The Almost Nearly Perfect People Read online

  ‘Yes, we are kind of special up here in the North,’ a fellow bystander says to me, catching my look of concern as I arrive at the parade proper. I am especially surprised by the teenage girls freely, proudly, dressed like a cross between Heidi’s grandmother and a holidaying Eva Braun: when I was a teenager I refused to leave the house if there was the slightest risk that my clothing might draw any attention from my peers. ‘This’ll be on TV live through the day and from parades all over Norway, and even in Norwegian communities in American and Canada,’ continues the bystander, who is actually one of a minority dressed in civvies, adding with a big smile, ‘Gratulerer med dagen!’

  ‘Make sure you dress smartly,’ a Norwegian chef friend had told me when he found out I was travelling to his capital city on 17 May. I was glad for the advice. If they were not wearing one of the four hundred or so different traditional costumes from Norway’s provinces (the most popular, according to a four-page spread devoted to the costumes in that day’s Dagbladet, being the one from Telemark), most of my fellow spectators were dressed as if for a wedding: the men and boys in suits and ties, with shades and an excitable excess of hair gel; the women in posh summer frocks and heels; and the girls in their best new party dresses. ‘I usually go to work in a hoodie and jeans, but I’ll put on a shirt and proper shoes if I have to go out on 17 May,’ the friend had added. It was the first time I had ever worn a suit to watch a public parade, but I was glad I had.

  Of the Nordic peoples, only the Norwegians commemorate their national coming-of-age with quite such fervour, spending a total of around 30 million kroner on their bunader (individuals might spend up to 70,000 kroner – £7,000 – for one costume alone). Yet the historic reasons for such extravagant celebrations appear opaque. The split from Denmark and the writing of the Norwegian constitution in 1814, which is what they are supposed to be commemorating today, was only really the beginning of a long, slow, rather low-key effort to wrestle free from Sweden’s grasp that did not culminate in full independence until 1905. And, even then, it wasn’t so much a question of the Norwegians wrenching liberty from the tyrannical rule of Stockholm with their dirndls flying and all guns blazing. Theirs was an independence born of persistent nagging over many decades, followed by a few minor skirmishes on the streets of Oslo. In the end, Stockholm agreed to a referendum based on spectacularly bad intelligence: the Swedes thought the Norwegians would vote to stay with them, but they voted against.

  One Norwegian conceded to me that 17 May was really not much more than ‘a kind of “fuck you” to the Swedes’; in fact its roots stem largely from the end of German occupation in 1945. I learned all this later that morning, as I sat nursing the world’s most expensive beer (a tenner) at an outdoor café table, and got chatting with a teacher from a school just outside of Oslo. ‘It was really by chance that 17 May coincided with the Germans’ surrender,’ she told me. The actual date was 8 May, but that presumably gave the Norwegians just over a week to muster their bunting and burnish their buckles for what must have been a hell of a street party.

  What of the other Nordic countries and their national celebrations? Only Finland and Iceland have been ruled by others for any significant period, so you would expect their national days to be more charged than those of Denmark or Sweden. Finland does celebrate its independence from Russia (in 1917), but in a typically Finnish, introspective kind of a way. The day plays out almost entirely in private homes and on television, something I suspect is only partly explained by the fact that it falls in December and so any marching would have to negotiate knee-deep snow, and more because that’s just how Finns are. The Finns are special too, you see. Only the Icelanders, who share the Norwegians’ penchant for fondly imagined nineteenth-century simulacra of medieval peasant costumes have anything to match, and Icelanders are basically self-exiled Norwegians anyway, so I am not sure they really count.

