The Almost Nearly Perfect People Page 26

  I began to wonder whether the Finns’ pathological taciturnity was a symptom or the cause of many of the perceived negative aspects of Finnish society – the melancholy, the depressiveness, the violence, and so on. Or was it, instead, a manifestation of historical scars – too many conflicts and losses better left undiscussed – or, simply, a side-effect of the weather which, as Richard Lewis claims, in these parts is hardly conducive to frivolous chitchat.

  The Finns’ obmutescence seemed especially to go hand in hand with that other most famous Finnish characteristic, their drinking. But was the latter used as a cure for the former – medication to help deal with their self-imposed isolation – or were they mutually symptomatic? In other words, which came first, the spirits or the silence?

  Chapter 3

  Alcohol

  Two Finns meet on the street. Hannu says to Jaakko, ‘Fancy a drink?’ Jaakko nods, and they head off to Hannu’s house.

  They drink the first bottle of vodka in silence.

  As he opens the next, Hannu asks Jaakko, ‘So, how are you?’

  Jaakko replies, tetchily, ‘I thought we were here to have a drink?’

  WHENEVER I MENTIONED to people that I was going to be travelling to Finland, every single one of them, without exception, made some kind of nudge-wink reference to the Finns’ reputation for drinking, whether it be a subtle dig along the lines of ‘They like a drink, the Finns,’ to warnings like ‘You’re going to be there on a Saturday night? It’s Armageddon!’, usually accompanied by the speaker gripping my elbow and maintaining eye contact just that little bit longer than strictly necessary.

  This impression of the Finns is not limited to my social circle. An etiquette guide to foreign managers moving to Finland offers this advice: ‘A word of warning: cocktail parties or drinks after dinner can be prolonged indefinitely by Finnish guests if you adhere to the practice of displaying an unlimited amount of liquor. Finns do not like to leave behind bottles that are full, or even half-full.’

  Jean Sibelius was renowned for his three- or four-day drinking binges. Former prime minister Ahti Karjalainen was a noted boozer, once arrested for drink-driving and eventually sacked because of his alcoholism. A culture of extreme drinking also defines one of the country’s chief exports after mobile phones and timber: death metal bands. And in Formula 1 the Finnish drivers always have a reputation for being big drinkers. One of them was once found guilty of the singular crime of ‘drunk sailing’, I seem to recall. To this day, Estonians run for cover, grabbing their children from their front doorsteps, when the ferry from Helsinki arrives and hundreds of thirsty Finns disembark to take advantage of the cheaper alcohol on that side of the Baltic.

  Walking around Helsinki during my first few days there, I saw few signs of rampant dipsomania. The streets were not awash with vomit and broken glass. Cars drove in an orderly fashion, and I saw no ruddy-faced men in battered top hats tipping back suspiciously weighty brown paper bags and singing sea shanties.

  The Finns’ reputation for drink is perplexing given that, when you look at the per capita annual alcohol consumption figures for Europe, they are actually strikingly average drinkers. Most reports tend to place their alcohol consumption somewhere between 10 and 12 litres per person per year (that’s the amount of pure alcohol were it separated from the drink itself), a mid-table ranking. The Swedes drink less, it’s true, but their government spends more on anti-alcohol propaganda than any other in the world. The Danes and British both drink more than the Finns, as do almost two-thirds of the countries that featured in a 2010 OECD worldwide health report on alcohol. A study carried out in the mid-1980s into the drinking habits of the Nordic region revealed that all the Scandinavians were broadly similar in their approach to intoxication: only Icelanders actively approved of drunkenness. So where does the Finnish reputation for heavy boozing come from?

  Matti Peltonen is head of the Department of Social History at the University of Helsinki. This large, thoughtful man in his early sixties has been researching his countrymen’s relationship to alcohol since the 1980s. We met in his book-filled office in one of the university’s palatial, nineteenth-century buildings in central Helsinki, where he explained the – surprising – original source of all the jokes about Finns and booze.

