It's Not Your Fault; We Deserve A Second Chance

I really enjoyed the dark comic wit that is 'Anxious People' (2019) by Fredrik Backman. The book was quite a delight to read. 

I'm sure many readers would have also watched the Swedish mini-series on Netflix that has been adapted from the book. The six-episode series directed by Felix Herngren was released in 2021. I like both the book and the tv series almost equally. One was well thought-out and written; the other was well produced and filmed. Good acting. 

A day before New Year's Eve, a desperate 39-year-old mother who needed to pay rent to avoid losing custody of her children attempted to rob a bank, only to discover that it didn't have cash. She fled into a nearby apartment building, stumbling into one with an open house. With a toy gun, she took a group of strangers (eight prospective buyers) hostage.

The police swarmed the outside of the building. A gunshot goes off, the apartment was covered in blood, and the woman-robber went missing. The scenes were set. We followed these released hostages to the police station to hear them give accounts of what happened. 

This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it's always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is. Especially if you have other people you're trying to be a reasonably good human being for.

Because there's such an unbelievable amount that we're all supposed to be able to cope with these days. You're supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you're supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks.

Through police interviews thankfully written and told chronologically so that I don't get confused, it's eventually revealed that the hostages swapped clothing and aided her to escape. Even a police officer got involved. 

These eight people are so different. We hear all of their stories, whether we like it or not. We gotta wade through their backgrounds in order to understand their actions and the ultimate ending to this story. We have young married and pregnant, and anxious couple Julia and Ro. There are the older wealthy married couple Anna-Lena and Roger who have a strained relationship, and tried to salvage the marriage and cope by flipping apartments in order to find their perfect home. We have calm and collected bank executive Zara in her fifities who's dealing with grief and guilt over a past client who died by suicide; we have Zara's psychologist Estelle who's an elderly, wise and eccentric widow. There's Lennart, an actor hired to act as a potential buyer to boost the property's appeal. Then, there's the incompetent and optimistic realtor at 'How's Tricks' hosting the open house. 

Then we have the two policemen who are a pair of father and son — an older Jim and a younger Jack. How Jim chose to handle the bank robber led to the ultimate resolution in the story. He had stood in the stairwell, and let the robber escape into the next apartment. The blood in the apartment was stage blood.

'Roger's right. We just have to play dumb. We can say you never took the mask off, so we can't give a description'

.....................

'Who helped her get out if it wasn't us?' Roger wants to know, eager for correct information.

No one has an answer to that, but Estelle looks down at her phone, reads a text message, and nods slowly. Then she smiles, relieved. 'She says she's okay/'

Anna-Lena smiles at that.

'Say hi from us.'

Estelle says she will.

And the bank robber got away, and found solace and stability in a new home, in the apartment of a very "kind and just-crazy enough old lady named Estelle". Years later, they're all okay. All of them. There're so many layers to this story for us to mull over. 

We celebrate very human themes of sympathy, empathy, past positive connections, about what it means to 'lend a hand'. Everyone has an internal battle and our own anxieties. However, in this story, in this unforseen event, everyone came together to 'help', and really 'helped'.