In the third part of a remarkable series of books, Roy Jacobsen returns to the protagonist he introduced in The Unseen: Ingrid Barrøy, born and raised on a tiny island in northern Norway whose name she shares (“naked island”). It was a remarkably concise and much admired novel that was nominated for the 2017 Man Booker International prize, and focused on the small world of the island in the 1910s and 20s; in the subsequent books, the outside world creeps in and is confronted by Ingrid head on.
The second instalment, White Shadow , is set during the last year of the second world war: refugees from the northern province of Finnmark arrive, collaborators abuse their power, and Russian prisoner of war Alexander, having survived the sinking of the MS Rigel, lands on Barrøy. Ingrid falls in love with the young man and hides him from Nazis and collaborators until he is strong enough to embark on a trek to neutral Sweden. In Eyes of the Rigel Ingrid sets out across a postwar country in search of the father of her 10-month-old daughter. Ingrid’s only mementos of her lover are her daughter’s eyes, as black as Alexander’s, and a note in Russian, which a neighbour helps her decipher: it says, “I love you” nine times.
Armed with limited knowledge of Alexander’s route, Ingrid begins an odyssey where she can only ever see one step ahead. She is unfamiliar with the “mysterious mainland”, has never been in southern Norway or on a train, but now her road trip takes her through a country ready for an economic upswing, to prosperous farms and remote villages, a new mining town, over the Swedish border, back into Norway and all the way south to a displaced persons camp.
As she walks along what one character calls “a road of bad consciences”, the people she encounters always know more than she does, yet never reveal the whole truth: former resistance fighters, partisans who fought for the communist cause, Nazi collaborators and citizens who sit somewhere in between these categories live side by side in an uneasy peace. Frequently, they confess some of their secrets – cowardice, collaboration, punishment – to Ingrid, who with her island background appears to them like an apparition from a different world, marked by her dialect and her earnest naivety.
Ingrid has to puzzle out what happened to her lover bit by bit, as even former resistance fighters who helped him mislead her or obscure the truth. Her self-proclaimed indifference to politics doesn’t help: she is almost completely ignorant of Soviet attitudes towards prisoners of war, who were not infrequently cast as traitors. When she finally meets Henrik, one of Alexander’s travel companions, he is exasperated with her limited focus on her personal relationships: “You’ve lived through a whole war ... without understanding a single thing.”
At the end of her journey Ingrid admits to herself that she only wants to know as much as necessary – any more would threaten the careful equilibrium she has built for herself. Everyone navigates a delicate path between forgetting and remembering in this country determined to move on from occupation and collaboration, across the “bewildering battlefield of peacetime”. Ingrid is left with conjectures and false hopes – a luxury that Jacobsen doesn’t afford the reader, who, with the benefit of historical hindsight and the help of a short afterword, learns more about Alexander’s fate than Ingrid does.
Jacobsen’s rhythm in this book is different from in The Unseen: with the shift of his focus away from Barrøy, his language expands, without losing the intimacy with which he handles his characters. Don Bartlett and Don Shaw deserve much praise for their translation: their ingenious rendering of Ingrid’s island dialect, which closely echoes the original Norwegian, is accompanied by the lyrical simplicity of Jacobsen’s descriptions.
The sinking of the Rigel in November 1944 by British forces is the biggest maritime disaster in Norwegian history; more than 2,500 people, the majority prisoners of war from eastern Europe, died. The repercussions of this catastrophe pervade the novel. Most characters doubt that it has happened – they didn’t see it in any papers – and, in any case, don’t care much about Russian PoWs, who are “unseen” just as much as the island inhabitants are.
Jacobsen, having grown up near the remains of the Rigel, which stuck out of the sea until it was dismantled in 1969, pointedly puts an event that happened near Norwegian shores back in focus at a time when people drowning in European waters were headline news again (the novel was published in Norway in 2017). Ingrid, a Norwegian among Norwegians, finds shelter, support and kindness wherever she goes. In contrast, the displaced people among whom she seeks Alexander can’t or won’t return to their countries of origin for fear of what would happen to them there. To their Norwegian overseers, they have become a bureaucratic problem; to the locals, their camp is a reminder of the war. With this latest book, Jacobsen asks pertinent questions about Norway’s collective memory: how do we choose to remember war, guilt and collaboration? And what remains unseen?
• Eyes of the Rigel by Roy Jacobsen, translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, is published by MacLehose (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
