At the Edge of Light
Maria Peura, trans David Hackston Maia Press, 240pp, £8.99
First: some helpful background information. The suicide rate in Finland is the second highest in Europe. Some clinicians think this might be linked to the nation's limited amount of daylight (especially in winter); others suggest a national predisposition to depression. Whatever the cause, death would appear to be part of the Finnish psyche in a way existentialists could only marvel at.
Death swirls around Finnish writer Maria Peura's mesmerising new novel from the very first image. A river runs through the remote, northern Finland village where the 12-year-old narrator Kristina lives. Children are warned not to skate on it when it's frozen, in case they fall in - but as Kristina says: "That's why you had to go." Her compulsion to dice with death is a self-destructive trait she would appear to share with others in her village. Kids play on the railway lines, smoke pot and self-harm. Adults drink and drive, play fast and loose with shotguns, and pop pills. The village is a hotbed of unchannelled, primitive emotions, where old curses on the land are believed, and where dead souls appear in dreams. There is a certain madness to the village, and many have tried - either literally or metaphorically - to escape.
Kristina also longs to escape. Approaching puberty, she is old enough to know that her mother lurches from pill to pill, and that her father is having an affair. She likes a rather disturbed boy called Kari, but is wise enough to guess that his first choice would have been Kristina's friend Pirta, who is dating Aslak.
Coming-of-age stories are nothing new, but Peura's novel is set apart by the swooning, psychedelic feel to her writing, vibrantly translated by David Hackston. To enter Kristina's highly sensitive world is to take an acid trip. Her soul flies, her brain melts, she becomes a whirlpool. She relates to nature and the dead as if they were living people. There is little plot to speak of, or certainly not one that I believe I need to set down for you to whet your appetite. Kristina masturbates; she starts to menstruate; she develops bulimia; she has sex for the first time. She is sent to Coventry by the girls at school; she is intrigued by orgasms and lovebites. Above all, she moves from partial to fuller knowledge, and shifts from a compulsion for death towards life.
This is an invigorating novel of mood, of atmosphere. Geography and climate mirror emotion and personality. Some of Peura's images have the resonance and extravagance of fairytales (the reindeer, the Matryoshka doll, the river), and each one of her sentences has, in addition to its literal meaning, a highly allusive metaphorical sense. When Kristina says that she disappears into the woods with Kari for "a year, two years", you relive those heady, all- consuming days of adolescent first love; or when, before her first period, Kristina sprouts long black hair all over her body, Peura humourously evokes embarrassment.
This is a tale about what it means to long for escape when you can't. Not just for Kristina (on the cusp of "escaping" childhood), but for num erous characters whose actions illustrate some of the means we have devised to escape our lives: drugs, fainting, eating disorders, adultery. Some characters hear voices; several injure themselves; at least one is addicted to prescription meds. It is as though Peura is asking: do we ever grow out of running along the railway tracks, or skating on thin ice?
This novel is as much about life as it is about a village, a girl, a journey. Existentially, death is part of life. To focus on this runs the risk of mis sing out on life, but deep down we can't escape the knowledge that death waits for us at the end (whenever that may be). Peura's remarkable talent is in addressing our anxious subconscious.
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