Us Against You

Backman establishes the tension in Beartown, a small working-class town that pours all its pride into their local hockey team. For Beartown, hockey is not just a sport, it is a community ethos. When that ethos is disrupted, the characters begin to turn on one another; this tone foreshadows ongoing conflict.

In these chapters, Backman presents the reader with a town failure, harassment of a young girl enduring the post-trauma of a rape, open dismissal of her family, burning flags, mysterious strangers, and deep anger. However, in Chapter 1 Backman implies that this saga is another challenging chapter in Beartown’s history that the townspeople must rise above. Explicit foreshadowing is a reoccurring technique for Backman, one that allows the reader to see many dimensions to the characters and conflict presented.

Indeed, this is not a book about a town bitter about sports. The sport itself is not trivial, but metaphorical and seismic in its importance. The people of Beartown are so devoted to hockey that they burn with shame over Maya’s rape at the hands of their star player Kevin, because hockey is more important than one single person. Maya is, therefore, forced to relive her rape through multiple rounds of victimization at the hands of the townspeople who cannot find empathy for her because they are so distracted by their rage over the fate of hockey. For Beartown, the fate of hockey is the fate of the community.

In a community brought together (and torn apart) by a team sport, everyone knows each other. This adds even more pressure on the Andersson family; the first five chapters introduce them as under a microscope. The small towns that are tight-knit but merciless with one another is a common literary trope, typically used to symbolize nuances in human nature.

For example, Leo and Peter are both described as being the kind of men who simply do not have the desire to engage in physical altercations, even when they can clearly sense that their society’s expectation is that they do. Leo knows that he is supposed to fight the boys at school who make fun of Maya’s rape, and Peter knows that the is supposed to fight the boy who raped his daughter. However, Peter, and by default his son, are peaceful people. Backman makes this characterization clear in the first few chapters for two reasons: The first is that it creates a parallel symbol between two characters, allowing for a potential larger commentary on biology and environment. Because Leo is so much like his father in temperament, he is essentially an extension of Peter’s character. However, as alike as a father and son can be, all people are different in their own way. This parallel symbolism foreshadows future conflict as Leo seeks to separate from a weakness he sees in himself and in his father, or a deeper bond as the father and son help one another through this crisis. Secondly, Backman foreshadows the possibility that if Leo or Peter succumb to violence, they will be acting against their nature; this could foreshadow something worse happening to the Andersson family. 

Backman’s novel is reliant on the setting, and characterizations of the many townspeople develop Beartown as a character of its own. Backman further connects the disparate characters in the novel with the sensory onomatopoeia, “Bang.” The “bangs” are unique to each character and refer to the shooting of a gun, the thudding of a heart, and the pounding of a fist. These “bangs” connect the characters through mutual rage.