When two Oslo apartment blocks start falling apart in Catriona Shine’s debut novel, Habitat, the root of the cause is more pernicious and concerning than anything a bad survey could uncover. The apartments seem to have a life of their own.
At first, events are gradual: missing items and strange stains. Matters, for the residents, only get weirder and terrifying. Soon, it’s crumbling or disappearing walls. Not only are the residents’ homes in danger, their lives are too.
Shine is told over the course of a week, devoting chapters to each of the residents. From Knut living with three generations of his family, to elderly Hildegunn, to Raj and his flatmates, among others, they have a range of ages, professions and preoccupations with one another.
The multiple perspectives serve the purpose of giving free access to each character’s lack of grasp on events, allowing the reader to share the confusion (being an architect, as well as a writer, you’d think Shine would be the one to know what is happening).
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The characters’ reactions become increasingly interesting, maybe more so than the increasingly fabulist nature of the apartments’ behaviour
Intermittently, an anonymous voice seems to take responsibility. Written in first-person plural, it might be tempting to read its vaguely ecological lexicon as a kind of retributive voice of climate change. This isn’t the only reading, though, and it’s likely Habitat will be interpreted in many different ways.
Ironically, the characters’ different reads on the situation are partly their problem. The characters’ reactions become increasingly interesting, maybe more so than the increasingly fabulist nature of the apartments’ behaviour. Some of this is due to the novel’s conceit losing an element of intrigue, as Shine’s choice to drop in on different apartments arguably makes the novel a touch longer than it probably needs to be. However, an element of comedy and farce, before increasing dread, underpins the errors people make in judging and misjudging the situation and other people, meaning the novel mostly zips along.
Some of them believe they are going mad, or are led to believe they are going mad by the residents’ treatment of them, mutually refusing to prescribe to another’s worldview. Shine writes, “madness meant that you were convinced of something and everyone else disagreed”; one of her many sharp lines). That is, for some, their fatal error.
