Imagine you are an adult orphan, a rootless Hungarian man raised in Sweden, whose greatest emotional connection is with a charismatic criminal.
Let’s say she drags you to a remote settlement in the Swedish forest at the invitation of a woman she met in prison, who’s currently defrauding the state while raising a motherless teenager more or less as her own.
Suppose enough time goes by that you live there now, and the only living soul in whom you can safely confide your doubts is a chicken named Dr. Snuggles.
This is just one strand of Annika Norlin’s first novel, “The Colony,” a disturbing, engrossing portrait of a tiny community living beyond society. They’re an incongruous group, each so physically distinct it’s clear to any onlooker they belong to no traditional social unit, like family or a team of loggers.
Among their ranks: the orphaned man, József; his partner, Sara, who was imprisoned for extreme animal-rights protests and exerts a dark magnetism over her peers; her friend from jail, Aagny, a formidable, maternal woman who murdered her husband; her young charge; a beatifically handsome man on the run from the authorities; an ant specialist who despises the son she delivered on the premises; and that child himself.
Together they bring a staggering amount of violent history and psychological torment to this glorious mountain setting, where they fall into such a harmonious rhythm that they hardly need to speak. Their days are governed by work and they have almost no contact with outsiders, but there are plenty of foraged berries, roast perch from the nearby lake swabbed with butter and nights spent sleeping together under a sprawling, quasi-matriarchal tree they call Big Spruce.
No wonder they take care to give thanks for everything they ingest, kill or saw down.
Depending on your perspective, this could be an Edenic laboratory of human cooperation — everyone occupying a role suited to their talents, their biological needs more or less met — or a band of vulnerable individuals in thrall to a manipulative despot, whose will is so strong it eclipses all prior conceptions of fairness, law and reason. Meaning: That unwanted little boy, who spends his formative years living in the woods, deserved a proper education and doctor’s visits, and regular socialization with his peers.
We meet the group through Emelie, a freelance journalist overcome by such paralyzing burnout that she leaves her city life for a tent in the woods. Soon into her stay she spots the Colony, who are settled nearby; starved for companionship and a simpler existence, she’s moved by the rituals of care they perform for one another. “I noticed that I had tears in my eyes,” she writes in her notebook. “A bodily memory of what it was like to be little, and held.”
Her observations are intercut with chapters focusing on each of the Colony’s members, in the past and present. Norlin is in full command of her characters’ histories and marshals a tremendous level of detail, particularly surrounding József and Aagny. A sad little boy hollowed out by his parents’ experiences during the Holocaust, József grows up well-liked but a loner, and eventually leads a church choir. When he meets Sara there, she warms a side of himself that has never before felt sunlight.
For all her physical strength, Aagny has been broken by a dismissive, mentally ill mother and an uncouth husband who left her for another woman. It’s crushing to learn her reason for casting off her given name (Öline) and adopting “Aagny” instead: “I wanted to come first, for once.” When you sense the alphabet is someone’s only ally, is it so hard to imagine the appeal of a fiercely loyal, insular clan?
The novel covers two decades of the Colony’s existence, enough time for nearly every member to suffer a privately unbearable period and imagine living outside the group’s perimeter. “It’s been 1,286 days without sex. Soon I’ll dry up completely. I find myself relating to the potatoes,” Aagny thinks at one point. “And it had been a really bad year for potatoes.”
It is a delicate balancing act, designing the inner lives of eight distinct characters alongside their shared mythology. “The Colony was the vessel, and sometimes they could see in each other’s faces which way things were headed. Now the ship is about to capsize, someone must go stand on the other side, to restore balance,” Norlin writes, summoning the collective mood and its hold on them. “One thing they often said to each other was how lucky they were, to live like this.”
My admiration of “The Colony” is equally an appreciation for Alice E. Olsson, whose work to bring the story into English is so precise and vibrant that I often forgot I was reading a translation.
Too often novels packed with this many ideas sacrifice emotion in favor of mounting a ponderous argument; Norlin instead writes visceral episodes that speak for themselves. (How to sever an umbilical cord in the forest? With your teeth.) The story’s open-ended questions — about the power of charisma and love and the boundaries between the individual and the greater good — arise organically, without forcing stale answers.
The book’s ending may strike some as a bit pat, though it helps to remember that ant colonies are known to make group decisions for the benefit of their population. As for Dr. Snuggles, once she got too old to be useful, “they chopped her up and cooked her with sauce.”
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