I have to confess something shameful: I would not usually have picked up this book because the name of the author, Derek B Miller, for me evokes the image of a crass kind of stereotypical American male - over-confident, overweight, over-loud. He sounds to me like the kind of writer who would pen thrillers in which there is less-than-credible action on every page, and none of the characters develop, but all of them pull together at the end for the protection of the American way. Grossly unfair of me.
I took up the book on the recommendation of a friend and was immediately intrigued when I learned it was set in Norway. Last winter Bibliohubby and I became deeply engrossed in the first season of Danish television series The Killing, and I have since developed a taste for Scandinavian crime fiction. Although Derek B Miller is American, he currently lives in Norway and has lived in Europe for many years. With this book he pulls off the twin feats of writing convincingly in the genre of Scandinavian crime fiction and creating a multi-faceted all-American protagonist. I found myself inevitably picturing The Killing's enigmatic Sarah Lund during scenes that were focused on Police Chief Inspector Sigrid Odegard, at the same time as I warmed to 82-year old ex-Marine Sheldon Horowitz, who feels entirely out of place in Norway because he is both American and Jewish.
Don't get me wrong; the book is a thriller, through and through. It is a page-turner with an archetypal villain who is blessed with no shades of grey. Enver's first person account of raping the woman who ends up bearing his child is disturbing not just because of the pleasure he derives from it - when he finds her hiding alongside 'a soft little one' he believes it to be a gift from God - but because of his interpretation of the sounds she makes as he rapes her, some of which he believes are sounds of 'confused pleasure'. Charming.
But Norwegian by Night is more than this, too.
Sheldon Horowitz has moved to Norway from Manhatten after the death of his wife to spend time with his granddaughter Rhea, who has just announced she is pregnant with her first child to her Norwegian husband Lars. Rhea is convinced that Sheldon is suffering from a dementia which causes him to believe that he was a sniper during the Korean war, rather than a mere clerk as he had informed his family upon his return. One day when Rhea and Lars are out of the house Sheldon witnesses an awful crime in which the mother of a small boy is killed. He hides the boy to protect him from the fate that has already befallen his mother, and then, sceptical of the integrity of the police in a country that is foreign to him, Sheldon decides to run away with the boy rather than turn him in. So begins a journey across the lakes and wooded hills and vales of Oslo and surrounding areas. Anticipation and excitement builds as the police close in on the perpetrators, who themselves are closing in on the summer cabin to which Rhea and Lars have retreated, and to which Sheldon and the boy are also headed.
The tale is told from various perspectives and it moves at pace, although Sheldon's flashbacks to Korea, and his imaginary flashbacks to the war in Vietnam, where his son Saul (Rhea's father) was killed many years before, have the effect of slowing things up from time to time. The flashbacks to Vietnam in particular are jarring because we are aware, as readers, that they are entirely fictitious. Nevertheless, for the most part these scenes work, largely because the theme we are asked to explore alongside the 'action' is the veracity of memory. As readers we know that Rhea believes her father is suffering from dementia, and we know that Sheldon's wife believed it too. But we are asked to decide for ourselves whether or not his memories are true, a decision we must make based on Sheldon's actions and the inner workings of his mind, which include these flashbacks to war as the inevitable side-effects of an ex-Marine going undercover and on-the-run in a foreign country with a boy whose language he does not share. The only time I resented these interruptions to the flow of story was towards the end, when Miller had expertly pulled together the various elements so that Rhea and Lars, the boy, Sheldon, the bad guys and the police were all descending on the summer house at the same time. I wanted to know what was going to happen, dammit! When the narrative moved from this fantastic set-up to another Sheldon flashback, I literally sighed outloud and put the book down. Very frustrating. But for the most part I think the device worked.
Miller writes extremely well and in spite of the one-sided villain, this is more than your run-of-the-mill thriller. It is an exploration of culture, the after-effects of war - World War 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Balkan War - and the effects of grief and age on the mind. And it's a pretty great story, to boot. I shed a small tear on the last page, because by then I cared about the boy who is central to this book, and I cared about Sheldon. It doesn't surprise me to learn that this ending (don't worry, no spoilers here) came to Miller as he waited in hospital for the birth of his son.
Overall assessment: 3.5 out of 5. A great read.
Pros / favourite passages: Miller's use of language is lovely and evocative; the landscape through which Sheldon escapes and the bizarre (yet brilliant) tactics he uses to evade police and bad guys alike were painted in vibrant colours in my mind. And Sheldon himself is a wonderful hero - a father whose grief at losing his own son has never quite left him, and whose strategic brilliance is inevitably compromised by the weaknesses of his ageing body. I also loved the occasional wisdom Sheldon spouts, even if most of his musing is never shared, but restricted to his own mind:
"Only the educated stop to look for words - having enough to occasionally misplace them."
On his wife Mabel's approach to ageing: "Mabel, in her final years, had stopped listening to music. The songs of her teenage years brought her back to people and feelings of that time - people she could never see again, and sensations that were no longer coming. It was too much for her. There are people who can manage such things. Those of us who can no longer walk, but can close our eyes and remember a summer hike through a field, or the feeling of cool grass beneath our feet, and smile. Who still have the courage to embrace the past, and give it life and a voice in the present. But Mabel was not one of those people. Maybe she lacked that very form of courage. Or maybe her humanity was so complete, so expansive, that she would be crushed by her capacity to imagine the love that was gone. Those of us with the courage to open ourselves to that much lost love and not fear it - who can give joy to a dying child until the very end without withdrawing to save ourselves - those are our saints. Ir is not the martyrs. It is never the martyrs."
On whether or not his memories are true: "It is all clearer now than it was then. Rhea would say it is the vivid fabrications of an ageing mind. More likely, though, it is the clarity that comes from ageing - from the natural process of releasing the mind from imagined futures, and allowed the present and past to take their rightful place at the centre of our attention."
Cons: Occasionally the flashbacks to Vietnam, in particular, dragged on a bit.
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