Ankomst by Gøhril Gabrielsen
Review by Rachel Farmer
If you are looking for your next slow, tense, Nordic noir thriller, this is it. Ankomst by Gøhril Gabrielsen, deftly translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin, is rather sparse in plot, focusing instead on unravelling the mystery of our narrator’s memories, her motivations, her moral ambiguity. The protagonist, who remains unnamed, is a biologist and environmental scientist wintering on a remote Norwegian peninsula, in order to collect data on declining seabird populations.
She has left behind her young daughter, Lina, her ex-husband, and her lover—who she is convinced will be joining her imminently. Details of her rather dry, methodical task are interspersed with sharp flashes of raw emotion: intense love, rage, desire, creeping fear… Little by little, we start to understand why she left everything behind and travelled to the ends of the earth.
Throughout, order is juxtaposed with chaos, the rational with the emotional, the civilised with the wild. Our narrator is scientifically-minded, she suppresses her growing emotional turmoil through the determined method and rigour of her daily chores—measuring environmental conditions and taking data readings.: (‘Emotions should be like that too. Measurable. Predictable.’) But, as the story progresses, her emotions cannot be so neatly contained, and the strain of resurfacing memories and the pressure of isolation begin to take their toll.
Early on, our narrator discovers a local history pamphlet detailing the story of a couple, Olaf and Borghild, and their six children, who settled out on the peninsula 140 years ago, and whose house was destroyed in a devastating fire that killed one of the children. We watch our protagonist grow increasingly obsessed with their story, imagining the love between husband and wife, and the betrayal and destruction wreaked by that one fateful night.
Their two stories, their two destinies, become entwined in our narrator’s mind, as Borghild—her life and her eventual fate—gradually pervades her psyche. She draws a parallel between the death of the family’s child in the fire 140 years ago and her own perceived abandonment of her young daughter. She questions her own mind, her own devotion as a mother, constantly oscillating between anger, worry, gnawing guilt and fierce maternal love. Olaf’s anger at the tragedy and at his wife, echoing from the distant past, merges in our narrator’s mind with the rage of the elements and of her own emotions, joining forces to conspire against her: ‘Here we are. The elements and I. Together.’
Looming over everything, influencing—or perhaps influenced by—our narrator’s state of mind, is the spectre of nature and the frequent reminders of its awesome power. More than once, the weather and natural surroundings in this remote area are likened to an animal or a human being, with thoughts, feelings, and even a heartbeat. Our narrator connects her memories and emotions with climatic conditions, comparing her feverish state to atmospheric pressure, her sorrow with a stagnant pond. ‘[…] I spill over with tears and lie quietly like still, algae-green water.’
This narrative technique, though at times slightly heavy-handed, serves to build tension and an impending sense of doom through the relentlessly foreboding seas and skies. Yet, there is ambiguity. Is the atmosphere, this meteorological harbinger of doom, really as it seems, or is her perception muddled by her worsening mental state? Are her very senses becoming clouded by her pain, her memories bubbling to the surface?
The novel’s ending, frustratingly open-ended yet masterfully suspenseful, is the culmination of the gradually rising tension, our narrator’s deteriorating state of mind, and the omens written in the skies over the frozen tundra. This slip of a novel left me with an unsatisfied craving for more, but perhaps that’s the whole beauty of it.
Ankomst by Gøhril Gabrielsen (translated by Deborah Dawkin) is published 30/6/20