Review of The Sixteen Trees of the Somme by Lars Mytting

The following day I asked the woodwork teacher a question. He swept the wood shavings from his leather apron and said, "Flame-birch? The finest cabinetmaking material in the country. Comes from trees that are scarred in some way. The pattern comes from the tree doctoring itself."

[…] He disappeared into a closet and came back carrying a small cupboard door which had a golden shimmer. The meandering pattern created shades of black and shadow play on the luminous, amber-yellow woodwork.

"What you see are scars," he said. "The tree has to encapsulate the wound and continue to grow. The growth rings find alternative routes, extend across the wound. The pattern is unpredictable. Only when you saw parts off the tree can you see how it will turn out."

This is a novel by the chap who got famous with "Norwegian Wood", a sort of lyrical paean to the carpenter's trade. Trees and wood figure heavily in this book too. In 1991, after the death of the grandfather who brought him up, Edvard, a young Norwegian man, decides to unravel a mystery about his childhood. Twenty years before, Edvard's French mother and Norwegian father were killed in an accident in France; he himself, as a young child, was with them but went missing for four days, of which he has no recollection, until his Norwegian grandfather travelled to France, found him and brought him home. This at least is the story he has always been told, but he is certain it is not the whole truth. Furthermore the grandfather had a brother, Einar, from whom he was estranged and who is now, allegedly, dead, but after the grandfather's death, Edvard discovers that Einar's alleged death date can't be true either. The plot, basically, is his search for the truth, which takes him to Shetland in search of Einar's life and to France in search of the missing four days of his own childhood. On the way he gets embroiled with two women, Hanne and Gwen; his love life might best be summed up in John Gay's aphorism: "How happy could I be with either, were t'other dear charmer away".

I was drawn to the book because it is partly set in Shetland, where I live. It's only fair to note that there are some technical problems with the Shetland part: the author clearly has been in Shetland, and done research, but there are errors. It is not true, for instance, that there are "no police in Shetland"; there are fewer than some TV viewers of crime series might think, but there's a perfectly serviceable police station in Lerwick and I'm surprised he never came across it. Also there are problems with timing; Einar cannot be drinking in Captain Flint's in the 1970s because the premises wasn't a pub then; it was the top floor of a grocery shop, and the most northerly fish and chip café in the UK, Frankie's in Brae, wasn't so much as built in 1991 when Edvard eats there. As for swimming nude off Unst at the end of summer… well, maybe Norwegians are unusually hardy, but sooner him than me, mate.

However, this is the sort of thing that makes odds to someone who knows the location but not to most readers. As a mystery, it is a genuine page-turner; I would defy most readers not to share Edvard's curiosity to unravel the past. There is also a fascinating web of deception going on in the present, between Edvard and Gwen, who for good reasons never tell each other the whole truth and are often working behind each other's backs. Betrayal, both real and imagined, is in fact a major theme of the book. So is forgiveness, or maybe not so much forgiveness as living with what people are, particularly if they happen to be part of one's family and hence part of oneself.

None of this would matter, of course, if Mytting couldn't write, which he can. His lyrical gift is an odd one: it is not triggered nearly as much by nature or sense of place as it is by man-made objects, as can be seen in the extract above. His style is very readable, unfussy and clear in the Scandinavian way, never letting fancy stylistic devices overwhelm or slow down the narrative but not ignoring either the need for nuance and layering.