Fiction: Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horse is a very special miracle of a book, writes Eileen Battersby
Out stealing horses - should that not be "rustling"? Stealing sounds a bit too polite. But this is not a Wild West adventure. Per Petterson's remarkable novel is set in his native Norway, and the horses are not fantasy cow ponies; they are real yet also acquire profound significance as symbols in one man's somewhat astonished review of his life. At the age of 67, and at the close of the 20th century, Trond, now retired and a widower, has taken his leave of the city and is making a home for himself near a lake in the countryside.
Rituals have become vital for him: the early mornings when he wakes, the importance of the BBC World Service as his oracle - with its broadcasts about cricket, "a game I have never seen played and never will see" - and the walks he completes with his dog, a stray he met in an animal shelter.
The genius of this beautiful, candid work lies in its tone of gentle, if at times angry, reflection. Here is a man thinking and remembering in an atmospheric, eerie landscape that inspires thought. Even while pursuing images and moments from the past, Trond remains alert to the present and his physical surroundings. "I live here now, in a small house in the far east of Norway. A river flows into the lake. It is not much of a river, and it gets shallow in the summer."
From the opening lines, Petterson establishes his narrator as a likeable, honest and real person, someone who admires Dickens and remarks: "When you read Dickens you're reading a long ballad from a vanished world where everything has to come together in the end like an equation . . ."
Trond does not know how it has come to pass that he is now old. There is a subtle sense of his bewilderment and, as his mood moves between the practical and philosophical, Petterson, brilliantly served by his translator, Anne Born, creates a character who is consummately alive, as aware of the force of memory as he is of his aches, and the stiffness that now determines his movements.
His new life in a small house, which he is battling to restore to some level of comfort, offers many parallels with the time he spent in another cabin in the countryside, some 50 years earlier, with his father. Trond in old age recalls his 15-year-old self and his friend, Jon, and, in particular, three events that took place. This is a novel that immediately makes itself impossible to put down. Petterson, on winning the reader's trust and attention, never releases his hold.
It is a book which is both European and curiously North American. There are shades of Richard Ford, and increasingly strong echoes of the great William Maxwell. Petterson understands the fragmented and exact nature of memory. He acknowledges its relentlessness and capacity for superimposing itself upon the present.
Throughout the narrative, Trond, as an old man with a history, walks side by side with his younger self, the romantic, uncertain boy who loved his attractive, mysterious father and also loved his despairing broken mother, who was a depressing presence. As the narrator recalls, thinking of his father: "For Christ's sake, he [ just disappeared and left me with her."
Trond's friendship with Jon was almost as important as his close relationship with his father. Both disappear, just as through the novel there are many moments at which the father and Jon appear as variations on the same theme. Petterson never presents Trond as a victim, he is more of a reluctant survivor. And, as the novel unfolds, he is not the only reluctant survivor seeking solace in this remote country area.
The adventure which gives the book its title is vividly recreated. Petterson allows Trond to see it as a seminal moment in his life: "We were going out stealing horses . . . I was 15. It was 1948 and one of the first days of July. Three years earlier the Germans had left, but I can't remember that we talked about them any longer. At least my father did not. He never said anything about the war."
Jon, the friend, is presented as a determined, slightly dangerous character, intent on sharing his adventures exclusively with Trond, the boy from Oslo. "He never knocked, just came quietly up the path from the river where his little boat was tied up, and waited at the door until I became aware that he was there."
The "stealing" amounts to little more than attempting to ride two fairly accommodating horses owned by a neighbour farmer. It ends in some comedy.
Far darker is the sequence in which Jon shows Trond a goldcrest. "He bent forward, stretched out his hand toward the nest and put three fingers down in the feather-covered opening, then brought up an egg that was so little I could only sit there staring."
Trond describes the sense of wonder he felt, but Jon has no interest in Trond's delight in the bird destined to break free of the perfection of its delicate shell - and, in an act of bravado and shocking cruelty, drops the egg.
"I looked up at Jon again," continues Trond, "and he had already bent forward, and with one hand he tore the nest free of the split in the branches, held it out at arm's length and crushed it to powder between his fingers only a few centimetres from my eyes. I wanted to say something but could not utter a word."
Later, a horrific accident occurs and Jon disappears, leaving his family. Abandonment is a theme of the book. Trond even appears to have "abandoned" his grown daughters - one of whom tracks him down in a sequence that is all the more moving for being deliberately unemotional.
There is no sentimentality, no easy nostalgia, only truths and an honest response to experience. Out Stealing Horses, a very special miracle of a book, triumphs through Petterson evoking a sense of watching one man's memory piece together the elements, both immense and tiny, that create a life.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Out Stealing Horses. By Per Petterson, Translated by Anne Born, Harvill Secker, 264pp. £16.99