Cold, bleak and brilliant
The Reindeer HuntersI am a huge fan of this author. My only problem with “The Reindeer Hunters” is that it is the second book of a trilogy. My memory is not brilliant, especially when many of the place names and characters are Norwegian and therefore to me, unpronounceable and or unmemorable. Therefore when the author links events and people featured in “The Bell in the Lake” to action in “The Reindeer Hunters” I am some times lost. Read the trilogy in sequence, in as short a time as possible. This book is set mainly in Norway some twenty years later than “The Bell in the Lake” and continues to centre around the pastor of the village church and focuses on the changing times which wracked Europe in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The book follows the early lives of two reindeer hunters, one Scottish, the other Norwegian; one rich, one poor. First rival hunters, then friends, then divided irreconcilably. The farming and hunting life in Norway for tenant farmers in those days was excruciatingly hard and is brilliantly portrayed by the author. I defy anyone not to shiver and groan at the efforts the young hunter and his wife to scratch a living from the unforgiving mountains. The introduction of electricity, driven by water and indomitable will, is wonderfully described. The other hunter, meanwhile has discovered the joys of flying and buys a Bleriot aeroplane which is kept in at the ancestral Scottish estate and encourages him to become a pilot and endure the horrors of the First World War. After the war, he returns to Norway,to continue the hunt for the bell in the lake. I am in awe of the author’s power to hold the reader both with depictions of landscape and human emotions. I just hope the final book of the trilogy comes before I forget what I have just read.
