When Einar, one of the narrators of Favel Parrett’s new novel One for Sorrow, looks at his weary father in the bathhouse, he wonders, “Had he ever been young and alive and ready to spring into the air? I could not see it.” Papa is diminished by comparison to Einar’s new teacher, Johan Kristiansen, a recent arrival in the Norwegian city of Trondheim. At the bathhouse, the teacher “looked like he might suddenly spring into the air, like a young deer feeling joy”.
As Einar, on the cusp of adolescence, starts to separate himself from his sad, silent parents, he finds in Johan a surrogate father and a model for a life beyond provincial poverty. After their first class together, “I had this feeling in me that maybe things might go well for the first time in a long time.” The teacher is tall, virile, cosmopolitan – and unlike so many of the laconic residents of this city by the fjord, he is eager to talk: “I liked listening to him talk about ordinary life. His life. It made me feel like I was part of his world.”
Einar and Johan take turns narrating the novel, which plays out against the occupation of Trondheim by the Nazis during the second world war. This is an historical novel insofar as the events of the war propel the plot but the true interest of One for Sorrow is the inner lives of its characters, and their inaccessibility. Einar’s narration looks back to his childhood and sketches the streets of working-class Lademoen from the perspective of an adult still unable to understand what happened then. By contrast, Johan’s narration remains in the present tense of his youth, the painful vantage point of the narrator who does not know his fate. And so One for Sorrow builds slowly to a devastating climax which is foreshadowed in the very first chapter by a reference to Johan’s unmarked grave.
The child is not the only one whose attention is caught by Johan. As Einar glories in his infatuation with his teacher, Johan and his mother, Marianne, fall in love and commence an affair of great erotic intensity. Johan recognises Einar as a fellow dreamer but his attachment to Marianne is of another order: “I’m on fire whenever I think of her.”
Johan’s lessons allow Einar to form new ideas about himself and to name the emotions that have been banished from his family home. We discover that Einar’s little sister died suddenly: “No one talked about her, my sister, for the rest of my childhood. No one spoke her name. It was as if she had never been there at all.” These are people who respond to loss with silence – “my mother stood beside me and I could hear her breathing”, recalls Einar. Of his father, he writes: “He was there but he was silent, just a presence in the room that you could feel.”
Food is rationed under occupation, and speech is restricted too, heightening the atmosphere of emotional repression in Einar’s family and within the town. Of one of his teaching colleagues, Johan observes: “Svanhild has been with the school since it opened in 1906, and I believe she has a contempt for every child that has ever been born.”
Einar has an eye for the numinous which helps him endure the loneliness of childhood with his grieving parents. Early on he asks his teacher: “What does enchanted mean?” The snow turns his courtyard into a “magical playground”; his imagination allows him to see beyond the fearful austerity of military occupation. Marianne has no such outlet, until she meets Johan; she tells him “sometimes I feel like I am going to start screaming”. After her clandestine meetings with Johan, Einar sees Marianne dance and sing, her face flushed. He revels in her unexpected joyfulness, even as he cannot comprehend it.
One for Sorrow treads similar paths to Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and LP Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953). In these novels, each of which plays out against a backdrop of war, young protagonists witness forbidden intimacies and respond as the children they are, not as adults might. Their actions set in train terrible consequences for the lovers, and the guilt and grief shapes the adulthood of the child witness.
This quiet and affecting novel evokes themes that will be familiar to readers of Parrett’s fiction, which includes Past the Shallows (2011) and There Was Still Love (2019): emotional distance within the family; metaphorised landscapes; the not-fully-formed perspective of the adolescent protagonist; varieties of love and attachment. In other hands, a plot about betrayal and desire against a snowy wartime backdrop might melt into sentimental mush. That’s not the case here because Parrett is such a careful and spare stylist. This lucid, delicately crafted novel is defined by silences and absences; these are the spaces demarcated by grief and guilt, and also those enchanted by love and eroticism.
One for Sorrow by Favel Parrett is out now through Hachette
