Berlin Poplars by Anne B Ragde

Harvill Secker

DULL, intellectual-looking cover, check. Translation from the Norwegian, check. Harrowing farm story, check.

I picked up Berlin Poplars with the quiet faith that this was going to be a really dull book.

Boy, was I wrong.

It's darkly funny, grabs you at the start and doesn't let go. Not often is a book this great.

And even at the end, when you think everything's wrapped up, there's a shock that makes you go "WOW!!" as you realise the real identity of the father despised by everyone in his family.

It starts discouragingly with an undertaker arranging the funeral of a 16-year-old suicide. Highly moral, very Christian, deeply respected by his community, the undertaker hasn't spoken to his two brothers in years.

One brother is the farmer in his fifties, at home with their 80-year-old mother and hated father. All his love and care go to his breeding sows.

The other brother is ragingly camp, a window-dresser who's escaped gloomy Norway and his family to live in uxorious luxury with his lover, a senior newspaper editor.

When the aged mother has a stroke, the three men - and the daughter the farmer has supported but never loved - turn up, and everything has to change.

Sounds awful, doesn't it? But if you want a treat, race to get this book, because it's truly heartwarming, and so, so funny.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

Out Stealing Horses
Per Petterson
Vintage

TWO boys go out stealing horses in the forest idyll of Norway a few years after war has ended and the Gestapo been routed.

Not really stealing, just larking - but the day-out-of-time sense of those beautiful hours is shatteringly reversed by the revelation, later, of what has happened just before it.

Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses comes laden with awards, the latest the Dublin Impac, the largest prize in the world for a single work. Fittingly, for ex-bookseller Petterson, it's a prize awarded by libraries all over the world.

This is a book full of solitude, with the super-reality of a world brought to life in a phrase. It's a short-story-writer's novel, concentrated and disciplined.

The alternate chapters are the youth and age of the narrator. In his sixties, alone again, he has returned to the woods to find a shape for his life. In his youth, he is learning to be a man, under the tutelage of his flawed, heroic father.

And underlying it all are the stories of the Resistance, the occupation, and the betrayal of the parents' marriage.

Petterson has a unique ability to show character by a single, well-placed brush-stroke: a glance, a word, even a word not said. And what characters!

How lucky we are to live in a time when we have this to read.

The Shadow in the River by Frode Grytten

The Shadow in the River
Frode Grytten
(Abacus)


ODDA is a quiet Norwegian town, where Robert Bell's the local stringer for a national paper.

Norway is like Ireland used to be: a murder is big news, a story that will last all summer.

When a young lad goes into the river in his car, everyone knows it's murder, and the Serbs killed him.

But Robert's paper parachutes in a star journalist and photographer to cover the story, and Robert is demoted to their chauffeur and local source.

He watches with lip lifted as they wade in, asking the wrong questions and treading on toes. They ask him to 'tickle' his brother, who's the cop leading the investigation; he says his brother isn't ticklish.

Indeed he isn't, and Robert is having an affair with his brother's wife - secret, they hope, but how secret can anything be in a small town where everyone calls the nationalist leader 'Knickers' because he's known to steal panties off washing lines.

Robert looks at it all with the gloomy eyes of a basset hound, wondering where social democracy went, and thinking 'There's nothing easier than covering a murder'.

Frode Grytten's morose thriller isn't really about murder, though; it's about ambition, greed, globalisation, money and excuses, lit by mordant humour and incisive insights.