The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man Read online

  Copyright

  4th Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.4thEstate.co.uk

  This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

  Copyright © Jonas Jonasson 2018, first published by Piratförlaget, Sweden, and upon agreement with Brandt New Agency

  Translation copyright © Rachel Willson-Broyles 2018

  Cover based on a series design by Jonathan Pelham

  Jonas Jonasson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

  This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN 9780008275570

  Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008275587

  Version: 2018-07-24

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Indonesia

  Indonesia

  Indonesia

  The Indian Ocean

  The Indian Ocean

  Congo

  North Korea

  USA, North Korea

  The Indian Ocean

  The Indian Ocean

  Tanzania

  North Korea

  North Korea

  North Korea

  South Korea

  North Korea

  USA

  Switzerland, USA

  North Korea

  North Korea

  USA

  USA

  USA

  USA, Sweden

  Sweden

  Indonesia

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  USA

  Sweden

  Russia

  Sweden, Germany

  Germany

  Denmark, Sweden

  Russia

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Russia

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden

  Sweden, Denmark

  Russia

  Denmark

  Sweden

  Denmark, Sweden, Germany

  Germany

  Russia

  Tanzania

  Congo

  Tanzania

  Tanzania, Kenya

  Tanzania, Kenya

  Kenya

  Kenya

  Congo

  Kenya

  Kenya

  Indonesia

  Kenya, Germany

  Kenya

  Kenya, Madagascar

  Kenya, Germany

  Germany

  Kenya

  Sweden

  Madagascar, North Korea, Australia, USA, Russia

  Sweden, USA, Russia

  Kenya

  Extra thanks to:

  Also by Jonas Jonasson

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  I AM JONAS JONASSON and I want to explain myself.

  There was never meant to be a sequel to the story of the hundred-year-old man who climbed out of a window and disappeared. Many people wanted one, not least the protagonist, Allan Karlsson, who kept strolling around inside my head and calling attention to himself whenever he wished.

  ‘Mr Jonasson,’ he might say, out of nowhere, as I was busy with my own thoughts. ‘Have you changed your mind yet, Mr Jonasson? Don’t you want to have another round before I’m really old?’

  No, I didn’t. I’d already said everything I wanted to say about what was perhaps the most miserable century ever. The idea had been that if we reminded one another of all the shortcomings of the twentieth century, maybe it would make us better at remembering and less inclined to make at least those mistakes again. I packaged this message of mine with warmth and humour. Soon the book spread all over the world.

  It sure as hell didn’t make the world a better place.

  Time passed. My inner Allan stopped getting in touch. All the while, humanity kept moving forwards, or whatever direction it was moving in. Event after event filled me with the sense that the world was more incomplete than ever. All the while, I was just an onlooker.

  More and more I started to feel the need to speak up again, in my own way. Or Allan’s. One day I heard myself asking Allan straight out whether he was still with me.

  ‘Yes, I’m here,’ he said. ‘What might you have on your mind, Mr Jonasson, after such a long time?’

  ‘I need you,’ I said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For telling it like it is and, indirectly, how it ought to be.’

  ‘About everything?’

  ‘About more or less everything.’

  ‘Mr Jonasson, you understand that won’t help, right?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Good. Count me in.’

  * * *

  RIGHT, THERE’S ONE MORE THING. This is a novel about recent and present events. I make use of a number of public political figures in the plot, and of people in their immediate vicinity. Most of the characters in the book go by their real names. Others, I have spared.

  Since these leaders sometimes look down upon, rather than up at, ordinary folks, it’s reasonable to poke a little fun at them. But that doesn’t make them less than human, every one, and as such they deserve a moderate amount of respect. To all these potentates, I would like to say: I’m sorry. And: Deal with it. It could have been worse. As well as: What if it is?

  Jonas Jonasson

  Indonesia

  A life of luxury on an island in Paradise ought to be satisfactory to just about anyone. But Allan Karlsson had never been just anyone, and his hundred-and-first year of life wasn’t the time to start.

  It was, for a certain amount of time, gratifying to sit in a lounger under an umbrella and be served drinks of various colours at whim. Especially when one’s best and only friend, the inveterate petty thief Julius Jonsson, was right next to one.

  But soon old Julius and the much older Allan grew tired of doing nothing but frittering away the millions from the suitcase they’d happened to bring with them from Sweden.

