The Girl on the Bybane

Come faster, wingèd chariot – the sweet release of death cannot come soon enough for our reviewer.

The Girl on the Bybane, by Knut Ove Knutson
Midnight Thrillers, 332 pp, 450kr, June 2018

To find oneself, in the twilight of one’s days, that wingèd chariot beating loud and clear in one’s eardrums, reverberating like one’s lineage across the generations; to find oneself, in such small and tender hours, whiling away one’s ever-dwindling days by penning a review of what would once have been relegated to the shelves of what the French call (quite rightly) l’fiction du genre; to find oneself not only reviewing such a book, but discovering that said book is now acclaimed and applauded by a disestablishment-worthy establishment more so than one’s own works ever were; well, to find oneself in such dire straits, one feels an unmistakable sense of humiliation, not for oneself but for the literary culture one once imagined but must have merely hallucinated. Come faster, wingèd chariot – the sweet release of death cannot come soon enough.

Death comes soon enough, of course, to the hapless inhabitants of Knutson’s Bergen, a city apparently so rife with murder and so short on constabulary that detective work is left to rank amateurs of no apparent qualification and even less finesse. It speaks only to the heavy hand of the author and an implausible string of “lucky breaks” for the protagonist that the result expected in our social cult of the (non-aristocratic) amateur eventually pertains. Knutson does at least have a fine ear for the speech of the lower classes, such that jumbled mumblings of the protagonists are rendered with pleasing fidelity to the horrendous status quo. So thorough is the author's dedication to sociolinguistic fidelity that the grammatical, syntactic and orthographic idiosyncrasies of the Bergen illiterati more than occasionally manifest themselves in the language of the narrator himself. Such aberrant shifts in tone happen with sufficient regularity to necessitate an incessant conjuring-forth of new dissociative identities to attach to the narrator’s voice.

“Thought and plot are not so important as some would make them out to be,” H.C. Earwicker’s creator once opined. “The object of any work of art is the transference of emotion; talent is the gift of conveying that emotion.” Was he, one wonders, speaking primarily about himself? In any case, The Girl on the Bybane manages to be simultaneously as convoluted as Ulysses and as nonsensical as Finnegans Wake. Here we find a fine example of a novel written with neither thought nor plot nor emotion. It hardly needs to be added that the novel has been written without the slightest semblance of talent. Si finis bonus est, totum bonum erit, but the only thing bonus about this particular finis is that it happens at all. One reaches the final page with the same sense of relief as a newly-murdered victim bleeding out on the modern, punctual trams of the Bømlo metro: if death is inevitable, at least we can be happy that it occurs quickly and with air conditioning.