The narrator seems multiple, often taking on the voices of the characters, but also having an omniscient voice of someone who belongs to the town and comments upon what the town people think, feel, and do. This combined with a continuous third person present narrator gives an immediacy and contemporaneity to the events of the text. The novel delves into the thought processes of the characters, often through a remarkable use of free indirect discourse. From almost the very beginning you are being dragged into the town, and given how the novel highlights interconnectivity, the way in which everybody’s actions affect everyone else, it might just inspire a sense of complicity within the reader. What makes it an affective mode of address is that it carries the abrupt, no-nonsense tone of voice that one associates with Beartown as one continues to read the novel. Asking questions of the reader is a common device through all three books in the series, and it has lost none of its confrontational manner. This is one of the strengths of the novel, and one of the ways in which the novel is structured the narrative voices want you to understand, indeed takes it as a condition for your presence as a reader of the text. “Do you want to understand the people who live in two hockey towns? Really understand them? Then you need to know the worst that they are capable of,” (8) the narrator states. Readers should not worry if they have not read the previous two books, as there is enough recapping to understand the various motivations of the characters.

Rather, it acts as a way of understanding the characters and the way they see, and interact with, the world. Whilst it is central to life in Beartown, detailed depictions of the games or the statistics are not present here.

Readers should not expect a novel which focuses primarily on ice hockey. Through all this, the novel comments upon masculinity in sports, the ways in which sports can exclude and include, and parenthood and mental health. There is violence (physical and verbal) both inside and outside the rink, corruption at the club, a devious politician, ambitious journalists, a young boy seeking revenge, and dreams of ice hockey stardom. Fredrik Backman’s The Winners is the third novel in a three-book series about the fictional Swedish town, Beartown, in which life revolves around the ice hockey team and its rivalry with that of the nearby town, Hed.

Winners fredrik backman