  Not that there was anything wrong with frittering. It just got so monotonous. Julius tried renting a fully staffed hundred-and-fifty-foot yacht so he and Allan could sit on the foredeck with fishing rods in hand. It would have been a pleasant break if only they enjoyed fishing. Or, for that matter, eating fish. Instead, their yacht excursions involved doing the same thing on deck as they’d alre
ady learned to do on the shore. Namely, nothing at all.

  Allan, for his part, made sure to fly Harry Belafonte in from the United States to sing three songs on Julius’s birthday – speaking of too much money and not enough to do. Harry stayed for dinner even though he wasn’t paid extra for it. Altogether, this constituted an entire evening of pattern-breaking.

  By way of explanation for his selection of Belafonte over anyone else, Allan pointed out that Julius had a soft spot for this newer, youthful sort of music. Julius appreciated the gesture and didn’t mention that the artist in question hadn’t been young since the end of the Second World War. Compared to Allan, he was, of course, a child.

  Although the superstar’s visit to Bali provided no more than a speck of colour in their otherwise dull grey existence, it would prove to affect Allan and Julius for a long time to come. Not because of what Belafonte sang, or anything like that, but because of what he brought along and devoted his attention to during breakfast prior to his journey home. It was a tool of some sort. A flat black object with a half-eaten apple on one side, and on the other a screen that lit up when you touched it. Harry touched and touched. And grunted now and again. Then tittered. Only to grunt once more. Allan had never been the nosy sort, but there were limits.

  ‘Perhaps it’s none of my business to pry into the young Mr Belafonte’s private matters, but if I may be so bold as to enquire what you’re doing there … Is something happening in that … well, in that?’

  Harry Belafonte realized that Allan had never seen a tablet before and was delighted to demonstrate. The tablet could show what was going on in the world, and what had already gone on, and it verged on showing what was about to happen. Depending on where you touched, up came pictures and videos of all imaginable sorts. And some unimaginable ones. If you touched other buttons, out came music. Still others, and the tablet began to speak. Apparently it was a ‘she’, Siri.

  After breakfast and the demonstration, Belafonte took his little suitcase, his black tablet and himself, and headed to the airport for his trip home. Allan, Julius and the hotel manager waved adieu. The artist’s taxi had no more made it out of sight before Allan turned to the manager and asked him to procure a tablet of the same sort Harry Belafonte had been using. Its diverse contents had amused the hundred-year-old and that was more than could be said about most things.

  The manager had just returned from a hospitality conference in Jakarta, where he had learned that the main duty of hotel staff was not to deliver but to over-deliver. Add to this that Messrs Karlsson and Jonsson were two of the best guests in the history of Balinese tourism, and it was no wonder that, by the very next day, the manager had a tablet ready for Karlsson. And a cellular phone to boot. As a bonus.

  Allan didn’t want to seem ungrateful, so he didn’t mention that he had no use for the phone since everyone he could imagine dialling had been dead for at least fifty years. Except Julius, of course. Who had nothing to answer with. Although that particular point could be remedied.

  ‘Here you are,’ Allan said to his friend. ‘It’s really a gift from the manager to me, but I have no one to call but you, and until this moment you didn’t have any way to answer.’

  Julius thanked him for his kindness. And chose not to point out that Allan still couldn’t call him, but for the opposite reason.

  ‘Just don’t lose it,’ Allan said. ‘It looks expensive. It was better before, when phones were stuck to the wall with a cord so you knew what they were up to.’

  * * *

  The black tablet became Allan’s most treasured possession. What was more, it was free to use since the hotel manager had instructed the staff at the computer store in Denpasar to set up the tablet and phone with all the bells and whistles. This included, among other things, linking the SIM cards to the hotel, which found its total telephone costs doubled, although no one understood why.

  Once the hundred-year-old man learned how the remarkable contraption worked, he no sooner woke for the day than he turned it on to see what had happened overnight. It was the minor delightful news items from all the corners of the world that amused him most. Like the one about how a hundred doctors and nurses in Naples took turns signing each other in and out so no one had to work but everyone still got paid. Or the one about Romania, how so many government officials had had to be locked up for corruption that the country’s prisons were full. And how those officials who had yet to be arrested had a solution to the problem: legalize corruption so they would avoid the need to build more prisons.

  Allan and Julius developed a new morning routine. The old one had involved Allan launching into every breakfast with complaints about his friend’s loud snoring, which he could hear through the wall. The new one involved the same, but with the addition of Allan’s reports about what he’d found out on his tablet since last time. At first Julius enjoyed the brief news updates, not least because they took the focus off his snoring. He was immediately delighted by the Romanian notion of making the illegal legal. Just think how much easier it would be as a petty thief in such a society.

