New Passengers by Tina Hoeg
Review by Elodie Barnes
The premise of Tine Høeg’s debut novel is simple: on the way to her first day of a new teaching job, a young woman meets a married man at the railway station, and they begin a furtive affair based around their daily commute. It’s a story that is played out the world over. It’s also a story that can only (usually) have one ending. However, in New Passengers, this storyline becomes almost secondary as Høeg takes us on a journey that skilfully analyses the complexities of desire, loneliness, and the struggle to belong; the free verse style, with all of its shifting nuances and flashes of dark humour, is superbly translated by Misha Hoekstra.
We never learn our protagonist’s name, nor that of her married lover. We do know that he has a wife and daughter and a ‘real life’, while she is struggling to find her place in her new job. It’s a time of life that isn’t often explored in literature — the shift from student to adult — but Høeg captures it wonderfully, with somewhat sardonic playfulness and a great sense of timing. The sudden thrust of responsibility is a jolt for the protagonist, who identifies more closely with her students than her colleagues and who finds it hard to know how to exercise authority: on her first school camping trip she feels ‘like a single mom with twenty five kids’ who would rather be sharing pizza with her students than cod soup with her colleagues.
We get the sense that she is floundering a little, that the ‘real life’ of other people is eluding her and she doesn’t know what to do or how to do it. She feels herself as unreal, in a self that hasn’t quite developed yet. In one poignant scene, her sister -- a doctor who has just married and has her life firmly together — quizzes her about her affair. Her response is that she know’s it’s a mess, but, ‘it’s my body / it’s like it only exists / when it touches his / the rest of the time I’m this haze drifting about’. It’s a feeling that is probably very relatable for anyone who has ever been in love, and yet we already know that, despite her lover’s promises of ‘before Christmas’, this relationship is never going to last.
This feeling of unreality is underscored by the protagonist’s preoccupation with her lover’s wife and daughter. Unlike her lover, they are named. They are obsessed over and even dreamt about. Maria and Evy, unlike our protagonist and her lover, are very real. They, in a sense, represent ‘real life’ — the real life that the protagonist feels unable to be part of - and it’s when she comes up too close against that reality that the wry humour of the narrative takes a darker turn. Here, we sense, things could go horribly wrong. She begins drinking, and dreaming more and more often of both Maria and Evy while an undercurrent of guilt forces its way to the surface: ‘if I mustn’t think of you / when I think of happiness / I think of chilled vodka / sliding through me’. Her situation and her emotions are precarious.
She gets drunk at her school’s Christmas gala and passes out; she is more and more unable to cope with the expectations placed upon her as both a teacher and as an adult. She is a newcomer — a new passenger — in both worlds. She is out of her depth, but feels there is no one she can turn to for help. Again, Høeg takes a situation that is familiar to many and captures it, perfectly, in as few words as possible.
In many ways, it’s this minimalism that gives the book a real edge. The free verse style lends the narrative a tautness. Lack of punctuation means that words flow, never stopping, like the movement of the daily commute around which the affair is set, and the text messages through which it is often conducted. Lines and phrases are left hanging throughout. Together, though, they form a clear, incisive portrait of the search for adulthood. Unsurprisingly, the book was picked up by the Danish Royal Theatre and adapted for the stage in Copenhagen. It also won the Bogforum’s Debutantpris, the prize awarded each year for the best debut work of literary fiction published in Denmark.
New Passangers is published by Lolli Editions, 10th September 2020