Blog Tour: Toxic – Helga Flatland,  translated by Matt Bagguley

When Mathilde is forced to leave her teaching job in Oslo after her relationship with eighteen-year-old Jacob is exposed, she flees to the countryside for a more authentic life.

Her new home is a quiet cottage on the outskirts of a dairy farm run by Andres and Johs, whose hobbies include playing the fiddle and telling folktales – many of them about female rebellion and disobedience, and seeking justice, whatever it takes.

But beneath the surface of the apparently friendly and peaceful pastoral life of the farm, something darker and less harmonic starts to vibrate, and with Mathilde’s arrival, cracks start appearing … everywhere.

Helga Flatland is already one of Norway’s most awarded and widely read authors. Born in Telemark, Norway, in 1984, she made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Stay If You Can, Leave If You Must, for which she was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas’ First Book Prize. She has written four novels and a children’s book and has won several other literary awards. Her fifth novel, A Modern Family (her first English translation), was published to wide acclaim in Norway in August 2017, and was a number-one bestseller. The rights have subsequently been sold across Europe and the novel has sold more than 100,000 copies. One Last Time was published in 2020 and is currently topping bestseller lists in Norway

Matt is a British, Norwegian-to-English translator, born in Coventry in 1971. I studied at Derby University, and spent several years as a musician and songwriter. In 2001 I moved to Norway, working with graphic design and music, while gradually developing an interest in translation. Now I work full-time with authors, publishers, literary agencies, and film producers – within fiction and non-fiction. From climate science or animal philosophy – to Roman history and Russian punk. I recently translated Simon Stranger’s acclaimed WW2 novel Keep Saying Their Names, and a movie script for the Oscar-nominated director Joachim Trier.

My thoughts: this reminded me a little of Notes on a Scandal, which also concerns an inappropriate relationship between a teacher and her student, but while Mathilde is let go from her job, she isn’t dragged through the press and doesn’t have her entire life destroyed. Instead she escapes to a farm run by brothers Andres and Johannes, where she causes trouble there too.

I found the dual narration of Mathilde and Johannes interesting, at first I couldn’t see how the two would connect, they were so different, Mathilde in Oslo, caring only about herself, Johs on the family farm, weighed down by family history and expectations. They are very different people, although both quite self centered.

Being a pandemic novel, I was worried that it would too much, bring back the collective stress and trauma of those days, but out in the countryside, there seems to be little to no worry about infection rates and social distancing. Except Andres the hypochondriac, a few masks and the cancellation of almost all of Johs’ fiddle lessons (I liked Viggo, he was an entertaining character, I also liked the cows named after film stars).

The ending left lots of unanswered questions and I wonder if the author chose to let us fill in the blanks depending on how morbid or twisted our minds are!

What started off as two separate stories of insular and prickly people, slowly became one narrative with very different perspectives, and was very enjoyable to read. 

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.