‘I cannot get out.” Four simple words, yet when placed together they make for a slightly terrifying opening to a novel of impressively dark intelligence.
Johanne, the narrator, is a university student in her 20s, living with her mother in a small flat in Oslo. As the story begins, Johanne, who is intending to fly to Pittsburg with her new boyfriend that very morning, discovers her bedroom door locked. She seems quite calm. But then, Johanne often appears to be coldly in control. She is a calculating individual.
The Blue Room is a highly unusual, coolly daring psychological thriller that explores emotional pain and indifference with an unsettling detachment. Johanne is studying psychology. She seems diligent and has great plans for the future. She has even decided on the trees she will plant to create a pleasing environment for her patients. Her little world is about her career, her appearance and her love of God, although even her approach to religion is coldly practical.
When not thinking about her studies and the vast amount of money she is saving by living with her mother, Johanne’s mind pulsates with pornographic imaginings. These include a poor young girl chained to a bed waiting for the next man to appear, as well as various scenarios in which she convulses in ecstasy. No matter how graphic her fantasies are, she is secure, aware she has God.
Johanne's mind is indeed a strange place. Hanne Orstavik's fourth novel was first published in Norway in 1999 under a far more telling title, which translates as This Is What I Really Am. It's the first of her 12 novels to be translated into English and should establish her as yet another gifted Scandinavian writer.
Venture into the mind
Orstavik boldly ventures inside an ordinary psyche. The result is unnerving. Johanne is candid enough to make it easy to believe that she is reasonably pretty, has amazing red hair and inclines towards plumpness. She is also clever, yet aware of her limitations, as when she visits a bookstore with her mother, a voracious reader.
Johanne favours restraint: “I have to focus on textbooks in term time, so I tend to avoid the fiction section in case I find anything too interesting. Besides, books are expensive and I’m trying to save as much as possible . . . Mum arrived with an armful of books . . . ”
Poor Mum. In the figure of the defeated, self-absorbed mother, Orstavik has created a convincing study of a desperate middle-aged woman who is almost catatonic with despair. Caught up in a humiliating relationship with a married father of four, Johanne’s mother has a silent agreement with her daughter and leaves out money for her whenever the man visits.
Throughout, the narrator Johanne notices the endless cigarettes her mother smokes while her nervous hands are busy making up the next one. She glances at her mother’s hands: “I noticed how like Granny’s her hands were. I stared down at my own. I may be young now, I thought, but it all lies hidden in there . . . I’ll be sitting with a client perhaps and I’ll see Mum in my hands.”
Each evening the mother returns from work and slowly begins to dismantle her public self by removing the tight and provocative clothes she wears. One day she is late for church because she was dyeing her hair. Later, in an attempt to disperse some tension, shrewd Johanne attempts to pacify the poor woman by offering to help her wax her legs.
The dynamic between mother and daughter is played out in an ever shifting power game. Johanne needs to stay where she is to save money; Mum views her daughter as both dependent child and companion. It is eerily astute. There is no mention of the long-absent father, aside from a comment about his liking for bondage sex. There is a brother studying in the States whose name alternates between Edward and Edvard, though that may be a typo.
The delicate balance of the parent who is far more aware of ageing as a woman rather than as a mother and the daughter who has practical needs is skilfully handled. Deborah Dawkin’s translation sustains a deadpan tone that deliberately falters when she needs to convey Johanne’s rare moments of panic.
Fragile co-existence
Mother and daughter have managed to co-exist within a careful structure of domestic rituals that are fragile, judging by Mom’s reaction to being taken to a French movie she does not enjoy. She equates the experience to betrayal. “If that’s what you think love is,” rages the mother, “then you’re welcome to it, darling. That film knows nothing about women or women’s sexuality. Nothing.” The mother pulls deeply on yet another cigarette.
This novel is often very funny. Peirene Press publisher Meike Ziervogel, one of the most exciting publishers of outstanding international fiction in translation, has compared it to Fifty Shades of Grey, The Blue Room is far more impressive and less laughable, but far funnier than Fifty Shades of Grey seems from the film trailer.
Orstavik explores and exposes, possibly even explodes, notions about erotic sex. Johanne, for all her controlling ways, appears obsessed by sexual submission. Complications surface when she becomes attracted to Ivar, a man working in the college canteen. He has the regulation sleepy eyes and is wearing a white coat. To the snobbish narrator Ivar is merely a kitchen worker and beneath her. But a furtive romance begins and he quickly emerges as the leader.
Johanne’s thoughts slide between psychology and fantasy, the reality of her life and her crazy dreams – and, most importantly, her ambitions, which are threatened by her needs. Ivar is, naturally, a musician who is on his way to the US.
Despite being a self-contained individual who plots her every move, Johanne rashly invites Ivar home for a meal. He brings wine. Mum is shocked, makes clear she never drinks wine and dislikes pasta. “Tell me about love, Ivar,” asks Mum. He makes no effort at offering an answer.
Ambiguity is a medium that Orstavik has apparently mastered. None of the characters, with the exception of the saintly Karin with her shaved head and radiant smile, are remotely likeable. Yet they are believable. Johanne speaks to her divided self; she wants Ivar but she also wants a life. She fears being with him in squalor.
On the night before she thinks she is about to leave for America, her mother reminds her that she has not painted the lounge. Ivar thinks nothing about asking Johanne to miss three weeks of lectures. She dreams about sitting on the veranda he has told her about, listening to the grasshoppers.
Then she imagines being set upon by a gang of youths. “First they raped me, while Ivar watched on . . . Blood and more blood . . . and we both survived; Ivar permanently maimed, me torn, bruised.”
All very graphic and odd, as is Johanne’s way of looking at the world and her place within it.