  But Allan quickly disabused him of that thought, because if petty thievery were to become legal then the concept would cease to exist. Julius, who had been on the verge of suggesting that he and Allan leave Bali and move to Bucharest, immediately deflated. The joy in being a small-time thief was, of course, mainly derived from tricking someone out of something, preferably someone who deserved it or at least wouldn’t suffer too much from it. If swindling could no longer be considered a swindle, what was the point?

  Allan consoled him with the information that the Romanians had turned out to a man to protest against the politicians’ and officials’ plans. The average Romanian was not as philosophically inclined as those in power. He or she reasoned that those who stole should be locked up, no matter their title or position, and whether or not there was anywhere to lock them up.

  Breakfast times at the hotel in Bali ended up revolving ever more often around where in the world Julius and Allan should go now that life had become so humdrum in their current location. When the leading news story on the morning in question told him that it was twenty degrees warmer than usual at the North Pole, Allan wondered if that might be an option.

  Julius stuffed fried noodles into his mouth, finished chewing, then said he didn’t think the North Pole was the right place for him and Allan. Especially not if the ice was about to melt. Julius caught a cold whenever his feet got wet. And there were polar bears, and all Julius knew about polar bears was that they seemed to get out of the wrong side of bed every morning from birth onwards. At least the snakes on Bali were shy.

  Allan said that perhaps it was no wonder a polar bear might lose its temper given that the ground was melting beneath its feet. If things were about to go down the tubes, that bear probably ought to stroll to solid ground while it still had time. Canada, in that case, because the United States had a new president again – had Allan already mentioned this to Julius? And, by golly, this new guy wouldn’t allow just anyone over the border.

  Yes, Julius had heard of Trump. That was his name. The polar bear may have been white, but it was a foreigner first and foremost. So it shouldn’t get its hopes up.

  The news on Allan’s black tablet had the curious habit of being both big and small. Mostly big, unpleasantly enough. Allan sought out the small and charming but got the rest of it into the bargain. It was impossible to see the molehills for the mountains.

  During his first hundred years of life, Allan had never reflected upon the bigger picture. Now his new toy was telling him that the world was in a dreadful state. And reminding him of why he had, once upon a time, rightly chosen to turn his back on it and think only of himself.

  He recalled his early years as an errand boy at the gunpowder factory in Flen. There, half the workers had devoted their free time to longing for a red revolution, while the other half was horrified at the threat from China and Japan. Their understanding of the Yellow Peril was nurtured by nov
els and booklets that depicted a scenario in which the white world was devoured by the yellow one.

  Allan did not care about such nuances, and he continued along the same path after the Second World War when brown shirts made brown the ugliest colour of them all. He noticed this as little then as he did the next time people converged around an ideological expression. This time it was more a longing for something than away from it. Peace on earth was in, and so were floral VW buses and, frequently, hash. Everyone loved everyone else, except Allan, who didn’t love anyone or anything. Except his cat. Not that he was bitter: he just was.

  The flowery era of life lasted until Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took over in their respective realms. They thought it was more practical to love oneself and one’s own successes. But if you insisted on disliking someone it should be the Russians. Essentially there were no other threats, and when Reagan killed Soviet Communism simply by talking about sending missiles from space, it was peace and joy for all, except the half of humanity who had no daily food and the several thousand British miners who no longer had a mine to go to. The new view was that there was no reason to care about your neighbour; it was enough to tolerate him or her. And people did, until the winds of change blew once more.

  A bit unexpectedly, perhaps, the brown-shirt ideology made a comeback. Not by way of Germany this time, at least not first and foremost. Or even second and middlemost. But in a number of other countries it was in. The United States wasn’t first among them, but it soon became the most noticeable, thanks to its recently elected president. It was impossible to say how much he really believed in it: that seemed to change from day to day. But the old adage about doing something yourself if you want it done right wouldn’t suffice: it was time to point out external threats to the white Western lives we all deserved to live.

  Allan, of course, wanted to consider his black tablet a tool of pure entertainment, but he had a hard time shielding himself against the broader contexts he was beginning to perceive. He thought about putting the tablet down. Leaving it be for a whole day. And another. Only to admit reluctantly that it was too late. The man who had, more than anyone else, not bothered to care about the state of things had started to care about the state of things.