  ‘It’s the Finns who told the jokes first, otherwise how else would you know about them?’ said Peltonen, blankly. ‘We created this absurd myth ourselves.’

  Negative national stereotypes tend to be promulgated by neighbouring countries – the British label the French ‘devious’, the Americans call the Canadians ‘retarded’, and so on – but Finland has saved everyone else the trouble by creating its own negative self-image. Peltonen has written of the Finns’ ‘tendency to go to extremes in order to discredit our own national character’. But why would they sully their own name in this way?

  He blames the early twentieth-century Finnish temperance movement that grew out of a class struggle between the ruling classes and the emerging industrial working-class labour movements. The working classes couldn’t be trusted with the vote because they were blotto most of the time, at least according to the establishment. By way of a response, those labour movements moved to self-impose mandatory abstinence in the form of prohibition, but the plan had a flaw of which both sides were well aware: in those days the Finns drank even less than they do now, around 2 litres per annum.

  ‘To get a temperance law they had tremendous difficulties because everyone was temperate already. We were too poor to drink,’ says Peltonen. ‘The peasant movement at the time used this idea of temperance to become more accepted in society: “Look, we are representing all these temperate people so we should have more say in society.”’

  Their leadership happily fostered the myth that working-class Finns couldn’t handle their drink – that they grew wild and uncontrolled under the influence – going as far as to claim that it was biological, something in their blood. They did so because they believed that, if the working-class could subsequently prove they were sober and responsible, they would be entitled to greater political rights. As they were largely sober and responsible to start with, this was something of a fait accompli.

  The Finns grew so committed to curbing their imaginary drinking that in 1919 they did eventually manage to impose prohibition on themselves. That lead to the inevitable bootlegging and multiple deaths from home-distilled moonshine. Tellingly, Finland’s first ever film, made around this time, was about a bootlegging farmer – already the self-image was being formed. For a long time after prohibition finally ended in 1932 Finland had a rationing system, with each adult allowed a personal alcohol quota; this was eventually replaced by the same kind of state-run alcohol monopoly that is found in Iceland, Norway and Sweden, in Finland’s case with the dreaded Alko shops. This remains a humiliating way in which to treat ordinary drinkers, but at least in Finland the system is more relaxed than it once was – there are more alcohol shops now, and some of them are occasionally open. Still, it is not unusual for Finns in the remoter regions to have to drive a hundred miles to get their quavering hands on a bottle of 60 per cent proof Salmiakki Koskenkorva, the popular Finnish clear-grain, licquorice-flavoured alcohol.

  The Finnish ruling classes continued their efforts to depict their lower orders as wanton boozers in the wake of the Second World War. The last thing the Finnish workforce should be doing was drowning their sorrows when there was a nation in need of rebuilding! As well as losing valuable agricultural land and prosperous towns to Russia following border changes, Finland was forced to pay heavy war reparations and desperately needed economic growth to pay for them. So, put down that bottle, Mika! Buck up, and get on with rebuilding the country! And thus the temperance movement granted itself an ongoing mandate for its state-sanctioned party-pooping.

  When the Olympics were held in Helsinki in 1952, and the Finns began to emerge shyly on to the international stage, they were extremely self-conscious about others’ perceptions of them. By this point
they had become so convinced of their alcoholic tendencies that they were more anxious than ever to control their imaginary boozing – still well below 3 litres per capita per year, almost half that of their Swedish neighbours. The Finnish People’s Moral Movement was formed by the state alcohol monopoly to try to keep their drinking under continued control. From then on booze would only be available in restaurants and the state-owned Alko stores.

  ‘What would foreigners think?’ Peltonen wrote in a recent essay about the Finns’ paranoia concerning their supposed alcoholism at this time. ‘An attempt was made to coerce Finns with this anxiety-producing uncertainty as early as 1948 . . . with the aid of the illustrated flyers distributed by the Moral Movement, in which Finns were depicted as club-wielding cavemen dressed in animal skins.’

