3 hours ago
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The Danish author Helle Helle’s They, published in the UK in a pin-sharp translation by Martin Aitken, charts the subtle and shifting bond between a teenage daughter and an ailing mother in prose that is minimalist but never austere. It’s one of those novels where little is spoken but everything, by the end, gets said.
The unnamed mother and 16-year-old daughter live above a hairdresser’s in a Danish backwater on the island of Lolland, where nothing much goes on. They walk across the spring-awoken fields, they shop for groceries, they join an evening class. Details of their past are scanty, fugitive: a few house moves, but nothing about the daughter’s father, who exerts a vague apophatic presence. Mostly, they enjoy a frictionless, symbiotic closeness: “They sit by the window a lot, and on the settee, and with the free local weekly … They lift their mugs, sip synchronous mouthfuls.”
Occasionally, there are flashpoints. When the mother straightens her daughter’s collar before school, the fast-maturing girl says: “Only you still do that.” For much of the novel, the daughter is preoccupied with her best friend, Tove Dunk, and parties where she drinks vodka from “little beakers made of wood”. She has the usual anxieties about her looks and where she stands in the hierarchy of popularity. And then, devastating news. The mother’s throat pain and lethargy are the symptoms of terminal illness. “The doctors can relieve the symptoms but the condition can’t be cured … Six months, perhaps a year.”
Another writer might have turned this scenario into sentimental melodrama, but Helle startles the reader by having life go on much as before, though the daughter must now visit her mother for long stretches in hospital. These provide some of the book’s most quietly touching scenes. There’s a tender moment when the daughter breaks her toenail excruciatingly, and the mother asks: “Do you want a morphine tablet?” Another when they sing If You’re Happy and You Know It together: “They laugh until they cry, it goes on for quite some time.”
When the mother returns from hospital, their roles are reversed: the daughter is forced to prepare the flat, incompetently vacuuming and cleaning the toilet. Her emotions occasionally break through her strenuous self-control. Stepping into a shop selling racks of fur-collared overcoats, she briefly “cries into a hood”. Later, she suffers irrational hatred towards a carpet. Alongside this, Helle captures the strange sense of listlessness and expectation of being a teenager, with its shifting friendship groups and oppressive sense of a huge and unknown future to fill, all of which is intensified by the mother’s finite handful of days.
While the accumulation of detail can be overwhelming, the novel is unflinching in its observation of the tiny exchanges that define a relationship, many of which are easy to miss. These vignettes build up to a forceful picture of a mother and daughter coming to terms with the mutability of existence and what it means to fulfil a duty of care. The sense of impending doom creates a tension which is never resolved; instead, it forces the mother and daughter to live in the moment, sitting simply together at each end of the settee with a biscuit bowl: “They laugh and laugh. It’s getting dark, the garlands rustle outside under the window.” Precise, controlled and unforgettable, They is a book that begs the reader to slow down and take notice.