  The Swedes consider themselves far too modern to indulge in this kind of public dressing up; besides, they have never been occupied, so have no such yoke-shrugging to celebrate. Their ‘National Day’ on 6 June is, by comparison, a contrived and half-hearted event being tied up with their break from the Kalmar Union in the sixteenth century. From what I hear, there is sporadic flag-waving on the day, but this has at times been hijacked by right-wing extremists, thus confirming many Swedes’ fears that this kind of overt nationalistic expression brings the Nazis out of the woodwork. Some Norwegians accuse the Swedes of jealousy over the fact that they get to dress up and wave flags on 17 May, but I think it’s fair to say that were the Swedes to adopt the Norwegian approach it would be a source of mortifying embarrassment for at least half the population. This kind of Nordic national romanticism still prompts uncomfortable memories of the Swedes’ dalliances with the Nazis during the Second World War. The Norwegians, on the other hand, fought more determinedly against the Germans than any of their Scandinavian siblings, so have no such qualms about reviving this otherwise unfashionable iconography.

  The Danes, meanwhile, would find the whole idea similarly preposterous, never having been yoked to anyone but the Germans for a handful of years during the Second World War (an occupation that was, let’s be honest, no biggie in the grand scheme of things). As we have heard, you will not find a more fervent bunch of flag-wavers outside of Pyongyang, but, sadly for them, the Danes would struggle to muster any kind of a national costume beyond jeans and a cycle helmet.

  So we are left with the Norwegians as the leading Nordic proponents of overt public nationalism in all its easily mocked glory. I rarely shy from the task of mocking easy targets but, as I mingle with the be-dirndled crowds on the streets of Oslo, gradually, quite unexpectedly, I begin to find my approach to the Norwegians and their 17 May celebrations transform.

  For one thing, it takes some chutzpah to pull on a pair of knickerbockers, wrap yourself in a great, ivory-coloured cape, and stride out on to the streets of a twenty-first century European capital looking like an escapee from Middle Earth. It also demonstrates an enviable tribal confidence, a link to a less complicated, more innocent past, which most of us left behind when James Watt invented his steam engine and we all went off to live amid the bricks and smoke. In Britain, the few traces that remain of these kinds of folkloric traditions are easy fodder for the lazy comedian (or conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, for that matter, who once said, ‘In this life, try everything once, except incest and folk dancing’). Syttende Mai may largely be a post-war revival of a national identity contrived in the late nineteenth century, a romanticised imagining of rural traditions that probably never really existed, but there is no doubting the sincerity of those who take part.

  The overwhelming impression I had that day, standing on the broad, clean streets of Oslo, was of a country wholly at ease with itself, of a people basking not just in vast material wealth but in an equally valuable civil cohesion deeply rooted in a shared history: a solid national–spiritual capital, if you like. By stepping out wearing their intricate, expensive and, to some eyes perhaps, silly, regional costumes, the Norwegians were sending a signal to one another: ‘I am like you. We share the same history, the same values, and I am prepared to expend vast amounts of money, go to significant sartorial lengths and risk public humiliation in order to demonstrate this.’

  In the end, I spent a very happy couple of hours on the streets of central Oslo watching the traditional parade of children – a good number of them ethnically non-Norwegian – from kindergarten-age to teenagers, and I envied Norway that day. I envied its sense of togetherness, its unabashed pride and, yes, the capes. There should be more capes in the world. I would look great in a cape.

  At one point, as a multicoloured gaggle of under-tens passed by in that distracted way that characterises the marching style of under-tens everywhere, I had to fight myself to stop from crying. Admittedly, this should be taken in the context of a man who has become pitifully prone to lachrymosity (Pixar films are virtually a no-go these days, and I can only watch major sporting eve
nts in private), but what on earth was this all about? As a Somali girl passed by, struggling proudly with a flag three times her height, followed by a Sikh boy in authentic bunad, it was all I could do to suppress a full-blown, snotting meltdown. And that really would have turned heads. It wasn’t just the fact of their ethnicity that had so touched me, but that the Somali, Turkish, Iraqi and Pakistani kids had committed just as fully to the Dungeons and Dragons aesthetic as their ‘pure’ Norwegian peers. They, too, were proudly, unselfconsciously dressed up in their Hobbit Sunday best. And it doesn’t get much more assimilated than that.

