Berlin Poplars

Neu-Drontheim: a projected city of 50,000 houses that was to be built on the Norwegian coast by the invading Germans during the Second World War. It was a grand scheme – the Reich’s architect Albert Speer had a 25-metre plaster model of its design constructed – but defeat brought a halt to the work.

A motley collection of buildings and the poplars they brought with them from the homeland were all that they left behind, reminding successive generations of Norwegian farmers how close they came to losing their land and their country. The German army retreated, but the trees remained, putting down roots in alien soil.

Around this historical fact Anne Ragde has written a fine novel about a dysfunctional family whose members, scattered both emotionally and geographically, are now reluctantly brought together as the matriarch approaches death. Their reunion reveals each person’s way of coping … and a whopping great secret.

Of the three sons, only Tor has remained on the remote family farm. He lives there with Anna, his mother, who cooks his meals, and his father, a feckless character who remains silent most of the time and does little apart from chop firewood. Straitened financial circumstances and the sheer amount of work involved in looking after his cattle have forced Tor to give up the herd in favour of pigs; it is they who receive his attention and love.

Margido is a morose undertaker who lives nearby but has not visited the farm in recent times following a disagreement with his mother. Erlend, the third son, left many years before that; ostracised for his homosexuality, he now lives very happily with his partner in Copenhagen.

When Anna uncharacteristically takes to her bed, Tor is convinced she has nothing more than a cold, but a stroke a few days later puts her in hospital and sends Tor into traumatised denial about the possibility of losing her. When she dies, he implodes with grief.

As Tor’s brothers – and one other family member – gather, it is clear to them that he has been living under an illusion about his mother’s ability to keep house. The kitchen is filthy, and any items of good quality have either been squirreled away or sold. The ensuing clean-up operation reveals much more than pieces of mouldy cheese in the fridge.

Ragde gets right to the heart of the ways in which families can come apart. She is too subtle to go down the ‘long-held resentments bubbling to the surface’ route; instead, she focuses on how the death affects each family member. They all prove, if nothing else, to be practical: Margido, distanced from his mother by their argument and used to seeing death on a daily basis, makes the funeral arrangements; Erlend blubs hysterically, mainly for the fact that he has to leave his beloved for a few days, then gets his Marigolds on and starts cleaning. Tor seeks solace in the pigshed when the unwanted houseful of relatives (particularly the gay relative) becomes too much.

Such practicality hints both at the way these people live their lives and also their reaction to the death of a woman for whom, Tor aside, their feelings are equivocal at best. The roots of the Neshov family lie, like the poplars', buried at the farm, but their true homes are elsewhere.