What a book this is, which I picked up thanks to the new Waterstones in Forestside shopping centre. In it, the author, Robert Ferguson, goes in search of the ‘soul of the north’ by exploring Scandinavian cultures, but you quickly realise something more profound and universal is going on.
There’s a lot of history – the kind of history that you just didn’t have a clue ever happened. Things like Muslim raids on Iceland, a British naval blockade of Norway which caused a famine. We get novel-worthy portrayals of Scandinavian political leaders, explorers, writers, and artists, some known in the English-speaking world, many not.
Several chapters are set up as conversations with various Scandinavian friends – usually troubled and uptight characters who help Ferguson sift through obscure aspects of the Scandinavian experience on a shoreside walk, at a dinner party, in a jazz bar. Even the actor, Max von Sydow, makes a brief appearance to discuss Swedish and Norwegian emigration to the US.
The account of how Denmark, Norway, and Sweden fared during the Second World War is beyond interesting – an awfully important and underrecognized aspect of the war. One chapter tells us in forensic detail about an experimental and well-intentioned theatre production in Sweden in 1999 involving Neo-Nazi prisoners which ends in disaster. We are even told of a brief crossing of paths between the author and Anders Breivik shortly before he carried out his massacre in July 2011.
Through it all, Ferguson offers glimpses of his own story as an ex-pat in Norway since the early 1980s. He loves the place. A wonderful passage describes him taking the car ferry near his home now and again, having a waffle in the ferry terminal on the other side, and returning, just for the joy of it. Still a Scandi-phile, he allows himself to be challenged by his friends who are much less enamoured with their own societies.
A theme throughout is Nordic melancholy. Are Scandinavians innately depressive, perhaps due to the landscape and darkness, or the legacy of strict Protestantism? Or is this just a stereotype started by gloomy figures like Søren Kierkegaard and Edvard Munch, and then perhaps internalised by the Scandinavians themselves? Was it because the playwright, Henrik Ibsen, (‘a professional Scandinavian’ as one person calls him) wore black all the time?
All this is meant to be a journey into the Scandinavian soul. But you get the feeling that Ferguson suspects that this region might actually hold the key to understanding all of our souls, that his book is an expedition into human nature – our capacity for misery and self-destruction on the one hand and building happy and humane societies on the other. We know this duality, but as the book shows us, it’s particularly clear in cold, clean Scandinavian light.
Recommended, but I think my next book will be a funny one.
David Mitchell 