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Roman
Editor:
Kagge
Release year:
2021
«Daring image of a war hero.»
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A group of young men lures a woman into a car. She thinks they will transport her to Sweden, but they take her to a deserted place. One of the boys begins to beat her uncontrollably. The woman yells for help, and another of them puts the gun to her temple and starts. They tie the body to a huge rock and throw it off a bridge.
Young people are “rat catchers”. This is the name given to the Norwegians in the resistance movement who did the dirtiest jobs during the occupation. The woman was the informant, and the men killed her on the orders of “the high gentlemen of London” who “let our handsome boys become murderers.”
Three years after the war, the murderer Knut is haunted by nightmares so strong that he tries deceptively to kill his girlfriend.
Crime Writer’s Nightmare
The scene is taken from the Max Manus novel “The Rat Catcher.” The original script is said to have been written in 1948. It disappeared, but before his death, Manus’s wife, Tikken, is said to have given a copy to their son George.
It is this version, with a “sensible linguistic update” from George and an equally sensible adaptation from editor Aslak Nore, that is now available.
The result has been a surprisingly honest and surprisingly open postwar portrait of a disillusioned war hero.
Malicious female portrait
Drunk or sober. Night or day The memories never leave him. The only times he gets peace from rat hunting was when he slept with his wife. “, it is said about the main character Freddy, also a rat catcher.
He is a celebrated war hero who makes a living from a neglected auto repair shop and entertains himself with his equally neglected wife Miriam. Her portrait is one of the most malicious portraits of women I have ever read. Miriam is big and beautiful, but unfortunately so vulgar: “as perfect as her body was, so empty was her head.”
Only eroticism holds them together, and Manus is surprisingly bold in his tragicomic portrayal of her: “Her body probably required exercise, but when instead of working and exercising she just lay in bed all day, it burned inside with an immense energy by which she only ejaculated during intercourse ».
The description of a grotesque wedding night between the two is high-class fiction: Freddy who drinks up some kind of love for her, but wakes up with a thunderous hangover the next day and looks at his vulgar, stupid wife in disgust.
“The wart on his large chest was like an evil eye looking at him.”
Launch a thriller about his “worst nightmare”
Inverted image of autobiographies
Freddy’s background has surprisingly many similarities to Max Manus’s, but Manus himself is said to have said that he was glad he didn’t have to liquidate.
The novel is in many ways a disappointing twist on his more heroic autobiographies, which came just after the war. “I’d Rather Be Right” and “It’ll Be Serious” sold 300,000 copies and helped make him the most notorious war hero of the postwar period.
“We should have focused on those who were really guilty. All the dangerous informants, all the great ones who had really failed, all those who had had enough intelligence to understand that what they were doing was wrong.”Freddy thinks now. He is furious at all those who made a lot of money from the Germans and now make their living from extensive black market trading, while the resistance fighters who returned home from Germany have to settle for small jobs and stand in line. in an infinitely long line of houses. Freddy also has sympathy for those who joined the National Society for idealistic reasons and who were forever marked.
First of all, this is a unique description of a gloomy post-war period. What is most impressive is the resistance of the men of the resistance after the war and the time in England, where the noble British and Polish counts were equal to the poor Norwegian and Danish sailors:
“When the elegant uniform disappeared, the confirmation suit came out. Worse still is for the boys who got married, and who in the belief in the Norway that was to emerge, only the country became free, filled their little English lacks with stories which indicated that in Norway, in fact, we were all landowners and wealthy. “
The war was fought in the hope of a change that never came.
Surprisingly controversial
This is not a great novel, neither technically nor linguistically. It’s messy and weird and with a pathos-filled love story between Freddy and the resistance woman Gerd, who bears similarities to Max Manus’s wife, Tikken.
But the severe and honest content is impressive, considering this was written in 1948. In his enlightening and interesting preface, Nore reflects on the surprising fact that the duty of confidentiality surrounding the settlements of the resistance movement was extended by the Archivist. National in 2008. This means that the nearly 75-year-old script is almost surprisingly controversial, even today. It is in itself a literary achievement, which is why this rather uneven book deserves a roll of the dice.
