Roy Jacobsen’s depiction of Nazi-occupied Norway is informed and particular, a view of ordinary lives in extraordinary times. The war looms over the city of Oslo and the gates and courts of its working-class districts. Trams and horse-drawn carriages traverse the streets in snow and ice while aeroplanes circle overhead. The miseries of rationing are suffered in the cellars, stairways and attics of the public housing flats where we are shown stone sinks, cracked plates, the treat of herring and potato, and a wooden plank to sleep on. Everything is described with a minimum of telling detail.
An apparently established neighbourhood is bolstered by lies. A web of stories involves family connections, neighbourhood closeness and revelations of double lives. As the daily rhythms continue, local secrets become more telling: parents disappear, children are sent to the country, flats are ransacked and citizens are arrested by the Stapo. It is often the case that “he had seen something he should not have seen, something that he might not have understood, but ought to have”. All jobs involve deception, fake IDs and ration cards, mysterious lists and maps. Evidence of involvement with a complex spy network passing on secrets to the enemy appears, then disappears in hints and whispers; “one of us” is a phrase with sinister meanings. Mysterious strangers and the quisling – Jonathan-without-a-surname – follow the local boys. Funerals take place with due ceremony. Two traitors are murdered efficiently, with little fuss. After liberation, the local violence and attacks on collaborators are convincingly nasty, with a triumphant, jeering mob spitting on the unfortunate Else, who had had a German sweetheart.
At the heart of The Unworthy (De uverdige, 2022) is a gang of teenage boys – Carl, Olav, Roar, Vidar and Jan – who steal bicycles from the streets, then move on to taking jewellery and silver from the hastily abandoned houses of the rich, deftly counting and sharing the proceeds of their thefts, supplementing their parents’ basic rations with bottles of stolen fine wine. More interested in food than in politics, they help themselves to vegetables and fruit from private gardens, and even slaughter the pet rabbits they find. The adolescent perspective, a close-up view charged with greed and fear, is compelling. The boys’ attitude to what is going on is both knowing and ignorant, and their families remain loyal to them when they suffer for their deeds in prison and in hospital.
The many intricate plots are treated by Jacobsen in a gracefully casual style that is both poetic and down-to-earth. He prefers to suggest rather than state the obvious, in a way that suits the general theme of the novel. A powerful element is the dialogue. The boys’ exchanges are terse and practical, often comic. When Carl’s older sister Mona attempts to seduce Olav, his response is first “I love you, Mona”, then “I can’t be fagged”. “There were many questions that Carl could not answer that summer” is a characteristically laconic expression of the boy’s mixture of confidence and bewilderment, as is the remark often made by teachers to pupils: “No good will ever come of you”. The enigmatic effect is enhanced by the absence of speech marks and a scattering of untranslated sentences in German and Swedish. (For this translation, from the Norwegian, we must be grateful to Don Bartlett and Don Shaw.) The mysterious German password “Wo sind wir?” seems to cover the mood of the town. In exile in Sweden, Olav’s father, who is known locally as “Aron-Not-a-Jew”, utters his first sentence in his new homeland: “Jag vet inte”.
A complex family history of escape and emigration is revealed slowly in accounts of a stolen painting by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich, the reassuring value of a Fabergé egg, revelations of a guilty secret and a tainted inheritance. These are set out in the novel’s epilogue, in which the elderly Carl writes to his grown-up son about the wartime past. Carl is looking back from his comfortable flat in the same city quarter he once roamed. He is now contentedly retired, with a fridge, bookcases and a desk, looking out over a familiar view. He meditates on the notion of “ignorance” and quotes from a contemporary’s memoirs the calculation that “around ten per cent of the Norwegian population took part – more or less actively – in the resistance struggle, ten per cent were collaborators, what we generally call traitors, while eighty per cent were indifferent”. Roy Jacobsen’s fictional account of these strange events seems simply true.
Lindsay Duguid is a freelance writer
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