  Peltonen believes that the Finnish reputation for drinking got out of hand early on and has been allowed to run wild, unchecked, ever since. But I am afraid to say there is some truth to it. Admittedly, it is not a question of how much the Finns drink in total per year, but the way in which they drink that is at the root of their reputation. The Finns are bingers, or ‘episodic’ drinkers: they get more heavily drunk more often than almost anyone else in Europe. In a 2007 EU poll of almost 30,000 people, 27 per cent of Finns admitted that bingeing – consuming five or more drinks in one session – was their customary way of drinking alcohol (they were second only to 34 per cent of Irish people). It is not that the Finns drink any more than the rest of us during the year, but that they tend to guzzle it all down in one go.

  It would appear, then, that the Alko stores are not having the sobering effect they are supposed to. To an Englishman, having one’s government control the sale of wine, beer and spirits in this manner seems positively Huxley-esque, merely another way for the Bordeaux-quaffing ruling classes to subjugate the downtrodden masses. One might well argue that if you employ government alcohol monopolies to protect the health of those who are too ignorant to understand the consequences of overindulgence, or are unable to control their appetites, then why not have sugar and fat monopolies too? (Whole stores devoted to marshmallows and pork scratchings . . . perhaps not such a bad idea.) Besides, it is also bloody annoying if you want to buy a bottle of wine at such a time when you might actually want to consume it, say, in the evening, or at the weekends. In Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Finland it is quite normal for these stores to close at around 6 p.m. on a Friday night. Needless to say, they are closed all day on Sunday – in my experience, the very day when you are most in need of a drink.

  Some alcohol monopoly stores do make an effort to present their goods as if they are a normal consumer product instead of, say, a treatment for venereal disease, but the worst alcohol monopoly store I ever visited was in Gamla stan, the historic quarter of Stockholm. There, the bottles were displayed in glass cabinets, out of reach of the animal urges of the tragic addicts who shopped there; on the Friday night I went, the customers had to queue for over an hour, utterly humiliated by their desperation for alcohol, just for the privilege of being able to hand over an absurd amount of money to a disapproving old shrew who would then disappear behind the counter for ten minutes to find them a tawdry bottle of Chilean plonk. It was like Argos, but for an even more wretched substrata of society. The American essayist Susan Sontag described Sweden’s state-run alcohol shops – the Systembolaget (which translates, chillingly, as ‘The System’) – as, ‘part funeral parlour, part back-room abortionist’. She wasn’t far off.

  Peltonen was having none of this though. ‘There is no reason to feel sorry for us,’ he said defiantly. ‘Alcohol shops in Finland are better than [normal alcohol retailers] in Denmark because this is a monopoly: the government is a big buyer so they get better wines for less and the selection is much better. In the UK you can only buy cheap wine from Australia, the selection is not as good as Finland. We don’t buy all those shit wines for under five euro.’

  It seemed an odd state of affairs for a finger-wagging government to be supplying its people with better-quality booze for less money than customers paid in shops in supposedly permissive, intemperate lands. Could it be true? The Nordic government’s alcohol monopolies do have massive purchasing power which, combined with an absence of profit motive means that, in theory, they should be able to supply a better-quality product for a lower price. This has not been my experience in Sweden, but a sommelier friend in Oslo explained to me how, because they have a fixed duty on wine rather than adding a percentage of the value of the bottle, better quality wines were actually far cheaper in Norway than they are in the UK. The more you spent on a bottle of wine, the better the bargain you got.

  But still, as I left Peltonen’s office I couldn’t help feeling he was slightly in denial about the seriousness of the Finns’ boozing. He had claimed it was ‘difficult to prove’ that it had anything to do with the country’s violent crime levels and preferred to blame ‘the pressures of Western life’. It was only a minority who binged, he said. Finns were drinking fewer spirits and learning to appreciate good wines in moderation. But the consequences of excess drinking in Finland are of growing concern. Alcohol is now the leading cause of death for Finnish men (three times as many die from alcohol abuse as do from lung cancer), and the second leading cause for women. According to Helsingin Sanomat, deaths from cirrhosis of the liver are rising faster among the Finns than among other European populations: for some as yet unknown reason, Finnish livers seem more vulnerable to the ravages of alcohol than those of other nationalities.

