The Winners

By Fredrik Backman
Atria Books, 2022, 688 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, Dec. 3, 2022

“Never underestimate a dad who’s trying to be forgiven, he’s capable of anything.”

That’s from page 183 of “The Winners,” Fredrik Backman’s “Beartown” trilogy finale, an exhaustive consideration of sin, redemption, forgiveness, heroism and love wrapped inexplicably around two remote forest towns connected by their respective love for their hockey teams and hatred of each other.

The story is so complicated I don’t know quite how to explain it, so sad that I am still trying to feel all of it, and so beautiful today’s sunset has conceded.

“The Winners.” An ironic name because the only winners in the tale are those who suffered the greatest losses, those who sinned so horrendously that only a great act of atonement could save them, those who loved deeply only after losing love. In that is the yin and yang of the story, played out in even the smallest detail, Beartown’s green jerseys complementary to their rival’s red sweaters. Maya, who

suffered the greatest loss in the first book, finds redemption and justice in the third. Her father, Peter, the one who’s capable of anything, atones. Lev, the gangster, does the right thing in the end; Alicia, the most vulnerable, becomes the unstoppable.

Heads and tails: Hed, the rival town. Tails, the nickname of the man who runs Beartown.

Backman challenges us to reconsider our perceptions of winners and losers in a setting in which those definitions are clearly established. The team that scores the most goals wins, but even in that Backman fogs it up. In a book set around a hockey rink, not a single game is played. We don’t know who wins.

As Backman mines his flawed, perfect, characters struggling with their marriages, their regrets, their hopes, their friendships and their hatreds, he carries us through their lives with such literary finesse it’s impossible to know if we should be worrying about Mumble’s inner turmoil or admiring the prose describing it:

“Summer is long dead, but tonight is when we lose our memory of it, the last light slides away and a sack is pulled over the town. Tomorrow suddenly our fingers won’t remember life without gloves, our ears can’t quite remember the sound of birdsong and the soles of our feet have forgotten all about the puddles that don’t crunch when we step on them.”

Kira, the mother, wife and lawyer, is sent to Hed to persuade Hannah, the mother, wife and midwife, to join forces. In a single dependent clause, Backman puts in our head a Life magazine photo: She smiles awkwardly. Rubs her sweaty palms together. Hannah leans on her son’s hockey stick with an expression as if Kira were there to persuade her to change her religion.

Even in Backman’s analogies we’re pushed to see things differently. The aged Sune sees Peter, the one who made it all the way to the rough-and-tumble NHL, as nature’s delicate gift: Peter is the most beautiful cherry tree Sune has seen in Beartown, that was how he used to think of the very greatest talents: pink blossoms breaking into flower against all the odds in the middle of a frozen garden. But, with another floral analogy, Backman also reminds us that flowers are only unbreakable when they’re soft: … it was probably good to be soft, because then you didn’t break when you fell. Like flower petals. Perhaps that’s what happened to her, she grew hard, the way a rose that freezes to ice can be shattered with a hammer.

Who thinks of shattering a rose with a hammer? No one, until they read Backman. We see in his characters the fears we harbor and the love we withhold, but we also see the nobility and selflessness of which we’re capable. Proceed with caution, though. As Backman wrote in this story, “Most people don’t want to know the truth about themselves.”

We feel their hopes, their desperation, their regrets and their desire for redemption. We see love in the bang of a child shooting a hockey puck against a wall and hate in the bang of a child firing a gun at an enemy.

In the end, we see ourselves, but only barely. We’re too busy mopping away the tears in the final 20 pages to really see much of anything very clearly. But we can feel everything. Oh, my, how we can feel everything.

"The Winners" can be read as a stand-alone novel, but the Beartown series is a trilogy, with 2016’s “Beartown” and 2017’s “Us Against You” preceding. When something's this good, though, why skip any of it?

Backman concludes his acknowledgements with this: Finally: To you who have read the whole of this saga, I’d just like to say that I hope it gave you something, because I gave it absolutely everything I had.

And I wanted to reply: “Oh, yes. Yes, thank you. You have given me so much.”

Editor’s note: If you are interested in “Beartown,” the first in the series, you can read reviews here by both Ted Streuli and Sue Fountain: https://sites.google.com/view/copperclappercaperreviews/home/sports-fiction