The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

The Improbable Machine

Jonas Jonasson operates a particular kind of narrative machine. Its fuel is coincidence and historical misunderstanding; its product is comedy of a warm, absurdist variety that trusts the reader to follow complex plots through long intervals of improbability; its signature is an ensemble cast of people whose fates have been intertwined by forces they don’t understand and situations they didn’t choose.

The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden is the second such machine Jonasson has built, following the remarkable success of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. It shares the debut’s structural characteristics — the cascade plotting, the satirical treatment of historical institutions, the comic distance from political violence — and extends them across a broader geopolitical canvas.

The premise involves two young women from a South African township (Nombeko and her friend), a reclusive Swedish engineer whose work in nuclear technology has accidentally produced secrets that multiple governments want, and the Swedish royal family, whose relationship to the secrets is not what anyone intended. These threads, starting decades apart, are drawn toward each other through a combination of chance, error, and the specific kind of bureaucratic incompetence that Jonasson regards as the universal human condition.

The South African Opening

Where Jonasson’s debut was primarily Scandinavian in its setting, The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden begins in the townships of apartheid South Africa, and the opening sections have a different texture from what follows. Nombeko’s early life — the specific material conditions of township existence under apartheid, the particular forms that survival takes when official systems are designed to prevent it — is rendered with a satirical distance that avoids sentimentality without dismissing the reality.

The choice to begin with Nombeko rather than the Swedish characters represents a deliberate expansion of Jonasson’s usual material. He brings his characteristic comic touch to the apartheid setting, which is a risky approach — the comedy of historical atrocity requires a particular calibration to avoid trivializing its subject. Jonasson’s solution is to focus his satire on the perpetrators rather than the victims, on the institutional absurdity of apartheid’s enforcement machinery rather than on the suffering it caused.

Whether this approach fully succeeds is a matter of reader response. Those who find Jonasson’s comic distance adequate to the material will find the South African sections inventive and often very funny. Those who find the approach insufficient for this particular historical context will feel the discomfort of comedy inadequate to its subject. Jonasson is aware of the risk; the question is whether the awareness is sufficient.

The Nuclear Thread

The Swedish engineer — Ingmar, a man whose accidental competence in nuclear physics has produced a small atomic bomb that he doesn’t know what to do with — provides the novel’s geopolitical engine. His bomb, and the various international actors who want to acquire it or suppress it, drives the plot through a series of Cold War misadventures involving Mossad, the CIA, the South African government, and eventually the Swedish royal family.

This material is handled with the satirical light touch that Jonasson applies to all institutional behavior. The Cold War intelligence agencies appear as organizations whose strategic intelligence is inversely proportional to their operational confidence — they pursue their objectives with great certainty and minimal understanding. The comedy of people who don’t know what they’re doing acting with great authority is one of Jonasson’s consistent themes, and the Cold War setting provides excellent material for it.

The nuclear weapons technology itself is treated with cheerful inaccuracy — Jonasson is not interested in technical authenticity, and the bomb’s properties are whatever the plot requires them to be at any given moment. Readers who need technological plausibility will find this frustrating; readers who understand the book as fairy tale dressed in historical clothes will find it liberating.

The Ensemble

The novel’s ensemble is larger than the debut’s, which was effectively built around a single protagonist. Managing multiple protagonists across different settings and decades is a structural challenge, and Jonasson meets it with the same plotting instinct that made the debut work. Characters who seem to have converging but not connected storylines eventually reveal their interconnection, and the reveals are timed with the satisfaction of a mechanism that was built to deliver them at exactly this moment.

Nombeko is the novel’s most fully realized character — her resourcefulness, her particular combination of intelligence and pragmatism, and her relationship with her friend anchor the South African thread with a human weight that the more satirically distant Swedish characters don’t quite achieve. She carries the novel’s emotional core even when the plotting moves elsewhere.

Jonasson’s Formula and Its Pleasures

There is, inevitably, a formula to Jonasson’s work, and The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden hews to it closely enough that readers who loved the debut will recognize the moves. The cascade plotting, the satirical treatment of incompetent institutions, the warm comedy, the coincidences that accumulate into narrative destiny, the ensemble that expands and then contracts around a resolution — these are consistent features.

This is not a criticism so much as an observation. The formula exists because it works, and Jonasson’s second deployment of it demonstrates that the approach can accommodate a wider canvas without losing its defining qualities. The book is funny, inventive, and propulsive in the ways that the debut established, with the additional texture of a South African setting that the debut’s Swedish-centric world couldn’t provide.

The Case for Reading

The pleasures of The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden are the pleasures of comic fiction done with craft and warmth: the laughter that comes from situations rather than punchlines, the satisfaction of a complex plot that resolves with improbable neatness, the specific relief that comes from a novel that treats the world’s absurdity as funny rather than despairing.

Jonasson is one of the very few popular novelists working in a tradition of political absurdism that has largely migrated to television. His ability to sustain that absurdism over 400 pages without losing momentum or warmth is a genuine skill, and this second novel demonstrates that the debut was not an accident.

Our rating: 3.9/5 — Jonasson’s second comic machine runs as smoothly as the first, with a broader canvas and a South African protagonist who earns the novel’s warmth. Cheerfully improbable and consistently funny.