  It wasn’t so long ago, the 1980s in fact, that Norway was plagued by right-wing activity, with street marches, arson attacks on asylum centres, skinhead neo-Nazis parading on the streets of Oslo, and attacks on non-Western immigrants. But then, in 2001, members of a neo-Nazi group called the Boot Boys were found guilty of murdering a fifteen-year-old Oslo boy of mixed race. There was public outcry: a mass rally was held in Oslo attended by 40,000 people, and everyone assumed the far right had retreated to the wilds of the Internet. At around the same time, Oslo schools with large numbers of children of non-Western backgrounds who had wanted to march on 17 May had been the target of bomb threats and demonstrations by the same species of right-wing thug. In response, there had been a conscious effort by local authorities and civic groups to make 17 May an actively multicultural, inclusive event. It seems to have worked wonderfully, at least it did to me, on that morning.

  Later that day, on NRK1 TV, amid live coverage of all the various other, often perplexing and arcane, 17 May rituals being acted out throughout rural Norway (in Tjøtta, in Nordland, some children were pushing an oil barrel down a dirt track on a shopping trolley and hitting it with hammers), I watched an interviewer in traditional costume ask an Iraqi woman what she thought it meant to be Norwegian: ‘To be democratic, a socialist, pluralist. Maybe not so outgoing,’ she said. Other commentators were keen to stress that anyone, immigrant or otherwise, could become a Norwegian, and that one of the nation’s key values was ‘not to feel threatened’. Another said that the Russian background of the previous evening’s Eurovision winner set a good example for the ‘New Norway’: ‘We should feel so proud to have so many accents,’ he added.

  While watching the TV, my eye was caught by a headline in one of the day’s newspapers: ‘Nothing Can Bring Us Together Like 17 May . . . And Nothing Can Split Us Like 17 May.’ I scoured the article for evidence of the conflict alluded to in the headline. Were there some Norwegians who opposed 17 May? As it turned out, the controversy – and it was a major one: the article went on for five pages – concerned the slight alteration of the route of a 17 May parade in a town in Hadeland. It wasn’t that some people wanted the parade stopped, or that they weren’t interested in joining it, but that they were outraged that some local councillor had decided that it should no longer pass a particular old people’s home. So much for my 17 May controversy.

  After watching the morning’s parade and having waved back enthusiastically at the far-off king, I sat on a grassy bank and watched as the younger children were hustled on to buses and coaches and whisked away from the city centre. Now, it seemed, the real party could begin. It was time for the high school graduates to let rip.

  Throughout all of Scandinavia, gymnasium (high school), graduates celebrate by parading through their home towns on the backs of an assortment of open-aired farm vehicles, trucks and buses, clutching festively chinking carrier bags, and getting off with each other. In Denmark and Sweden, for some reason, they wear vaguely nautical-looking, peaked white caps, which make them look as if they are part of a sailing club. Graduation day often falls on an ordinary weekday and there can be a strange dissonance in seeing everyone else going about their daily business while a small section of society lets rip in the most spectacular fashion (I say the graduates ‘parade’, but no one really lines up to spectate). One afternoon while with my family on the beach near where we live in Denmark, a truckload of partying graduates arrived, promptly stripped off, and ran into the sea. In Britain or the US young eyes would have been shielded, there would have been loud tutting and the police might have been summoned, but in Denmark the other parents laughed and applauded as a parade of fashionably trimmed pubic topiary bounced past their children’s eyes.

  While the ever-sensible Swedes sensibly celebrate after their exams, in Norway they tie one off before their exams, which is either a mark of collective confidence or utter nihilism, I’m not sure. They also wear red dungarees along with their sailor’s caps. The dungarees are festooned with flags and badges and, that year at least, worn with the shoulder straps hanging down. (One other odd thing, the graduates were handing out specially printed calling cards – Russekort – bearing their photos and a joke or two. The smaller children – those who had not been bussed hastily out of town – were scampering around trying to collect as many as they could. It was terribly sweet.) Soon the dirndls and capes were replaced by a sea of red dungarees swaying and dancing, occasionally intertwined, a tangle of scarlet limbs and, as time went on, a large number of them prone in the grass.

