Oystein Lonn: The Necessary Rituals Of Maren Gripe

By MARGIE THOMSON

This novel, by a writer who in 1995 won the Nordic Council's Prize for Literature, has been translated from Norwegian, and is an insight into a certain kind of character, a way of living, a mood, that seems very foreign.

Set in a remote North Sea fishing village at an indeterminate time, it's a community that operates within a tight predictability. They all know each other and what to expect. But, it turns out, predictability is no more certain than anything else, and when one small strand works free, the whole fabric begins to unravel.

Maren Gripe is a young woman of spectacular attractiveness to every man in the village, and every seaman who calls there. Yet she has eyes for no one but her husband Jacob. On her wedding night, her mother instructed her to control herself: on Saturdays she must eat neither salt nor meat, and sleep alone, not in her husband's bed.

This she has done for 10 years, but one Saturday night she is woken by a soft thud of a rope falling onto the deck of a ship, and senses a new presence on the island. She slips into her husband's bed but he, rather than being glad to see her, is horrified at this departure from custom. To him, Maren smells inexplicably of rain, of autumn, and he gets out of bed, shattered.

From there the unravelling continues apace. A stranger has indeed come to the island, a man impervious to Maren's charms, although she lapses into madness for want of him, and is compelled into increasingly disorderly behaviour as the bemused villagers look on.

Told as a kind of report, through conversations held with various islanders by a doctor and a policeman, the story is deliberately speculative, inconclusive, our understanding further undermined by its insistence on the uselessness of reports.

It's an odd book, too inconclusive and mysterious to be to everyone's taste, yet strangely captivating and lyrical as it charts the unpredictability of passion.

* Margie Thomson is the Herald books editor.