FICTION: Child WonderBy Roy Jacobsen, translated by Don Bartlett with Don Shaw Maclehose Press, 264pp. £15.99
FINN LIVES WITH his mother in a flat in 1960s Oslo. He diligently attends school while she works in a shoe store. Money is scarce, and Mother announces her intention to acquire a lodger. It means that Finn will lose his bedroom, but as he has already lost a father he doesn’t mind all that much. Mother and son set about redecorating. At first with green paint; then they are introduced to the botanical splendour of fussy wallpaper. Finn tells the story well; he is both likeable and wry. Above all he has immense sympathy for his mother, and understands how much she was hurt by his father’s leaving. “For this may have been the era of Yuri Gagarin, but it was by no means the era of divorce, it was the era of marriage, and only a year after the divorce he also passed away.”
Roy Jacobsen, one of Norway's most celebrated literary writers, shares the blunt, gentle grace and narrative ease of his countryman Per Petterson. The publication in 2007 of a translation of Jacobsen's award-wining 2005 novel, The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles, a remarkable wartime story about Finland's resistance to Soviet troops in 1939-40, known as the Winter War, introduced him to English-language readers. Two years later it was shortlisted for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. It is a wonderful novel for many reasons, not least the candidly compelling voice of the outsider Timo, who refuses to leave his village. He makes a stand and, without considering himself a hero, he becomes one. He is aware that he is different, and is treated as something of a village idiot. But Timo has his own wisdom. Most of all, he believes.
In some ways Finn, a very different individual, a clever young boy, is like Timo. He too is an outsider. He and his charming, determined and vulnerable mother are more of a partnership than conventional parent and son. He understands the hurts she has suffered, not only through his crane-driver father’s desertion but also through a secret shame from her past.
Jacobsen has created a remarkable narrator whose wry, thoughtful voice has been brilliantly rendered by the same translators, Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, who worked on The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles. This novel about one boy's childhood and coming of age through a specific event is beautiful in its utter normality. This is the real world. There is nothing extraordinary, no heroics. Finn is an Everyboy, not quite Huck but near enough to be unforgettable. He tells his story with humour, humanity and not a little regret.
After the room has been redecorated and the door moved in an attempt to preserve some shred of privacy, the task of finding a paying guest to fill it begins. The “lodger project” advertisement quickly attracts the usual list of oddballs. But one of them is very odd indeed and uncomfortably close to Finn and his mother. “She had heaped-up, rust-red hair with a little grey hat perched on top, adorned with a string of pearls, black droplets, so it looked as though her hair was crying.” She is a hairdresser. Her first comment is quite hurtful. She surveys the room and says: “Basic, right. Shouldn’t you have said that in the ad?”
Mother’s reaction, as recalled by Finn, is brilliant: “Now Mother wanted to call off the whole business, and said that in fact we had changed our minds and needed the room ourselves . . . She even opened the front door for her. But then all of a sudden Ingrid Olaussen looked deeply unhappy. Her coiffed head slumped to her bosom and her long, ungainly body began to sway.” The wretched creature is Finn’s father’s other woman, left alone with a small child after his death. The room stays untaken for a while following this bombshell. But then a suitable applicant arrives, “one more man, in a hat and coat, a trifle distant, but a pleasant fellow, smelling of after-shave . . . called Aqua Velva and which could also, in an emergency, be drunk . . . She had been to sea . . . and was working now in the lucrative construction industry and needed temporary digs until he found his own place.”
Jacobsen’s comic instinct ripples through the narrative. “Neither of us [Finn and his mother] had heard of ‘digs’ or ‘own place’. But there was something modern and reassuring about this man, as if he had an education.” To the boy, the man is like a movie star because he is wearing a hat. But his suitability is consolidated by the word he uses to describe the room on offer. He describes it as cosy. Mother and son like that.
The man moves in. His name is Kristian. He has a television that he has no interest in. Finn does. A second person enters Finn’s life: Linda, the six-year-old daughter born to the now hysterical hairdresser and the man, now dead, who used to be Finn’s father. Suddenly there are four players in the narrative as little Linda moves in. The child has many problems. Many things happen; other things almost but don’t quite happen. Therein lies the pain, much of it absorbed by Finn’s ever-hopeful mother. All of this is described by the laconic boy. Kristian, an intriguingly ambivalent figure, offers the family the use of a mysterious tent he keeps on a holiday island. Mother is slow to accept the offer but eventually does. It leads to one of the finest set pieces in a gloriously intelligent novel that is so rewarding, funny, sad and human that the only advice to be given is to read it.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
