My apologies for not keeping up with this aspect of the blog as promised. One doesn't plan for a ballet story breaking out all of a sudden.
So anyway – let's get back to "Out Stealing Horses."
I remember a story about Norman Maclean's classic novella "A River Runs Through It," which was rejected by one publisher because "these stories have trees in them."
Trees play a major role in "Out Stealing Horses." In the second chapter, our main character, Trond, has what turns out to be a life-altering moment with his friend Jon while they are sitting amongst the branches of a tree. When read for the first time, what Jon does in that tree seems to be a reckless and wanton act of adolescent destruction. I've known youngsters who have done similar – and worse – things, simply because they can. But as one reads on, one begins to wonder if Jon's act in that tree (remember, it will be the last time Trond will be with this particular friend) is more of a warning to Trond – that things can happen right before your eyes, the meaning of which you can never completely comprehend.
And Trond is less an "unreliable" narrator as he is a self-centered one. For reasons that are never fully explained, Trond keeps a large part of himself hidden away. He mentions early on the death of his wife, and how he wonders if Lars recognizes who he is from a photograph taken of Trond at the scene of the accident, an image that won its photographer an award. But he mentions only in passing that this is his second wife, that he has two children by a first wife. I haven't the book in front of me, but I don't recall there being any other reference to this first wife. When one of Trond's daughters shows up at the cabin late in the novel, her appearance comes as much of a surprise to the reader as it does to Trond.
Back to trees: As Ida and Kevin have mentioned in their responses to our first post, the felling of timber during the summer of 1948 is one of the most important aspects of this story. There is the scene in which Trond's father and Jon's father engage in a kind of macho duel in front of – and for the benefit of – Jon's mother. It ends tragically (in this book, how else would it end?), but it is a tragedy that takes a while to work itself to its conclusion.
Then, there is Trond's father's desire to move a bunch of timber down river, with Trond and Franz supplying most of the labor. It seems that the first timber incident has inspired Trond's father to undertake this fool-hardy escapade. For those who haven't read far into the book, perhaps this is the point at which you should AVERT YOUR EYES.
The relationship between Trond's father and Jon's mother (interesting, I think, that they never have any other names) may be chaste, may be sexual, and certainly started during their shared experiences during World War II, and is bound up in the fate of the man in "suit and summer shoes." The man's death could be attributed to Jon's father, who was supposed to help cover the man's tracks to divert suspicion of the Nazis. But Jon's father – angry at being a cuckold – did nothing. And in the confusion, Jon's mother and Trond's father, now revealed to be working for the resistance, escape together to Sweden. Trond's father will be gone for eight months, until the war is over, or almost over. Jon's mother most likely was with him for most, if not all of that time.
So the "timber duel" becomes Jon's father's way of asserting his position, of cutting the man he believes (rightly or wrongly) to be his wife's lover down to size – and he ends up getting badly injured, and ultimately dies because of those injuries (Lars mentions that "he never came back"). And it is at that moment that Trond's father realizes that whatever he feels for Jon's mother is in no way as strong as the way her husband felt for her, and Trond's father also realizes that he doesn't feel about his own wife in that way. So begins the second "timber episode" – which is Trond's way of providing some sort of "life insurance" for the family he is planning to leave behind.
But to return to the subject of trees: One particular tree, a huge birch, becomes the vehicle by which Lars and Trond come together, as they work to clear the tree after it collapses in Trond's yard during a storm. And just as Trond has in his way cut himself off from his past, Lars has done the same – giving up the family farm he had been running when Jon returns from sea, leaving his hometown, never to return, not certain – and not all that concerned – if his mother is alive or dead.
It is that fluid sense of time, the way the narrative slips easily, sometimes almost unnoticeably between the past and present that makes the events of "Out Stealing Horses" take on a mysterious quality. At the core it is a simple story – a man remembers the summer that his father abandoned the family. But it is also a mysterious story: the reasons why Trond's father left is never explained – for that matter, the reasons why most of the things in this novel happened aren't explained. Relationships do not follow predictable paths; there is little sentimentality in the characters. Trond's father sends a final letter to his family that, the way Trond describes it, is heartbreaking in its formality. The summer of 1948 was when Trond thought he and his father had grown closer than ever – this letter is evidence to the contrary. Lars holds no melodramatic animosity toward the son of the man who, in some way, destroyed his own family.
In that sense, the book "Out Stealing Horses" reminds us of the most is "The Remains of the Day." The butler Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel is as repressed a character as Trond, and as suspicious of – or simply unfamiliar with – the messier human emotions of love and desire, of connecting with other human beings on any level other than that of duty.
Petterson alludes to a number of other books in "Out Stealing Horses" – Trond reads a lot of Dickens, and he recalls the famed opening of L.P. Hartley's "The Go-Between" (another excellent portrayal of a young character not quite comprehending the actions and emotions of the adults around him), when he says, "The past in another country; they do things differently there."
Yet that doesn't explain why Petterson lifts the opening paragraph of Jean Rhys' "Voyage in the Dark." He credits the use on the copyright page, but it again it is something unexplained. Maybe this passage was a source of inspiration for the book, that Petterson found in Rhys' story of a young woman making her somewhat sordid way through London in the 1920s a sense of dislocation, an intensity of language that would inform his own book.
Or maybe it's just another mystery of human action that Petterson wants us to ponder.
