All points north (original) (raw)

This year Scandinavia has changed its relation to the rest of the world. The Öresund bridge, opened this summer, links Copenhagen and Malmö; the significance of the sea dividing Sweden and Norway from Denmark and mainland Europe has thus been diminished. "Sweden is a beached unrigged ship", wrote the country's greatest living poet, Tomas Tranströmer, pointing up an island quality - an independence from the problems and decrees of elsewhere.

But in fact the Öresund bridge (bitterly resented by many, particularly ecologists) is the culmination of a long debate that became, in these famously consensual societies, all the fiercer as the 90s progressed: just how European are - or should be - the Scandinavian countries? During the last decade Sweden voted to join the EU, as did Finland; Denmark rejected the Maastricht Treaty in one referendum and accepted it in a second, while Norway decided to stay out. This last result was determined not by the south-facing capital, Oslo, but by the north's stubborn traditionalist communities.

Throughout Scandinavia there has been an increasing feeling that it is the northern regions, with their vast tracts of wilderness, that give the culture its distinctive definition. The Swedish novel of the 90s was Kerstin Ekman's wonderful Blackwater (Vintage, £6.99), a huge critical and popular success.

A young woman prepared to view everything through the rosy spectacles of the 1970s Green Wave comes to a remote northern community. Within an hour of her arrival she has stumbled across the victims of a brutal murder: two hitchhikers, both foreigners, hacked to death in their lakeside tent. It takes almost two decades for the crime to be solved, and the whole situation is metaphoric of a way of life that spurns - and has been spurned by - the modern world. Perhaps the north is more and more a home for men (rather than women), an isolating world of elk blood and gun oil. Yet Ekman has made her home there, and her evocation of the landscape recalls such literary forebears as Nor way's great visionary novelist, Tarjei Vesaas, or Finland's children's writer of genius, Tove Jansson.

Danish Peter Høeg's bestselling Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (Harvill, £7.99) also pays tribute to the north. Here power resides not in Copenhagen, which is presented as promoting bureaucratic secrecy and institutionalised racism, but in Denmark's former Arctic colony, Greenland: the heroine, farouche and percipient, is half Inuit. Høeg has gone on to champion the atavistic (and honest) over the societised (and dishonest) in later work, notably The Woman and the Ape (Harvill, £6.99).

But the majority of Scandinavians, of course, live in cities and are members of sophisticated, high-tech communities. For the greater part of the past century they have enjoyed international pre-eminence for their social democracy; in Sweden especially, the Social Democrat parties have known remarkable political hegemony. Closer integration with Europe could mean surrender of integrity, so opposition to "Brussels" frequently comes from the left.

One prominent literary spokesperson for this faction is the fine Swedish novelist and dramatist P-O Enquist, while in Norway a writer of major stature imaginatively bound up with the old left is Per Petterson. For me his To Siberia (Harvill, £12.99) is one of the past decade's most moving novels. It charts the life of his Danish mother who, with her beloved brother, devoted her youth to the international socialist cause.

Ecological threat aside, the new Öresund bridge is so potent a symbol because it reminds us that the outside world sooner or later asserts itself. With the end of the cold war, Swedish neutrality - a principled apartness - was no longer easy to justify; its critics saw it as shot through with evasions and deceptions.

The shadow of the second world war grew longer as the 20th century neared its end. A distinguished Swedish journalist observed that his country had never produced a writer who'd tackled head-on the subject of Swedish war guilt, as Max Frisch did in comparable Switzerland. Norway remembered that one of its greatest writers, Knut Hamsun, was an ardent, unrepentant Nazi, and P-O Enquist wrote a fine film script about him. Suddenly a hornet's nest had been disturbed; it is buzzing still. A magnificent Norwegian novel, Gunnar Kopperud's The Time of Light (Bloomsbury, £15.99), enters the mind of a young German fighting at Stalingrad and helps us all to come to terms with guilt and complicity.

Unfortunately, not all Scandinavia's talents have been promoted or even translated for English speakers. Norway's Kjell Askildsen's fascinating short stories deserve greater currency, while his compatriot Dag Solstad's explorations of shifting Norwegian society await a translator - as does the work of Sweden's socially incisive and psychologically bold Bodil Malmsten, and of Jonas Gardell, who has broken his country's fixation with the norm with his gay sensibility expressed in novels, plays and outrageous one-man shows. Agneta Pleijel, whose George Eliot-like moral seriousness combines with acute lyrical insight, has been translated only patchily.

Admirable Edinburgh publisher Canongate next month publishes the Danish Jens Christian Grondahl's anatomy of marriage and personality, Silence in October, but no one has offered the Swede Björn Ranelid's work to the English world. And who will render into English the Norwegian poet Steinar Opstad's sensitive insights into the familial and personal? Clearly it will take more than the Öresund bridge to open up communications.