An open-hearted book on emotionally fractured humans

Author Per Petterson writes about fundamentally good people in bad situations – and his latest novel mines a rich seam of human frailty.

Norwegian author Per Petterson. Geraint Lewis / Writer Pictures via AP

Per Petterson’s raw, atmospheric and intensely open-hearted novels follow the lives of fragile or fractured individuals who are missing family and lovers or are alienated from life as a whole. Human exchanges share the same temperature as his cold, snow-swept exteriors. Best-laid plans lead to dashed hopes. If Scandinavian crime fiction is Nordic noir then Norwegian-born Petterson’s bitter dramas constitute a kind of Nordic grey, both in terms of the bleakness on show and the moral and emotional ambiguity.

That's not to say that his novels are bleak. Each of them offers masterfully drawn portraits of fundamentally good people overwhelmed and under pressure. Petterson's tone might be sombre but his prose is arresting. Entering his world is the equivalent of walking into a bracing and cleansing wind. His latest novel, I Refuse (excellently translated by Don Bartlett), ticks all of the aforementioned boxes but goes the extra mile to expose even more frailties and complexities of the human ­condition.

His main characters this time are Jim and Tommy, whom we first encounter as adults. Jim is divorced, depressed, the wrong side of 50, his life “at half-mast”. Tommy is slick and successful but sad and empty. When they bump into each other in Oslo it is the first time they have met in 35 years. After a stiff exchange they go their separate ways. Having snagged our interest Petterson promptly unreels, taking us all the way back to 1966 when Jim and Tommy were best friends growing up in a provincial town. Jim comes from a good home; Tommy suffers at the fists of his abusive father. We read on wondering what brought about their reversal of fortune and their estrangement.

Each chapter of I Refuse covers either a specific period in the boys' youth or a critical juncture in the men's present. But instead of smooth flashbacks, Petterson takes us on a bumpy journey. In one chapter, dated 2006, Tommy is at the deathbed of his foster parent, Jonsen; in the next we are back in 1970 where a very-much-alive Jonsen is asking Tommy why the town police are interested in him. Consequence all too often precedes cause, and the full import of an early scene or a character's action is only properly felt many pages on once we see the complete picture. The more we lose ourselves in the disjointedly unfolding story, the more it feels as if Petterson wrote it linearly and then chopped it up and strategically shuffled its composite parts. The overall effect is disorientating but exhilarating.

We flit between Jim’s viewpoint and Tommy’s but later get the perspective of Tommy’s sister, Siri, who falls for Jim and berates her brother when he announces his plan to set the family house on fire. And there is also a brief though incredibly moving section in which Tommy’s mother abandons him and his siblings and heads off to sea.

Two standout features power the novel. The first is its intimate character studies, particularly that of Jim and his trajectory from carefree child to suicidal adolescent to tearfully desperate and lonely adult. The second is Petterson’s trademark sentences – sinuous and roving, replete with tumbling thoughts and random observations that collide and beget more of the same. Unlike those of fellow countryman, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Petterson’s sentences are never clogged with minutiae. The better ones have commas doing the work of full-stops and take up half the page. The shorter ones possess fewer twists but a just as strong magnetic pull: “He’d had a good relationship with my mother as well, in the time before she left us one evening just before Christmas, when the snowdrifts by the road stood as tall as a man and just getting in and out of the house was a grind.”

Along with scattered dramatic acts the novel is punctuated with moments of great tension: Jim and Tommy skating on splintering ice, Tommy’s struggle to rescue a drowning dog, and his adult face-to-face reunion with the father who destroyed his childhood. Each time there are no safe odds or foregone conclusions; outcomes go either way.

Petterson’s characters receive their fair share of hard knocks but the “refuse” of his title refers to a constant determination to face up to adversity – a refusal to compromise, to forgive, even to die. Ultimately, we witness a bowed Tommy and a beaten Jim relying on the kindness of strangers. Not everyone pulls through, however – Petterson doesn’t exactly do cathartic triumphs of the will. But what he does do here, and magnificently, is imbue desolation with singular beauty.

Malcolm Forbes is a regular contributor to The Review.