The UK has entered something of a heatwave, and I read They (2018) by Helle Helle entirely outside, in a couple of different parks in Oxford. It was originally in Danish, and translated by Martin Aitken – the first time, in fact, that I remember seeing the translator’s name on the cover.
I bought They earlier this year with a voucher from some friends for Caper, an excellent little bookshop in East Oxford, having been beguiled by a review in the Guardian. It’s about a 16-year-old girl and her mother (both unnamed) living in a small Danish community. We don’t know what happened to the father, and we don’t know all that much about the two figures – known usually as ‘she’ or ‘her’ and ‘her mother’. Instead, we are just immersed in the ordinary world they live together, with the only clue of instability being the number of previous houses they have lived in. Some of the short sections deal with previous homes, and we usually don’t know quite why they have been so temporary.
The girl has the same preoccupations of most 16-year-olds. Her school, her friends, including a new one called Tove who is a little wilder and exciting than the ones she is used to. There are her older friends, some boys who are starting to intrigue her, and the neighbourly people she bumps into each day. But most of all there is her mother. They are close with an unspoken intensity. In less subtle hands than Helle’s, we might know if this is an unhealthily close relationship – but she just shows it to us, without judgement.
The story is mundane, every day, with little to disturb the calm surface of their lives. Except the mother keeps getting tired. And then, in the midst of the relentlessly ordinary, is a phone call from the hospital, where the daughter uses impersonation to get the information she correctly thinks she’s being shielded from.
Then the telephone rings, it’s the nurse, she’s Swedish or Norwegian. She speaks clearly but considerately. She reads aloud from the patient file. The patient expresses great surprise at the severity of her illness. Her mother bounds into the living room with two potatoes. She finds a telephone conversation taking place and beats a quiet retreat. Now the music changes, again her mother sings along. The doctors can relieve the symptoms, but the condition can’t be cured. Her school bag is dumped on the floor, she sits in front of it with her back to the rest of the room. Six months, perhaps a year. The dinner’s ready, they can eat now. They eat now.
A rock has been thrown into that pool – but not into the narrative. Helle’s prose continues as slowly, calmly as before. The mother has to stay in hospital, and the girl distracts herself with baking and housework. This is not a novel with heart-to-hearts or emotional outbursts. It is quiet and tender.
I’ll be honest. For the first 50 pages or so, I wasn’t sure about They. To be frank, I found it boring. The voice didn’t feel quite as distinctive as I’d hoped – but which I mean that it didn’t have the oddness or off-kilter elements that might make Helle’s prose stand out. But, as I kept reading, and as the prose washed over me, I succumbed. I got into the rhythm of the writing, and started to understand what made it special. Ultimately, They won me over. It took a bit of time for me to connect with it, but once I had, I appreciated the gentleness, everydayness of it.
It was also one where I wish I could compare the translation with the original. There were some moments where the English didn’t quite make sense – a ‘goes’ that should have been ‘went’; a ‘since’ which should have been ‘in case’ – but I assume these discordances were in the original? Maybe?
Apparently it is the first of a trilogy, with the other two books focusing on one of this novel’s background characters. I can see myself going back another time, and hoping for that same connection to appear, once I let the novel take me over.