Review of TOXIC by Helga Flatland (New Release)

 4 Stars

I loved Flatland’s novel One Last Time (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2021/10/review-of-one-last-time-by-helga.html) so was excited to read her most recent offering. I was not disappointed.

Mathilde is forced to leave her teaching position in Oslo after her relationship with an 18-year-old student is discovered. To escape her tarnished reputation and Covid restrictions, she decides to leave the city and rent a cottage in the countryside. The cottage is on a dairy farm run by two brothers, Johs and Andres, whose family has owned the farm for several generations. Mathilde’s arrival disturbs the peaceful life on the farm.

There are two first-person narrators: Mathilde and Johs. Their perspectives reveal their inner lives and also emphasize their differences. Mathilde is very much the modern woman whereas Johs’ life, despite the farm’s modernizations, is very much rooted in the traditions of the past.

Mathilde was raised by her aunt after the deaths of her parents. She describes herself as “rootless” with no personal interest in her ancestry. Her behaviour certainly challenges traditional ideas about the behaviour expected of women. To his mother Signe, Johs describes Mathilde as a woman who “’talks too much, laughs too loud, sleeps with whoever she wants, and doesn’t give a shit about facades.’”

Johs lives by tradition. Mathilde thinks of him as “’a walking family tree . . . with a full overview of [his] heritage.’” Things are done as they were done by his grandfather Johannes. The brothers even manage the farm like Johannes and his brother did. Johs believes “traditions are important” and “traditions cannot be broken.” Like his grandfather, Johs plays the fiddle and insists on telling the folktale connected to the music before he plays. He even has a tendency to judge a person based on “what he comes from”!

What is outstanding is the characterization.  All characters emerge as fully developed, realistic people for whom the reader will feel sympathy but with whom he/she will also feel angry and frustrated. Mathilde, for example, lost her parents and as a result seems to suffer from abandonment issues. This situation might arouse sympathy, but it is difficult to agree with some of her choices and her refusal to take any responsibility for her choices. Johs seems trapped in a dysfunctional family between “a cold and manipulative mother” and a selfish brother. There were times I wanted to scream at him to develop a backbone.

One of the themes is the connections between the past and the present. Mathilde seems to have inherited some traits from her mother who “’had an enormous need for validation . . . almost . . . insatiable . . . [and] became almost psychotic when these men, who she didn’t even want in the first place, rejected her.’” Mathilde’s question about “’Who was driving the car?’” is so chilling! Mathilde’s inability to learn from past mistakes does not bode well: “I don’t know how to learn to stop being attracted to someone who’ll eventually reject me.” Johs lives in shadow of his mother whom he thinks is “damaged . . . I think Johannes damaged her.” But perhaps the shadow of Johannes is even bigger. Flashbacks clearly show that Johs and Andres could not escape their grandfather’s influence. A totally odious man who may even have attempted a murder, he loved to tell folktales about women who rebel against their patriarchal society and suffer tragic consequences as a result. Andres summarizes these stories as “’About unspeakably immoral, rebellious women who had to be punished. . . . Stories that say these women vanished mysteriously or dramatically, while in reality they were probably murdered or they killed themselves.’”

Tension builds slowly, but I soon realized that things would not end well because of the dark sides of the characters involved. There’s Mathilde who cannot tolerate rejection: “the feeling of unadulterated despair, the bottomless abyss opening beneath me when I think that someone is about to leave me. All my instincts demand that I fight back, I lose my sense of rationality and impulse control.” And then there’s a man whose “anxiety can make him furious – when his nerves are aglow like that, they can flare up and spark a rage so explosive.”

The book’s title is perfect since Toxic features a number of toxic characters and toxic relationships, both in the past and the present. And the ending . . . wow! Some readers will find its open-endedness unsatisfying, but I think it’s perfect. What it implies of course is very unsettling. I can well imagine the newest folktale!

This is a book I will put on my to re-read pile. There are layers and nuances I’m sure I missed.  In the meantime, I will be highly recommending it.