your town? To yourself?

We’ve all heard the saying, “what cost loyalty?” Because of the backlash of loyalty businesses fail, one of the towns is on the brink of failing, fearing the loss of their team and rink. This could mean merging the teams of Hed and Beartown and no one will tolerate that.

And then there’s a crack in the armor surrounding the towns. People who have left to escape come home and all over again, wounds are opened. But this time, there is a winner, this time loyalty reaches a fever pitch that can only have one outcome after the people of Hed and Beartown do unspeakable things to each other.

There has to be a limit, doesn’t there? A limit to what we do to each other before someone blinks and realizes what they’ve been doing? For me this was a hard book to read, living in the U.S. and watching the news every night and seeing what we are doing to each other. I wondered as I read The Winners what our breaking point would be because so many times in the past few years I’ve wondered  when enough was going to be enough. And apparently we haven’t gotten there yet. We are still swamped in Us Against You.

To read these three books is not to read about hockey, it’s to read about us. Against you. And we long for The Winners.