Thank you Netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I am struggling to decide how I feel about this book. There are lots of things about it I like very much. The language, the descriptions, the film references, the setting. I'm struggling to put my finger on what is niggling me and I think I was disappointed by the ending. Or, at least, what I took to be the ending, as the ending could be one of several things. I also don't think it was ever cleared up what was going on in the passages... I think I've come away feeling quite confused about why the backstory worth Greta, Anne and Karri was what it was. I probably need to give it another read to get it fully - but the fact that I enjoyed it enough to be willing to give it a second read at some point is a very positive statement :)

I was hopelessly in love with the book by the time I finished the first two sentences. <i>"Publisher Olli Suominen spent the rainy days of autumn buying umbrellas and forgetting them all around Jyväskylä. He also accidentally joined a film club."</i> And then it got better.

At first, the story mostly relies on the sarcastically comical effect of exaggeratedly straightforward sentences describing excessively mundane life of the main hero, like here: <i>"Sometimes there was the occasional street musician along the way. Today there was a ragged accordionist on the corner playing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Olli dropped two euros in his accordion case. The playing intensified. The accordionist wanted to give him his money’s worth."</i>, or here: <i>"Aino was sitting on the sofa correcting tests. She was wearing loose green sweats. The television was showing a programme about the everyday life of a family. The children screamed and refused to do what their parents told them. A psychologist gave them some advice. The children’s behaviour improved."</i>. 

But slowly, slowly the hint of distraction for Olli in the form of <i>"A Guide to the Cinematic Life"</i>, a book by Greta Kara, seeps in, together with the dark undercurrent in the form of Olli's memories about his childhood summers spent exploring secret passages under Jyväskylä (<i>"Life and death feel smaller in the passageways than they do above ground. That makes moving underground easier, but it’s also one of the greatest dangers of the secret passages. Under the ground, it would be easy to forget yourself"</i>). The detailed descriptions of Olli's dreams add a layer of surreal, which gradually blends the comical, the romantic, and the dark.

And by mid-book, the darkness and the surreal has taken over almost completely, what seemed a comical now becomes dramatic and devastating, and the crawling in secret underground passages turns into transformation and rebirth. <i>"In the nick of time, he gets a hold of that self and starts moving again, crawling forward for a time with his head humming empty. Eventually he finds his name, straggling somewhere behind him, more than half disconnected. He gets hold of his Olliness and continues crawling, starts to collect himself from memories scattered in the dark passageway, and put his life back together one piece at a time"</i>. This, then, is the essence of the book - looking for the self.

I could go on and on about the things I liked in the book, from the unusual movie references and characters trying to awaken their "cinematic" selves, to masterful turning Facebook into almost a character in its own right, to rich and mature prose (<i>"She knows how to choose her words skilfully. Her talk brings the past closer, close enough to touch the present, like the hand of a beloved"</i>). But, as Olli observes early in the book, <i>"A good film left a trace in the mind, like wine. You had to taste it before rushing back to your ordinary life"</i>. I'm still enjoying the taste of "Secret Passages in a Hillside Town".

When I started this book, I was wondering when I would finish this book. I thought of stop reading this book and pick something else. But in most of the cases, I would finish the book once I start reading it. So I stuck with it.

As I read through the book, I felt that story is not going anywhere. And because of the magic realism mixed with the unreliable narration, it was hard to distinguish where reality ended and fantasy began.But as I continued, at sometimes story made sense. The book is boring at most of the times probably because of the difficult to draw the line between fantasy and reality.

It is a confusingly weird book.

A few years back I had read Jääskeläinen’s The Rabbit Back Literature Society. That novel had been compared to “Twin Peaks meeting the Brothers Grimm” and was a dark and cryptic work which hovered rather awkwardly between outright supernatural fiction and magical realism. I had found this ‘ambivalence’ ultimately disappointing, but the novel was intriguing enough to make me want to sample the author’s latest offering, recently translated into English by Lola Rogers. 

In its initial chapters, this novel seemed quite different from its predecessor, apart from its small-town setting and “bookish” background. Indeed, it starts off as a gentle, if quirky, tale of mid-life romance. Olli Suominen, the head of a publishing company based in Jyväskylä, is going through a minor crisis. Book sales are not what they used to be and, as far as family-life is concerned, he seems to be growing distant from his wife and young son. Through Facebook, he gets in touch with Greta Kara, an old flame who has since become the bestselling author of an influential self-help guide to “living a cinematic life”. He somehow convinces her to issue her next book – a ‘magical’ travel book about Jyväskylä – through his publishing house. This promises to boost Olli’s business – and amorous - prospects.

But Olli’s Facebook exchanges with Greta also rekindle memories of another group of childhood acquantainces – the three Blomroos siblings and their cousin Karri. Together with Timi, Olli’s dog, they formed a Finnish equivalent of the Famous Five. In true Enid Blyton fashion, they spent their summer holidays together, shared long, glorious, sunny days on riverside picnics and solved mysteries along the way. Typically, they also explored secret passages. And here things start to get weird, because unlike the relatively workaday secret passages in Blyton’s novels, the Toulura tunnels seem to warp reality and cause time to go completely off-kilter. Unsurprisingly, Olli’s memories of the secret passages are vague and confused, but we eventually learn that they were the theatre for shocking happenings shared by Greta and the Tourula Five. 

Whether you will enjoy the novel from this point forward will depend on how crazy you like your fiction to be. In my case, I generally prefer novels which follow an internal logic, however strange their premise might be. And to be honest, it was sometimes difficult to understand where this book was going . But it still hooked me to the last chapter. Or chapters, given that the novel rather puzzlingly presents us with an alternative ending – probably a nod to “alternate movie endings” which are sometimes available on DVDs of certain movies. 

So, how should we interpret Secret Passages? Should we take it at face value as a work of supernatural fiction? Or is this actually realist fiction, using elements of fantasy to give us a glimpse of the workings of Olli’s mind? Is the book a satire on modern life which, thanks to social media, seems to be all about living a “cinematic life” worth sharing with the world at large? Or is this an adult parody of Enid Blyton mysteries, particularly the underlying gender politics simmering below their surface? Perhaps it’s all of this, but it makes for a wild and crazy ride.

There was a point where I found myself wondering why I was still reading this book but luckily I stuck with it. The story got better about a third of the way in and then I was fully sucked into the narrative. 

Overall this was a crazy read. Yes the twist was painfully obvious but the story was intriguing. A bit dated now though because Facebook is no longer a new thing. 

I do wonder if some of the narrative was lost in translation. Since I can't read Finnish I will never know.

Thank you Netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
I first wanted to read this book because of the colorful cover.
Then I read the first sentence:

Publisher Olli Suominen spent the rainy days if autumn buying umbrellas and forgetting them all around Jyvaskyla. He also accidentally joined a film club.

and was ready to plunge in as soon as possible.

I liked it a lot, even though it's not my usual kind of book.

Spending time between the pages of this story was like living through a dark and wet winter in Finland.