Translated by Deborah Dawkin
Reviewed by Harriet
They were joined from the hip down. But that was all. They breathed, cried, and were lively…. They grew, laughed a lot, and were never a bother, but a joy. To each other, to their father, to their siblings, to the village. The Hekne twins were put before the loom early, and sat for long days, their twin arms flying in perfect time between warp and weft, so swiftly that it was impossible to see who was threading the yarn through their weave at any one moment. The pictures they wove were uniquely beautiful, often mysterious, and soon their weaves were being traded for silver and livestock.
So begins The Bell in the Lake, the first book in this trilogy, which I reviewed on here back in 2020. The Hekne sisters were born in the early 1600s, and the action of the novel soon shifts to the 1880s, but the sisters, their weaves, and the bells that were named after them, are at the heart of these three superbly absorbing volumes, the third of which ends after WW2. I actually read them out of order, jumping over the second and then having to go back to it, and then having to reread the first, as I couldn’t remember some important details five years later. And the more I’ve read, the more fascinating connections have surfaced, and the greater my admiration for Mytting has become. So this is by the way of being an appreciation of the trilogy in its entirety. It will have to contain spoilers and reveal many things I didn’t write about in my 2020 review, because that’s the only way I can hope to demonstrate Mytting’s skill in following through a story that begins in the 1880s and ends after WW2.
The story of the Hekne sisters is developed further at the start of each volume. In the first, we learn of their birth and growing up, in the second there is the story of their involvement with the Scottish invasion of Norway and the tragedy it leads to, and in the third, the terrible night on which the sisters are accused of witchcraft. We finally learn of their deaths and burials, and the fate of the huge twin church bells which their father had cast in their memory from the silver they have earned in their lifetimes. And inseparable from the sisters themselves is what comes to be known as the Hekne Weave, a giant tapestry that took them fifteen years to finish, and which depicts ‘the night of the scourge’, known in Norse mythology as Ragnarok, during which the world comes to an end. This gives rise to the suggestion that they could see into the future. In each novel’s present tense, the weave comes to obsess Pastor Kai Schweigaard, the only character to appear in each volume. In his early twenties in The Bell in the Lake he falls in love with young Astrid Hekne, and the two of them would probably have married if a young German architect had not come to the village and fallen in love with Astrid before dying far away, leaving Astrid to give birth alone to twin boys. In the second volume, Kai is in his forties. He has helped to raise and educate Jehans, one of Astrid’s twins, but has been told that the other twin had died at birth, a story he is very sceptical of. And in the third volume he is in his eighties, involved very much in educating Jehans’ daughter, called Astrid after her grandmother. It’s only here that he discovers the truth about the weave and the final resting place of the sisters.
The two Astrids have much in common, as Kai recognises: their brightness, their energy, their intelligence and their curiosity. Young Astrid in volume three questions the Pastor about what happens to the soul after death. She firmly believes that it never dies, but continues on in some other sphere. This is perhaps a clue to the way she seems to know things that only her grandmother could have known. The fact that she has a twin brother picks up on a recurring theme throughout the trilogy: the original Hekne sisters, the twin bells cast for them and given their names, and the twin boys born to the first Astrid, the second of whom, Victor, far from having died, has been raised in England. This also leads into the theme of separation: the Hekne sisters’ disastrous attempt to cut themselves free from each other, Victor’s disappearance and final recognition of his identity, Astrid’s brother’s long absences and estrangement from the family, and the separation of the bells themselves, one of which has been taken to Germany to hang in the old stave church which the young Schweigaard has (mistakenly as he later realises) sold to a museum in Dresden, and the other which now lies at the bottom of the lake. Many attempts have been made to find and raise this bell, but legend tells this can only be done by two ‘chain brothers’, born with no sister in between. This belief, which turns out to be true, is only one of the many ways in which old legends and stories, often harking back to pagan times, prove to have relevance in the present day. The Hekne weave has a strong connection with these, as Kai recognises when he finally discovers the place where, as an old villager has told him, the weave is ‘hidden in plain sight’.
One thing that really impressed me as I read backwards through the novels was the way Mytting had left clues for future developments without ever hammering them home. One example that struck me was the brief mention, in the first novel, of a Norwegian woman giving birth at the same time as Astrid, to a stillborn son, and her terror of going back to tell her husband. This could be called retrospective myth making: Book 1 shows what actually happens, but incompletely, and Book 2 shows what the next generation is told – in this case, Victor is told that his mother gave birth to him on board a ship from Norway to England, when in fact he has been privately adopted. Only at the end of the novel does he come to terms with his own origin. This illustrates one of Mytting’s most fascinating techniques – he is often deliberately elliptical, avoiding spelling things out, so the reader is left to work out what happens in the gaps.
A final pairing that needs noting is the way mystical or supernatural events are woven into stories that follow the real history of Norway from the distant past to the mid-twentieth century. The third volume’s account of what happened to the country during World War Two makes painful reading, but offers an opportunity to demonstrate the resilience and strength of young Astrid and her mentor, the now aged Kai Schweigaard. And its here that in his advanced age he finally discovers truths about himself as well as about the mystery he has finally solved.
There’s a great deal more I could say about this trilogy, but I can only strongly suggest you read it for yourself. It doesn’t matter terribly if you read just one, or read them out of order, but they do make a fine combination, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.
Harriet has also interviewed Lars Mytting – read the Q&A HERE.
Harriet is a co-founder and one of the editors of Shiny, and is now longing to visit Norway.
Lars Mytting, (Maclehose Press). BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate links below. (Free UK+ P&P)