  Though suicide figures are notoriously unreliable (Catholic countries tend to be more reluctant to declare a death a suicide, for instance), according to the World Health Organisation Finland has the highest suicide rate in the Nordic region: 17.6 people per 100,000 per year, compared with 11.9 for Denmark, which is the lowest scorer in the region (the US rate is 11.8, the UK’s 6.9). Could this, too, be at least in part alcohol-related?

  The damage to the Finns from alcohol is not only self-inflicted. According to the 2011 Global Study on Homicide carried out by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Finland’s rate of intentional homicides is more than double that of Denmark, which has a similar-sized population – 2.3 deaths per 100,000 in Finland vs 0.9 per 100,000 in Denmark (the UK’s was 1.2, the US’s 5.0).

  Yet it can sometimes seem as if the Finns are almost proud of their reputation for bingeing and violence (not so much the suicide). The Ostrobothnia region of Finland is considered by many to be the country’s spiritual heartland. Perhaps tellingly, Ostrobothnians have long had a notable and celebrated reputation for violence – their knife-fighting horse thieves, known as the puukkojunkkarit, were legendary in the mid-nineteenth century as a kind of pissed-up cross between Robin Hood and Mack the Knife. Ostrobothnia folk songs sing breezily of fighting and brawling. The lyrics of ‘The Horrible Wedding in Härmä’ (a town with a reputation for violence in Finnish folklore) speak of ‘drinking and fighting going on – from the hallway to the head of stairs dead bodies were carried’.

  This leads us, inevitably, to sisu, the Finn’s cherished (by them) and envied (by the Swedes) spirit of endurance, stamina and manliness. The word evokes a sense of quiet, determined strength, of dependability; it speaks of the ability to display unwavering resolve in the face of insurmountable adversity, a kind of proactive stoicism, if you like. If a bus breaks down, the spirit of sisu dictates that the passengers get out and push, without complaint. Sisu is everything the Finnish male aspires to, the granite bedrock below the nation’s topsoil. But is it also sisu when you empty a bottle of Stolichnaya, pass out face-down in the snow, your nose falls off due to frostbite, yet you refuse to go to Accident and Emergency? And is the Finns’ binge drinking just another manifestation of this trademark national machismo?

  And then it dawned on me: throughout all these discussions of what made a Finn a Finn, what was really being discussed was what made Finnish men Finnish. Finland’s self-image as taciturn, strong, sisu boozers, is almost wholly male-orien
tated. Even the rampantly male-chauvinistic Italians allow for feminine elements in their self-image, but not the Finns. This is odd given the otherwise prominent role women have played in Finnish society since the Second World War as presidents and prime ministers; in the workplace; the first women to get the vote in Europe, and so on.

  It is a cliché but, as with most clichés, there are elements of truth in the fact that the kinds of men who are prone to making bold claims for their machismo or virility, do so to mask weakness or insecurity. It doesn’t require a quantum leap of speculative cod psychology to wonder whether, deep down, Finnish men aren’t in fact just suffering from really low self-esteem. Could all this sisu business be a front? Is the Finnish male the virgin who boasts loudly of his sexual conquests at the bar? The short man who picks fights with 6-footers? The triathlete who . . . well, just the triathlete.

  No, obviously that isn’t the case. Absolutely not. Any Ostrobothnians reading this, put down your axes. But I do wonder if the modern Finnish male, despite being well aware of the health risks and antisocial consequences of his alcohol consumption (in one survey the Finns were the only nationality to rate alcohol as their greatest societal problem out of eleven other issues), continues his heroic consumption as some kind of ritual masculine display, or a collective drowning of masculine sorrows, or both. Perhaps they are drinking to forget all those historic humiliations under the yoke of the condescending Swedes or the high-handed Russians. Even the Danes had a pop at ruling Finland, although that was back in the fifteenth century and the Danes have forgotten all about it. Surely there isn’t much to look back on with pride. Yet somehow the Finns manage.