Changes

What can one learn about writing from a good novel?

For many years, I’ve been collecting books about writing, and practicing various and sundry techniques and exercises from these. They are all good, and very helpful guidebooks through the mysteries of creating something in writing that will hopefully one day resemble a work of art: Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing; Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones; Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird; Julia Cameron’s The Artists’s Way; Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story; Christina Baldwin’s Life’s Companion; Judith Barrington’s Writing the Memoir; William Zinsser’s On Writing Well; Bill Roorbach’s Writing Life Stories; Stephen King’s On Writing, and many more. It’s a veritable industry, now, of people wanting to write and people who do and publish books to help them! I am very thankful to all these people, because I doubt I would have written even as often or much as I have, without these constant “prompts” and inspirations, wise suggestions, and in some cases, outright funny stuff. They take some of the edge off the anxiety that accompanies this business of spilling your most private and personal self onto that very public screen or those pages of print. With the up draught of such a wealth of encouragement and advice out there, you get the sense that you could launch yourself off that cliff and live to tell about it too. So I will hang onto my library of books about writing, and quietly thank the souls who have given of their experience, strength and hope as I return to my desk, laptop, notebook, or scrap of paper on which I continue to attempt to capture something elegant in the daily tumble of life.

But now I want to try something different.

When I came back from Norway this summer, I had the idea to see what Norwegian writers were up to (in translation, of course—my Norwegian being a sort of pigeon Swedish at best!). For some reason, I found myself attracted to a novel called Out Stealing Horses (Ut og Stjaele Hester) by a writer called Per Petterson. I had no idea who he was, or what I was in for. But a few pages into the novel, and I was enraptured! Yes, this is what I want to read! This is the sort of thing I want to write! Yes! Yes! Beautifully done! He has a wonderful control of both the story and language; great images, nice incremental repetition; very smooth transitions—not a single nut or bolt or piece of scaffolding showing. I kept turning the pages, and before I knew it, I had devoured this small but rich little gem in almost one gulp. But what was it really that was so good? Obviously lots of nice visual details, a believable and sympathetic narrator, brilliant shifts between the fictional present and at least two different past time periods; a real sense of place, and of pacing. But perhaps it was the sense of a drama playing itself out in subterraneous ways that had me hooked until, as happens in human life, it bursts forth with a shock and violence which is at one and the same time prepared for and yet which changes everything that follows.

I felt myself wanting to know more about how this writer actually did it. So I read it again more slowly, looking for the ways it had been structured, and how the movements in both time and drama worked together to arrive at a very satisfying and moving conclusion.

The larger scheme of the story has it divided into three parts. The novel is basically a bildungsroman—that is, the story of a young boy coming of age. This is seen through the eyes of himself as an old man living alone and reflecting on the events of his youth. So Part I of the novel (which occupies a good half of the entire story) tells of the summer in 1948 when he went with his father to a cabin out in the remote woods northeast of Oslo on the Norwegian/Swedish border. This was a summer in which he was close to his father—at least he believed this to be so—even though it wasn’t long after the occupation of Norway by the Germans during World War II, and a great deal—it becomes clear to the reader if not to Trond himself—has already happened to his father by this time. Yet even the tragic and accidental death of a neighboring boy does little to interrupt this happy father-son relationship as they work to clear the trees and send lumber downriver to a mill in Sweden, put up the hay in the fields, work on the cabin to make it more habitable, and so on. Life seems simple and sweet. But a lurking insecurity underlies the story that is palpable in the silence of the forest, the waywardness of the river running near their property, and the darkness of the nights.

Part II works to unravel the mystery of the other life that Trond’s father had been living and serves to make sense of the many unanswered questions that are carefully placed at strategic points in the story. What really happened to Trond’s boyhood friend, Jon, after that accidental shooting of one of his younger brothers by the other one? What really was the relationship between Trond’s father and Jon’s mother? Why did his father pick this particular cabin to come to? And what of the villagers and their silent complicity in things that seemed beyond Trond’s comprehension at the time? He listened, and noticed—but things weren’t adding up. Now, late in life and living alone in that same cabin, he learns from a neighbor who had worked closely with his father in those earlier years, that they had been part of an underground resistance movement, getting information up from Oslo through a chain of carriers across the border into Sweden, while at the same time appearing to be just farmers working the land, maintaining the cabins, and going about their simple daily business. They used the night, the river and the forest for this dangerous traffic, and Jon’s mother was a part of the link. Perhaps there was romance too? This is suggested—but the real connection was far more dangerous and important than that. When Trond, as a fourteen year old, returns to Oslo after that idyllic summer of 1948, he must learn that his father is not coming home, and that it is in essence the end of their special time as father and son—the end of his innocent youth. What he had thought was secure and real and close was at least in part an illusion. He must change, because life has changed, things are not what they seem, and he must become his own man now.

Part III, which occupies only a very small final section of the novel, shows the aftermath of this whole period of awakening, and the extent to which he can or cannot fill the role of his father in his mother’s now rather bleak and pointless existence. You get a brief glimpse of her pride in him as a growing youth who can momentarily delay the emptiness left by her husband’s decision to stay up in the northern wilderness. Also, we see that Trond himself had learned and accepted the state of things. And we see, from his decision in later life to be “robust” in his own isolation in that same cabin long years after his father’s death, that life has taught him much that is after all useful and good—and it was this that he learned from his father, so there is no need for remorse or blame. It has made him who he is, and when all is said and done, that is not so bad.

True enough, there is a dark, Bergmanesque undertow to the flow of the story, but the simplicity, beauty and love of daily life lived out in all its immediate detail are forces which, after all, are good enough to allow for a strong feeling of redemption at the end that is not maudlin, and is certainly not unearned.

The ways in which the details of scene, character, dialogue, transition, and overall pacing of the novel are beautifully handled show a writer at the top of his game. I could extract so many examples of these, but somehow, devoid of the story in which they are set, it seems pointless to do this. I can only hope what has been said so far will entice you to read this novel, and see for yourself, as you surely will, the skillfulness of this author’s craft.

Per Petterson was awarded two top literary prizes for this novel, I have since found out: the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, and the Bookseller’s Best Book of the Year Award. The English language translation was awarded the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction prize and the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. I knew nothing of any of this when I picked up this book to read and then later study it! I just knew I had a real gem of a literary work in hand. To enjoy reading it is one thing: that it made me want to write, and write well, is the greatest gift of a book like this.

September 20th, 2007

Labels: Book review

posted by Sea Change @ 10:00 AM