#Blogtour #Review - Toxic by Helga Flatland

Toxic
Helga Flatland (trans Matt Bagguley)
Orenda Books, 23 May 2024 
Available as: PB, 263pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788138

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for sending me a copy of Toxic to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Listen to the dance tune about the two brothers and the woman from Oslo...

If you're looking for multiple unreliable narrators, family tensions that fairly crackle off the page, obscure secrets and a sense of rural menace, then Toxic is just the book for you. If you don't think you're looking for those things, then I offer you Flatland's involving, complicity-inviting narrative which (in Matt Bagguley's excellent translation) lures in the reader, making them almost an accomplice to the moral gymnastics and self-justifications exhibited herein.

Take Mathilde, for example, a young supply teacher who's - let's use neutral language - entered a relationship with one of her pupils, 18 year old Jakob. The moral and ethical position here is clear, she was in a position of authority and she abused it, yet Flatland still gives us plenty of complexity as Mathilde takes most of the book to dodge any consequences and instead to give us her take on things. 

Or consider those two brothers. Andres and Johs, living on their remote farm far from Oslo. These are the days of Covid, and the progress of the pandemic - and the countermeasures for it - mark this book, phases of lockdown and social distancing disrupting everyone's life. (Although I have to say, the strictness of the measures taken in Norway never quite seems to match my recollection of the UK which felt like three years never leaving the house). The two are scrupulously observed, described through Johs's eyes, incidents of childhood painting the picture as we move to the present day where Andres stands to inherit, having acquired a late interest in farming, full of elaborate plans while Johns, the practical one, does most of the work. Meanwhile, their mother lurks, silently judging them every time they take an afternoon off. (The passive-aggressiveness of their mother, who will always, always sneak in and do a job before one of the boys can, is a joy in itself).

Mathilde's downfall precipitates a flight from Oslo to the country, where she rents an empty cottage on the brothers' farm. If Mathilde's background is complex (her parents dead in a car crash, she was brought up by her aunt, who she always refers to as 'Mum', and some of her most honest moments, the clearest revelations about her life and her - evidently complex, unresolved - relationship  with her birth mother seem to be when the two women share a cigarette) that of the brothers is even more so, both having grown up under the shadow of their grandfather, Johannes.  

Johannes emerges in recollection as a sneering bully, an abuser, a misogynist and a past master at coercive control. Also, a drunkard. He was, however, a superlative fiddle player and the identity of his remaining extended family seems bound up with that fact, with his place in the local culture such that no-one - either family or acquaintance - is willing to point up his faults. The book explores a curious dynamic in that local culture, introducing us to various popular ballads and dances, always with a narrative from Johannes at the start explaining where the music came from, what it's about. Inevitably the theme is proud, disruptive women who are punished for their transgressions in some way, blamed for whatever has gone wrong. This hint of folk horror, a sense of retribution imbued in the very landscape, lifts the setting above what could otherwise rather echo Cold Comfort Farm and gives the narrative a distinctly eerie, mournful cast. 

As Mathilde's behaviour spirals out of control (or is it?) we learn more and more about Johannes's outrages, and see the family's imprisonment (I don't think that's too strong a world) in the patterns of behaviour and the routines and casts of mind that he enforced. It makes for a volatile mix, one, as I said above, humming with tension. Yet it is all expressed and portrayed so coolly. Flatland's, and Bagguley's, language, is mild, focused on details, on characters whose minds wander, on the ordinary daily tasks of a farm. Also, perhaps, expressed in what we're not told, only given hints of.

The title of the story is I think well chosen - there is a sense of toxicity here, of taint, but it's hard to pin down. The frequent preoccupation with the virus, the handwashing, the scares and the distancing heighten this sense of contagion, but perhaps the characters here are missing the real source of danger, the thing that will really contaminate, will harm?

All in all, a marvellous, unnerving read, a book that simply creeps up on you, that gets under your skin and can't be picked out.

For more information about Toxic, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Toxic from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.