Review: Vivien Horler
When the Cranes Fly South, by Lisa Ridzen, translated by Alice Menzies (Doubleday)R
I have just finished this novel and I am in tears. It’s a dog book, and I am a dog person. It gets to you.
I bought it for my book club after a member said she couldn’t make it to our monthly meeting as she was moving her 90-something mum to frail care. She added: “I’m already emotionally exhausted having rehomed her cat today.”
So in Wordsworth Books a few days later my eye was drawn to a cover with a line-drawing of a dog, and a hand rubbing his ears. The blurb on the back says elderly Bo lives a quiet life in a village in northern Sweden, with his days punctuated by visits from his care team and his son Hans. He also has his beloved elkhound, Sixten, for company.
But now Hans feels Bo should give the dog up. He is too big for Bo to cope with on walks, and besides, Sixten needs more exercise than Bo can provide.
Bo resists this idea fiercely. Since his beloved wife Frederika “left” – we later discover she has gone into a care home suffering from dementia – his world has shrunk to Sixten, Hans, his care givers, and the occasional visits of his granddaughter Ellinor.
He also has a long-time friend, Ture, but now that they are both so old, their interaction is confined to the phone.
Both had worked hard physical jobs in a lumber mill, as did Bo’s father before him. Bo’s father was a fierce, unforgiving man who thought his son was cossetted and weak, protected by his beloved mother.
At the start of this prize-winning novel, Bo wants to improve his relationship with Hans, as he doesn’t want to die leaving Hans feeling bitter about his father the way Bo does about his own. But Hans wants to take his beloved companion Sixten away, and after the loss of Frederika, Bo can’t bear it.
Bo is frail, often dizzy, and you do sympathise, to an extent, with Hans’s point. But if the dog is his beloved everyday companion, do you remove him?
The narrative takes place over five summer months, when Bo is hit by some awful losses. You realise this story is not going to have a happy ending. And yet…
Bo is fortunate in that Hans is a supportive and concerned son, and he is remarkably well cared for by an array of carers who visit him up to three times a day, making sure he is fed (with food Hans has left), washed, kept warm and cared for. They also take Sixten out for walks, which is not strictly part of their job descriptions.
This level of care for the elderly makes the South African reader gasp.
The story of Bo today, old and weak, is interrupted with his memories of happy times with young Hans and his beloved Frederika, who showed him how good family time could be.
The form of the novel sees Bo addressing Frederika in a stream-of-consciousness memory, with the daily notes of the care-givers interspersed.
The idea for this author’s debut novel, a bestseller in Sweden, says the idea for the book came to her from the discovery of notes her grandfather’s care team had left his family as he neared the end of his life.
Well, when I reached the end, I cried. We don’t talk of this stuff much, like our own creeping decrepitude and what will happen to those we love, including our pets. Maybe we should.