Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament was one of my favourite novels of last year; the good news is that Long Live the Post Horn! (translated again by Charlotte Barslund) is even better. Its narrator, Ellinor, is a PR consultant who finds herself questioning her life. The crisis begins when she discovers an old diary and sees clearly the emptiness of her past – and present:
“…there was no sense of progression, no coherence, no joy, only frustration; shopping, sunbathing, gossiping, eating – I might as well have written ‘she’ instead of ‘I’. And had anything changed, had growing older made any difference?”
Her relationship with Stein, a divorcee with a young son, Truls, leaves her largely numb. When she meets Truls for the first time she finds the significance Stein places on this uncomfortable: “I was embarrassed on his behalf because he cared so much.” Similarly, a visit to her sister, Margrete, after she has had had a miscarriage leaves her feeling like “an imposter, a fraud” as Margrete assumes her distress is sympathetic. “Why couldn’t I feel the way I used to?” she wonders, “Except that was exactly what I didn’t want.”
In an echo of her own despair, one of her two business partners, Dag, goes missing and is later discovered to have killed himself. “I yearned for a breakdown,” she tells us, but even that release seems beyond her reach. In Paris to collect Dag’s body, she sees a group of homeless people gather beneath an awning to sleep:
“They were alone with their stories just like I was, I thought, except they were aware of it.”
Later she recalls this image as an escape: “I can go home, fly to Paris, and sleep under the awning.” Hjorth brilliantly captures the continual anxiety, to the point that it’s difficult to read this section of the novel without your heart beating faster and a knot of dread in your stomach:
“Even during my worst nightmares was more excited about continuing to dream than what the day I was waking up to would bring.”
Such a mid-life crisis is, of course, a staple of a certain kind of novel; Hjorth’s portrayal of it is almost too real (the first fifty pages read like an extended panic attack) but it is where Hjorth takes us next that marks the novel out as something special.
At the point of his suicide, Dag was working on the ‘postal directive’, an EU ruling that the Norwegian Labour government looks likely to enforce which will open postal services to competition (British readers will recognise a similar change which took place here). Dag’s remit was to prevent this happening, at the behest of the postal workers’ union, a task that Ellinor and her remaining partner, Rolf, will now need to take on. It is through this unlikely campaign that Ellinor will find a reason to continue; as she realises quite quickly, “I was lacking a cause.”
The change is not overtly political – it occurs when she meets the men and women of the post office in an attempt to school them in the rules of media communication, and listen to their stories for the first time:
“Rolf was bamboozled, but my heartbeat changed pace and my breath filled my body.”
She immediately decides that the training would, in fact, hinder their attempt to get their message across:
“If you were to write letters in the way I was going to teach you, your words wouldn’t move anyone.”
One story in particular moves her – that of a poorly addressed letter which eventually finds its intended recipient only because of the persistence of the local postman. What is the significance of this story? It demonstrates purpose, caring and connection (as all letters do) – all elements which seem to have gone missing from Ellinor’s life and which she now attempts to get back. Slowly she connects to Stein, realising for the first time, “he existed, he was real, he had a heart.” Instead of waiting for a future which she realises is not coming, “waiting for my fairy tale to begin,” she attempts to live in the moment:
“I didn’t want to distance myself, I wanted to engage with the present, but how could I without faking it. Stop faking, I ordered myself, be real!”
Just as Hjorth is convincing when it comes to Ellinor’s spiralling anxiety, she is equally believable when describing her struggle to change. It is neither instantaneous nor complete, but a process she must drive herself, all the time motivated by having a social as well as a personal goal. In this way, Hjorth turns the outcome of the postal directive vote into both a political and a personal drama in which the reader quickly becomes utterly involved. Her great skill lies in taking the most ordinary characters in the most ordinary situations and creating narratives which feel like life or death. She is no ordinary writer.