Burnout’s nothing new. Just ask Henry David Thoreau, who was lamenting in 1854 that our lives are being “frittered away by detail.” The smartphone may then have been unimaginable — Alexander Graham Bell was barely out of infancy —yet the impulse to reach for it was already there. “Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels.”
Thoreau’s solution? “Simplify, simplify.” For two years, as anyone who’s read “Walden” will know, he took himself off to the woods “to live deliberately” and alone — notwithstanding that his personal wilderness was only a mile and a half from Concord, Mass., and he still sent his laundry out.
When we meet Emelie, the sometime narrator of Annika Norlin’s debut novel, “The Colony,” she’s already gone full Thoreau. Modern city life — “the shops and the cars and the lights, and the screens, screens, screens” — has become too much. She’d once prided herself, in her temp jobs and social life, on her dependability: “First I stayed late, then I went out. I went to football games, to plays, to parties, to the gym. I drank cocktails at bars, went running, joined book clubs.” But hyperactivity has taken its toll, and one day she finds herself unable to get out of bed. So off she trots to the northern Swedish countryside, where she tosses her iPhone in a lake and settles in to enjoy the din of silence.
But Emelie is not alone. Shortly after her isolation begins, she spies the “Colony” of the title, an intriguingly heterogeneous group of seven, eating and bathing and singing together. We will discover they’ve been there for some 15 years. But can their off-the-grid idyll survive the arrival of an “Outsider”?
“The Colony” was a bestselling, prize-winning sensation in Sweden, where its author has enjoyed a long career as a pop star. On the face of it, the book’s appeal to an American audience is obvious. The search for meaning, authenticity and adventure in the wilderness is a Great American trope. From the canon, not just Thoreau but also Melville’s Ishmael sought a change of scene when life became too much; more recent examples might include Chris McCandless in “Into the Wild” and memoirist Cheryl Strayed. These works typically offer sociopolitical commentary along with the fishing and sleeping bags — and “The Colony” is no different.
Norlin seeds the book with ideas from her own wide reading. We’re told that Sara, the Colony’s de facto leader, finds inspiration in both Thoreau and Arne Næss, the Norwegian philosopher whose ideas about “deep ecology” gave rise to the notion that humans should be considered on a level with any other species. (Worth noting that Næss, too, was wont to retreat to the wilderness — albeit his Walden Pond was a mountainside cabin.) Sara also reads Pentti Linkola, a more extreme thinker sometimes linked to ecofascist ideas about radical depopulation, though Norlin doesn’t provide much of a gloss if you’re not up to date on your Finnish environmentalists.
That the book fails to properly explore any of these ideas is a major shortcoming. Indeed, Norlin spends so long on backstories for the Colony’s individual members and their practical motives for seeking isolation that there’s not only less space but less narrative necessity for them to share a philosophy. Three of them have good cause to fear the law; all seven are complicit in benefits fraud. The youngest, the straggling teenaged Låke, was born off the grid and has no identity, legally speaking. It’s ultimately less ideology than plot that binds the members of the Colony. Contra Thoreau, they all seem interested less in living life deliberately than deliberately avoiding life.
What’s left is a group of misfits blessed with the time and space to think without distraction yet weirdly content not to bother. The low intensity of dialogue and debate is baffling, especially given the early signs of discontent that Norlin carefully plants. When Sagne, who was an entomologist before retiring to the woods, compares the group to an ant colony, everyone appears to accept at face value the superficial aptitude of her analogy. “Everyone has a task for the community, said Sagne,” Norlin writes. “Everyone is needed. No one has to know everything.” Perhaps on these very narrow terms the comparison works, but it’s hard to imagine it would bear the kind of productive scrutiny that more extensive dialogue might have provoked. What about ants’ prodigious industry? Their enormous and growing populations? Without such dialogue, we must simply believe that the Colony is happy with its berry-picking and breathwork routines. Without dialogue, there’s little to convince the reader — nothing that a Thoreau or a Næss might say to add rigor and ballast to the Colony’s rather flimsy ethos. Yet over time, we’re told, conversation simply fizzles out.
Two characters are more finely drawn: Emelie, chummy and self-deprecating, irritating but believable, and Låke, whose unique style we encounter in the book’s best and shortest chapters. His appealingly eccentric voice arrives fully formed on first introduction: “We can feel it in our Bodies, when summer begins to weigh over. There are many little clues around us! Now it’s high summer now everything is in bloom. & when it’s time we shall feel the call to return to our nest.” Alice E. Olsson, in her English translation, locates a naive lyricism in the voice of this bright but unschooled boy, who learned the way of the world from the meager literature at hand: “Wuthering Heights,” “Flowers in the Attic,” old Jackie Collins novels.
If only the whole story had been told from Låke’s curious and blinkered perspective, “The Colony” might have ended up more show than tell, and the more eloquent for it. As it stands, the characterization is thin, the motivations are overdetermined, and the Colony’s endurance demands too steep a suspense of disbelief. Perhaps a different, better book might have been found had Norlin followed Thoreau’s advice and simplified.
Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.
