Anxious People plot summary
Seven strangers are caught up in a hostage situation. Trapped in an apartment with a gun-wielding bank robber, while a father-and-son police duo try to negotiate their release. But is a bank robber a bank robber if they couldn’t actually rob the bank? And is a hostage situation really a hostage situation if it occurred completely by accident? And how seriously can you really take someone wielding a gun if the gun might not even be real? As is so often the case in life, nothing in Anxious People is quite what it seems. Unfortunately, the stakes are still terrifyingly high. And good intentions aren’t always enough to protect you from the fallout of a string of truly terrible decisions.
My thoughts on Anxious People
Anxious People, by Fredrik Backman, is a hard book to pin down. Part social commentary, part exploration of mental health, part mystery, part farce – and entirely strange. It’s highly stylised, with characters painted in very broad strokes and a strong narrative voice.
The beginning of the book focuses on setting up its basic position: people are idiots because life is hard. You’re introduced to the failed bank robber and the father-and-son police duo who worked on getting the bank robber’s hostages released. There’s some moving backwards and forwards in time throughout the story. You see police interviews from after the hostage situation has been resolved, wherein the police are trying to work out what happened to the bank robber. You see the bank robber and the strangers in the apartment, and you see bits of background for various characters to explain who they are and what they’re all about.
Anxious People has a lot of characters
… And most of them are anxious, unsurprisingly. This is a book where a lot of the characters are dealing with some kind of emotional baggage or mental health issue, and they’re described with great care and attention. There are some interesting connections between characters that come out over the course of the book, both inside and outside the apartment.
Relationship between the father and son was fun, although like everything else in this book it was dialled up to 11 which for me made it harder to empathise with them. I did get there eventually, and by the end of the book I was reasonably invested in them both. But it took a really long time for me to stop finding them both infuriating.
The characters do all feel distinct. I didn’t always manage to keep them all in my head, and had to do some flipping back to introductions to make sure I was picturing the right person at some points. But they all felt like individual characters, rather than blending together into the kind of amorphous blob of supporting characters that you sometimes see in books with this many equally weighted characters.
I had a hard time connecting with the book
Ultimately, I wasn’t sure what it was trying to achieve. This isn’t usually a dealbreaker for me! But I felt like the author was working hard to send some kind of message. For me, because everything was so heightened and the characters seemed designed to wind me up, I didn’t feel like the narrative moments landed. But the book didn’t seem to be completely leaning the other way – into an exploration of ideas or morals or anything really. I may be wrong of course, but it felt like the author wanted us to care, even as he spent most of the book setting up characters who I wanted to get as much distance from as possible.
By the end I’d warmed a little to some of the characters, enough to appreciate that the ending tied things off reasonably smoothly. But if anything that left me more bewildered as to the point of the book. If it was meant to be an uncomfortable look at societal issues, why try and give it a pleasant ending? Or, if it was meant to be narratively satisfying, why make it such hard work?
It felt very stylised, and I think at the end of the day this particular style just isn’t for me. I think the writing is technically good, it definitely took an angle and committed to it, which I respect. It just grated on me.
In conclusion…
Humour in books can be really tricky. This one just didn’t agree with me. I didn’t hate Anxious People; I thought it was quite sweet in parts. Some parts made me laugh. But for at least the first half of the book I was dragging myself through it. Eventually I did warm up to some of the characters enough that it stopped feeling so painful (although I don’t remember liking a single police interview, they were unfailingly irritating), and some of the moments in the apartment that came out later were genuinely touching.
Was it enough to justify the frustration of the first chunk of the book? I don’t know. Did the first bit of the book being so overwhelmingly annoying do anything to enhance the end of the book? Personally, I don’t think so. My impression is that the author was going for something surreal, using heightened characters and situations to bring home a message with real emotional weight. And, for me, that didn’t work all that well.
But let me know if you disagreed! I know a lot of people really love this book, and I’m curious to know whether it’s purely a preference thing or whether there’s something other people are seeing in it that I missed.
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