Review - Resin by Ane Riel

Resin
Ane Riel (Translated by Charlotte Barslund)
Doubleday, 9 August
Trade paperback, 313pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Resin.

This is a hard book to review. At times, it was a hard book to read. There are some grim scenes, with a central character mistreating their family and also its animals. There are murders. There is a sort of self-reinforcing, almost cultish, thing going on and at times I wanted to scream at one character or another to just get out, or at least, step back, and notice what is happening to them.

But of course they don't, because they're caught in the moral stickiness, the resinous, clammy trap that is set.

That makes for painful reading. The greater difficulty, though, for both reading and reviewing is coming to terms not with what happens here but why. The title - and a recurring image in the book - Resin, goes to the heart of that. Here is a man who is obsessed with preserving what he has, with not letting go -  just as the lump of amber he cherishes preserves an ant, caught millions of years ago in the sticky resin from a pine tree. That fixation oozes through the book, bubbling up again and again, and the tragic consequences are set out here in shocking detail - the more shocking for a certain affectless style which (you soon realise) is normalising this stuff, making it seem like everyday life.

It's only towards the end, when we see events through the eyes of someone who has not been involved, that the full state of affairs becomes clear.

And yet, in the end, the why still remains, I think, a living mystery. I didn't ever really understand Jens, or his making - or I don't yet: again, this book is sticky, it lingers and there's a bit of my mind now that is still pondering him just as, in the book, one character takes away what has happened and will, it seems, be spending a lifetime coming to terms with it. Or not, based on a horrifying sentence that comes just as you think things are calming down.

This is the story of a family living on a remote island off the Danish coast. We see three generations of the Horder family (aptly named, at least in English, though I don't know whether in Danish the name has implications of one who piles up and keeps junk). There is grandfather Silas and grandmother Else, father Jens, mother Maria and children Liv and Carl. Riel takes her time in building up the oddness of this family, the train of accidents and losses that befall them - and the developing condition of Jens. There is all manner of weirdness here: a scavenging lifestyle, deaths due to both accident and murder, a bleak and inward looking family. It's as if The Borrowers went evil: Jens teaches his young daughter that the nearby village is there to be raided, not only for useful items but simply for stuff which he will then "keep safe".

The book is written from a number of viewpoints: a narrator, who sometimes follows a particular character for a chapter, giving a close insight into their thoughts, and sometimes gives a more general perspective, but also letters and other writings by Maria, Jens' wife and Liv's mother. And Liv's voice, telling her own story.

We see Else - controlling, attention-seeking and hypochondriac as Jens, relatively young, falls for Maria, who's been employed to care for Else. For a while, things teeter on the edge of normality - before catastrophe strikes.

We later see Maria, stricken by illness and overeating, gradually withdraw from the world.

And we see Jens withdraw into himself.

And we see the effect on Liv.

The writing is sharp and has a knack of nailing both the literal and the metaphorical at the same time ("Lars suffered from gout and struggled to walk, and his wife never went anywhere but crazy...", "My eyes had grown so used to darkness that in time I saw best at night"). The detail is painted in patiently, those different perspectives I mentioned before giving a kind of discordant and jarring view of the world: Liv's viewpoint, especially, is well done, a convincing portrayal of a child mostly saying and doing childish things but occasionally plunging into much darker, much more adult moments. This is truly unsettling and is another aspect of the book that will haunt me.

It's one of those stories that has you reluctant to turn the next page, fearing what you might read. The discord begins right at the start - that first sentence "The white room was completely dark when my dad killed my granny" - with almost immediately after, a lament that there wasn't a "proper White Christmas" that year. All is out of joint, the times and skew, something is rotten here.

And slowly, painstakingly, Riel explores and exposes that rottenness in compelling, slick writing that sticks in your head.

Like resin...