The names on them spoke of long lineages and deep histories: Johnsrund, Aamaas, Syverson. Behind, on a stone, stood five memorial candles, gutted and unlit, circling a wet and dirty teddy bear. The Norwegian flag lay limply to one side, and a pine tree stood covered with broken decorations on its dripping leaves. A Christmas not celebrated.
I drove further along the road to a campsite and pulled up near the main house. The bone-marrow chill had forced me to wear all the clothes I had. I eased out of the car and waddled over to ring the bell. Nothing. But as I headed back, a man in heavy blue fatigues, black cap and thick boots came towards me through an icy drizzle that had punctured the morning. His name was Brede Johbraaten, the owner of the camping ground. I asked him about renting a boat to cross to the island, but he said this was still winter, and people did not hire out boats in winter.
He would answer some questions, though, so we sheltered from the growing rain in a wooden workshop. This man in his mid sixties, a grandfather of three, was quiet at first, but then he began to speak about how he had helped people, dripping and terrified, out of the lake on that terrible day, and a shadow entered our conversation. He had run this campsite since the 1990s, with regular visitors from Norway, Germany and Holland, but the shooting had deeply hurt his business.
‘I’m fed up with it,’ he said – a Norwegian understatement.
As he spoke he became more critical. First, he blamed the police, as people often do when tragedy arrives unbidden, because we need to blame someone. He said they had been too slow to respond, too disorganised. But so rare are mass shootings in Norway that you could understand why there was such confusion.
Then he said journalists come here and all they want to talk about is what happened on that day, and not what had happened to the community. So I began to ask him questions about his life, but I floundered. What had happened here made me feel almost shy. I was hesitant to talk about the horrors that had unfolded. So I asked if house prices had been hit, and we talked a little about this, as it was something we both understood.
Then, as if he felt obliged to, he spoke about Breivik.
‘He is a stupid man. They should not call him by his name. They should call him as the mass killer, and that is that.’ The easiest thing would have been if someone had just put a bullet in the head of that mass killer, he said.
The rain had begun to fall harder now, and the lake sparkled with the drops. There was not much more to talk about, or those things that could be said felt wrong to say. So we shook hands, and I left him, the permanent view of the island framing his land, and I wondered what it must be like to wake every day being reminded of what happened here.
Further along the lakeshore I parked at a small strip of rock that projected out towards the island. Here the government intended to set up a permanent memorial, a sharp cut-through grey stone to symbolise the unnatural tragedy that had engulfed this place. I sat and, through my misting windscreen, watched as the white clouds slid down from the mountains and shrouded Utøya.
I had been to a few places around the world which had been marked by guns, just as Breivik’s guns had done here. School massacres in Britain and America, mass graves in Somalia and the Philippines, genocide sites in Armenia and Germany. That same awkward quietude, that feeling that any question you ask is tinged and mawkish, an absence of any easy explanation for what happened – these things were always a feature. So it was here. And the space between the earth and the heavens grew slowly smaller as the clouds came in, and the rain lessened until silence was the only thing left.
Night had returned to Oslo’s glistening streets as I walked past endless shops selling kitchens and homeware: white candles and wooden floor-boards and Scandi-chic. Norway does not wear its wealth loudly. Things here are not grotesque or baroque. But good taste requires consensus; social order and criticism are there in case you step out of line. If you start doing your house up with pictures of dogs playing pool, if you don’t follow the correct sauna rituals, someone will tut and tell you so.
But where Norwegians see good taste and a proper way of living, others see intolerance and small-mindedness. Because, beneath the liberal attitudes, a provincial conservatism lurks. Norwegians might be friendly, open-minded, polite even, but you can’t escape the impression that some think they are better than you.
This, at least, was what a Pakistani taxi driver, who had once been a PhD student in Islamabad, told me in Oslo. He had grown a beard since they had taken his taxi licence photograph – he had rediscovered his Islamic faith in the Fjords. He spoke about the perpetual unsaid: that if you don’t like the rules of Norway, you had better go back from where you came. But it’s hard to say no to living in a place with one of the highest qualities of life in the world.
I thought about the driver’s words as I walked the neat streets and wondered perhaps where he saw intolerance, if others would see just a strong sense of conviction. You need self-assurance to have good taste and a highly functioning society. But with light always comes dark, and it was this national self-belief that, perhaps, found its most aggressive, most self-deluded form in the mind and actions of Anders Behring Breivik.
Such reflections occupied me, because I was on my way to meet a Norwegian writer, Aage Borchgrevink. Aage had spent many months investigating Breivik and the motivations that drove him to kill, and I wanted to know if such a murderous gunman as Breivik can operate outside the culture he wants to annihilate.
Aage was handsome without vanity. Wearing a high-collared grey sweater and a blue T-shirt, he was the sort of person you’d cast as a good guy in a Scandinavian police series. His English was impeccable. But he was, in a way, not a typical Norwegian. He had been a human rights investigator in the Balkans for over twenty years – Chechnya, Belarus, the Caucasus. He was self-critical and had lived long enough outside Norway to see it for its flaws as well as its beauty.
We met in a bar called Den Gamle Major, the Old Major, a place where Breivik himself was likely to have once drunk. I walked up to the counter and bought a glass of wine for Aage, a beer for me. It cost $30, and I had to ask twice to make sure I had heard the price right. But it was right, because Norway has the second-highest alcohol taxes in the world: the price of social order contained.
Taking the two glasses back to the table, Aage was quick to get to the matter at hand. We began at the beginning, as you do with such things: with the killer’s relationship with his mother.
Aage explained that Breivik’s family problems were well documented by mental-health workers. When Breivik was just four, his mother became preoccupied with the fear her son would violently assault someone and frequently told him she wished he would die. Psychiatrists in the 1980s had concluded that the timid boy was a ‘victim of his mother’s projections of paranoid aggressive and sexualized fear of men in general’.
Despite these terrible reports, Aage said that the response of the state was not to intervene. Their reaction to this abuse was moulded by a strong Norwegian self-conviction about what was right and wrong. In this case, Aage said a belief in biological determinism – that the ideal condition for a child was always to be with their mother – was presumptive at the time. Both the court and the Child Welfare unit disregarded the warnings of experts. Breivik stayed with mother.
‘The system,’ Aage said, ‘let him go.’
Such a failure to intervene meant, Aage thought, that there was a missed chance to stop the young boy evolving into the deeply troubled young man. Under cross-examination, even Breivik said his mother was his ‘Achilles heel’: ‘the only one who can make me emotionally unstable’. The killer told the court he would urge his mother, a solitary woman, to find a hobby. She would
