Thoreau’s answer? “Simplify, simplify.” For 2 years, as anybody who’s learn “Walden” will know, he took himself off to the woods “to live deliberately” and alone — however that his private wilderness was solely a mile and a half from Harmony, Mass., and he nonetheless despatched his laundry out.
After we meet Emelie, the someday narrator of Annika Norlin’s debut novel, “The Colony,” she’s already gone full Thoreau. Trendy metropolis life — “the shops and the cars and the lights, and the screens, screens, screens” — has turn out to be an excessive amount of. She’d as soon as prided herself, in her temp jobs and social life, on her dependability: “First I stayed late, then I went out. I went to football games, to plays, to parties, to the gym. I drank cocktails at bars, went running, joined book clubs.” However hyperactivity has taken its toll, and someday she finds herself unable to get away from bed. So off she trots to the northern Swedish countryside, the place she tosses her iPhone in a lake and settles in to benefit from the din of silence.
However Emelie will not be alone. Shortly after her isolation begins, she spies the “Colony” of the title, an intriguingly heterogeneous group of seven, consuming and bathing and singing collectively. We’ll uncover they’ve been there for some 15 years. However can their off-the-grid idyll survive the arrival of an “Outsider”?
“The Colony” was a bestselling, prize-winning sensation in Sweden, the place its creator has loved a protracted profession as a pop star. On the face of it, the guide’s enchantment to an American viewers is apparent. The seek for which means, authenticity and journey within the wilderness is a Nice American trope. From the canon, not simply Thoreau but additionally Melville’s Ishmael sought a change of scene when life turned an excessive amount of; newer examples would possibly embody Chris McCandless in “Into the Wild” and memoirist Cheryl Strayed. These works sometimes provide sociopolitical commentary together with the fishing and sleeping luggage — and “The Colony” is not any completely different.
Norlin seeds the guide with concepts from her personal broad studying. We’re advised that Sara, the Colony’s de facto chief, finds inspiration in each Thoreau and Arne Næss, the Norwegian thinker whose concepts about “deep ecology” gave rise to the notion that people ought to be thought-about on a degree with some other species. (Price noting that Næss, too, was wont to retreat to the wilderness — albeit his Walden Pond was a mountainside cabin.) Sara additionally reads Pentti Linkola, a extra excessive thinker typically linked to ecofascist concepts about radical depopulation, although Norlin doesn’t present a lot of a gloss when you’re not updated in your Finnish environmentalists.
That the guide fails to correctly discover any of those concepts is a significant shortcoming. Certainly, Norlin spends so lengthy on backstories for the Colony’s particular person members and their sensible motives for looking for isolation that there’s not solely much less house however much less narrative necessity for them to share a philosophy. Three of them have good trigger to worry the regulation; all seven are complicit in advantages fraud. The youngest, the straggling teenaged Låke, was born off the grid and has no id, legally talking. It’s finally much less ideology than plot that binds the members of the Colony. Contra Thoreau, all of them appear much less in residing life intentionally than intentionally avoiding life.
What’s left is a bunch of misfits blessed with the time and house to assume with out distraction but weirdly content material to not trouble. The low depth of dialogue and debate is baffling, particularly given the early indicators of discontent that Norlin rigorously crops. When Sagne, who was an entomologist earlier than retiring to the woods, compares the group to an ant colony, everybody seems to simply accept at face worth the superficial aptitude of her analogy. “Everyone has a task for the community, said Sagne,” Norlin writes. “Everyone is needed. No one has to know everything.” Maybe on these very slender phrases the comparability works, however it’s arduous to think about it could bear the sort of productive scrutiny that extra intensive dialogue may need provoked. What about ants’ prodigious business? Their huge and rising populations? With out such dialogue, we should merely imagine that the Colony is pleased with its berry-picking and breathwork routines. With out dialogue, there’s little to persuade the reader — nothing {that a} Thoreau or a Næss would possibly say so as to add rigor and ballast to the Colony’s slightly flimsy ethos. But over time, we’re advised, dialog merely fizzles out.
Two characters are extra finely drawn: Emelie, chummy and self-deprecating, irritating however plausible, and Låke, whose distinctive type we encounter within the guide’s greatest and shortest chapters. His appealingly eccentric voice arrives absolutely shaped on first introduction: “We can feel it in our Bodies, when summer begins to weigh over. There are many little clues around us! Now it’s high summer now everything is in bloom. & when it’s time we shall feel the call to return to our nest.” Alice E. Olsson, in her English translation, locates a naive lyricism within the voice of this shiny however unschooled boy, who realized the best way of the world from the meager literature at hand: “Wuthering Heights,” “Flowers in the Attic,” outdated Jackie Collins novels.
If solely the entire story had been advised from Låke’s curious and blinkered perspective, “The Colony” may need ended up extra present than inform, and the extra eloquent for it. Because it stands, the characterization is skinny, the motivations are overdetermined, and the Colony’s endurance calls for too steep a suspense of disbelief. Maybe a distinct, higher guide may need been discovered had Norlin adopted Thoreau’s recommendation and simplified.
Arrowsmith is predicated in New York and writes about books, movies and music.
