Into the Norwegian wood

Here is a remarkable novel, one which appears to be about nothing in particular, featuring barely half a dozen characters, several of whom have no names. Hardly anything happens. A boy dies, a man gets shot, another boy is given a new suit, and that, more or less, is that. There is a good deal of description, though of the plainest kind, several emotions are registered after an understated fashion, but the author makes no attempt at centring these elements on a complicated plot. Having reached the middle of the book in the perfectly comprehensible expectation that Something Really Important will take place if only we hang on long enough, we are scarcely surprised when after all it doesn’t.

Yet Out Stealing Horses, which has already won three prizes (including, recently, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2007, given to both the author and his translator), is as touching and enthralling as any more traditional novel, its qualities enhanced by the candour and simplicity of Per Petterson’s style and Anne Born’s limpid English translation. The book is essentially a reluctant memoir, in which the onset of old age, together with the sudden resurgence of details from the narrator’s half-buried past, substitutes a vivid alternative existence for the numbness endured over so many years.

The scene is rural Norway, close to the Swedish frontier, during and after the second world war. Horse-stealing is the glamorous name given by the boy Trond and friend Jon to their occasional trespasses on a local farm, where, in the fields at dawn, they round up the horses for a gallop. Jon has learned to shoot and comes home one morning with a brace of hares. His parents, away in the nearby market town, have charged him with looking after his brothers, the twins Lars and Odd.