Lars Saabye Christensen: The Half-Brother

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

A funny thing happens when you tell people you are reading the winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2002: they laugh. Loudly and rudely.

If it's Nordic it must be as brooding and bleak as a Norwegian winter.

Then consider the subject matter. As the Germans retreat from Norway at the end of World War II a woman is raped in a drying loft. A bird dies. A child is born. Let the tragedy unfold.

And unfold it does, defying all expectations.

The Half-Brother is an absolutely compelling story: intricate and warm. It is also very funny.

It is like watching great clowning where tragedy and comedy work together. The magic is in the nuance and timing.

There is, fittingly, a grand sense of both the mysterious and the mundane: like looking in at the life of a circus.

All the characters are not quite of the real world. They are ill-equipped to cope, not skilled at fitting in.

This is Barnum's story. Named after the greatest circus man ever, he is short, round and uncoordinated, physically and socially.

When his half-brother Frank tells him the best way to get expelled from dancing classes is to do the exact opposite of what he is told, Barnum, typically, chooses a course of action which will further his reputation as a freak. He kisses a boy.

This boy is Peder, who will become his best friend for life. They share a sense of the ridiculous - and the ridiculous is usually Barnum.

There is great tragedy. Frank is born after his mother Vera is raped. Vera, Frank and later Barnum, her second child, share an Oslo apartment with her mother, Boletta, and her grandmother, The Old One. They are outcasts: the women without men, the sons without fathers.

Boletta takes to the bottle at the neighbourhood hang-out, The North Pole. Barnum the tiny man is particularly fond of the miniature bottles found in mini-bars.

He drinks because he doesn't want to become like the other men in this family history, and because he doesn't know how to stop history repeating itself.

They are The Night Men: they have disappeared, or were never known at all. They represent black holes in the fabric of the family. Memory, hazy and cracked, is replaced by myth. All families do this.

The Old One's great love disappeared on an expedition to Greenland. His last letter is read and reread: it becomes both talisman and a metaphor for loss.

As a young man Barnum's father, Arnold, disappeared: he ran away to join the circus.

Arnold was a man who, like Barnum after him, wanted to make people happy. He does not have the talent for this, or for much else, except swindling.

"I took him," says Barnum's mother, "because he made me laugh."

When he died he left a legacy: "a list of different kinds of laughter" and a suitcase. When the circus collapses around Arnold, literally, the ringmaster hands him the case: "In this I've packed all the applause. You're welcome to it."

The suitcase is empty.

Christensen is a wonderfully economical writer. When Arnold dies, he sums up his demise thus: "He got a discus right in the head and died."

The story moves through time in the way memory does, with unbidden bursts of self-recognition: "This is not a flashback - just you standing in a room you vaguely recognise. You can just hear someone crying behind you, and when you turn you see a child and that child is you."

In the room's background is Frank. He is seldom present - he is a Night Man. He was born unwanted. He is violent and silent.

He loves Barnum, hates Barnum's father: "I should have been your father, instead of that shit who says he is."

Although Frank is missing for much of the book, he is central to it. He is the missing half of Barnum as much as he is Barnum's half-brother. Without him Barnum cannot love. Or laugh.

It is that simple. It is that complicated.

As is this lovely book.

It deserves suitcases full of applause.

Arcadia, $34.95