Entertainment
Is This Mysterious Swedish Commune an Eden or a Nightmare?
Annika Norlin’s novel, “The Colony,” follows a group of misfits in a bucolic forest. The only thing its members share is a dark past.
THE COLONY, by Annika Norlin; translated by Alice E. Olsson
Imagine you are an adult orphan, a rootless Hungarian man raised in Sweden, whose greatest emotional connection is with a charismatic criminal.
Let’s say she drags you to a remote settlement in the Swedish forest at the invitation of a woman she met in prison, who’s currently defrauding the state while raising a motherless teenager more or less as her own.
Suppose enough time goes by that you live there now, and the only living soul in whom you can safely confide your doubts is a chicken named Dr. Snuggles.
This is just one strand of Annika Norlin’s first novel, “The Colony,” a disturbing, engrossing portrait of a tiny community living beyond society. They’re an incongruous group, each so physically distinct it’s clear to any onlooker they belong to no traditional social unit, like family or a team of loggers.
Among their ranks: the orphaned man, József; his partner, Sara, who was imprisoned for extreme animal-rights protests and exerts a dark magnetism over her peers; her friend from jail, Aagny, a formidable, maternal woman who murdered her husband; her young charge; a beatifically handsome man on the run from the authorities; an ant specialist who despises the son she delivered on the premises; and that child himself.
Together they bring a staggering amount of violent history and psychological torment to this glorious mountain setting, where they fall into such a harmonious rhythm that they hardly need to speak. Their days are governed by work and they have almost no contact with outsiders, but there are plenty of foraged berries, roast perch from the nearby lake swabbed with butter and nights spent sleeping together under a sprawling, quasi-matriarchal tree they call Big Spruce.