  There was no skinny dipping that day in Oslo, but there was plenty of drinking. This was the fabled helgefylla (the Norwegian term for binge drinking) as the Independence Day revellers and the graduates caroused, sang and made merry amid the shiny glass yuppie towers of the redeveloped harbour area, Aker Brygge, home to some of the town’s swankiest bars and most costly real estate. Here, beside the harbour, with the country’s striking new opera house floating like a shard of ice in the near distance, the drinking started in earnest around lunchtime and kept right on through to the next morning. It seemed as if half of Norway was out in Oslo that day, with the express intention of having a jolly time of it. By mid evening the streets were awash with empty champagne bottles. The Eurovision-winning ‘I’m in Love with a Fairytale’ blasted from speakers balanced on window ledges on Frognerveien, where the cafés and bars were heaving, customers spilling boisterously out into the late-night sunshine. Women in heavy, ankle-length embroidered skirts danced with men in capes; kids in red dungarees danced with other kids in red sailor’s caps. It was a great day to be in Norway.

  A little over two years later, as I worked at home in my office one Saturday afternoon, I read a headline on my computer: a large bomb had gone off in central Oslo. Soon after, reports began filtering through that a gunman had shot a number of people – perhaps as many as fifteen – at a Young Labour summer camp on the island of Utøya, 24 miles north-west of the capital.

  * * *

  1 A Norwegian friend of mine gets quite worked up when I call them this: ‘They are not dirndls,’ she says. ‘They are gala costumes.’ But they are close enough to dirndls, and besides, it’s such a fantastic word.

  Chapter 2

  Egoiste

  ‘Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.’

  Joan Didion

  EVEN IN MIDWINTER the sun is so sharp it forces me to squint, reflecting off the snow it turns the landscape into a light box. The air is brisk and, as I make my way from the airport terminal, I catch the scent of fresh pine. The bus driver grunts when I ask if he is going to Oslo centre. I assume this is an affirmative but, as we drive, I scan the view anxiously for clues that we are heading in the right direction. We drive past the yacht harbours that fill the fjords surrounding Oslo and, between the regimented conifers, I catch glimpses of dayglo hikers bearing those high-tech walking sticks that make them look like they have mislaid their skis, striding in single-file along the forested hillside paths. I am reminded just how extraordinarily beautiful Norway is. It is perhaps the most beautiful country I have ever seen.

  It is seven months since a 32-year-old Oslo man, the racist extremist Anders Behring Breivik, single-handedly doubled Norway’s average annual homicide rate in one afternoon, killing a total of 77 people. One of his chief bugbears about non-Western immigrants – who were the indirect subjects
of his attacks that day – was that he held them responsible for most of the violent crime in Norway. Well, not now they weren’t.

  From my seat in the bus nothing appears to have changed. What did I expect? Razor wire and police patrols? Hardly likely in a land where the then prime minister, at the memorial service to the dead of Utøya and the Oslo bomb, gave one of the most courageous speeches in defence of public freedom I have ever heard. Jens Stoltenberg had called for ‘more openness, more democracy’, at a time when most politicians elsewhere in the world would have used an attack of that nature to pledge revenge, exploit the anxieties of the electorate, garner greater authority and power, and then compromise civil liberties. His speech was a reminder that the political leaders of the North have often served as the moral compass of the world.

  Wandering around the capital – mostly trying to find a restaurant I could afford, peering at the menus outside like some starving match girl – the atmosphere seemed to confirm my impression that little had changed. There were no barricades on Oslo’s streets; no new security measures in this sturdy, restrained city; no X-ray machines on the Metro; no armed police patrolling its malls; no security checks at public institutions. You could still walk right up to the front door of the royal palace, which remained free of any kind of fencing or gates.

  So, the furniture and fabric of Norwegian society appeared not to have altered, and it occurred to me later that day, as I caught the tram to Blindern, the stop for Oslo University, that merely to ask the question, ‘How has Breivik changed Norway?’ was to grant the man a far greater significance than will ever be his due. But the question needed to be asked, and that was why I had returned.