Dea Brovig
The Last Boat Home is about a girl called Else Dybdahl who falls pregnant in the mid-1970s and the repercussions this has for the rest of her life. She comes from a poor, religious town on the southern coast of Norway, a place where people pry into each other’s business but keep their own secrets close. Her father works on a shrimp trawler and spends his spare time cooking up moonshine in the boathouse, while her mother goes to church and does her best to hide her bruises. Today, the town is barely recognisable. Else still lives there with her daughter and granddaughter in a house without men. When a figure from her past returns, prompting her granddaughter to ask uncomfortable questions, Else will do everything in her power to keep the truth from coming out.
To what extent has your MA in creative writing helped you to write this book?
My MA was helpful in every way. Before I started, I used to wake up two hours early every day to write before work. I never achieved much of a word count - I often found that, by the time I was getting into the story, I had to pack up and go. In those days, I was a Foreign Rights Agent for a literary agency in London. I didn’t tell anyone there that I was writing, or about my hopes. The agency represents some incredible authors and I felt vaguely ridiculous and more than a little presumptuous. When I was accepted to the MA, I started taking myself seriously as a writer. It put me in a room with other writers who would critique my work each month. I’d never shown it to anyone before that. More than anything, it gave me time to dedicate to my writing. An MA isn’t for everyone but, for me, it was formative.
How has working in publishing helped you to gauge what readers are looking for from new books?
I’m not sure it has, at least not when it comes to my own work. I don’t think I could care about a book I tried to write by prescription, and if you don’t care about your characters or your story, then I doubt anyone else will.
My idea for The Last Boat Home came after a 15-minute conversation with a taxi driver in Vienna. He was Bulgarian and had travelled around Norway in a circus when he was younger. He told me he’d fathered a child by a girl in the countryside somewhere. I went home and couldn’t stop thinking about that girl. I started making notes and then I started writing. I didn’t think about readers at all, it was always about giving that girl I’d imagined a story.
You moved to the UK from Norway at 17 so what was it important that you take the reader back to this country for this book?
I was born in New York, but I moved to Oslo with my family when I was seven. I only lived there for ten years, but I still think of myself as Norwegian. I’ve noticed among the expats I’ve met that they tend to identify more with a place once they’ve left it. Belonging to somewhere but being separate from it gives you an unusual vantage point.
Norway fascinates me. It is full of contradictions, on one hand liberal in its thinking, but with a history of strict pietism, especially on the western and southern coasts. Since the discovery of oil in the North Sea in 1969, its transformation has been dramatic. It’s beautiful, too, with its rugged coastline and mountains, all rock and water. The country’s size and landscape mean there are clusters of people who live intimately, but far from everyone else. There’s a strange mix of claustrophobia and isolation. That’s a great starting point for a story.
Please tell us about the character of Else.
We meet Else at two points in her life. In 1974, she is sixteen and starting to rebel against her parents and the church. She is in love with the son of the local shipyard owner and, in trying to keep up with him, she begins to take chances. When a circus sets up in a paddock on the outskirts of town, she allows herself to be drawn to them, with terrible consequences for her and her family.
In the present day storyline, Else is in her early fifties. She has never left the town of her birth. She has built a life for herself with her daughter and granddaughter and wants more than anything to protect that, and them. Else has suffered, but she is strong. She has an enormous capacity for love.
You have been praised for your descriptions of the landscape so did you revisit Norway to refresh your memories for the setting?
My father comes from a small town on the southernmost tip of Norway. When I was growing up – even before we left America – we used to spend our summers there. These days, I go to Tromøya, an island near Arendal (also on the southern coast), where my partner’s family has a property. For about two months each year, I write in the boat shed surrounded by life vests, old fenders and stacks of cushions for outdoor furniture. I’ve spent every summer I can remember in Norway, so it isn’t difficult for me to call to mind its landscape, but I suspect there’s a different charge to my writing when the view from my window is of the sea.
Why does the book leave the reader with a mark afterwards as one review suggested?
I think – I hope – there’s a ring of truth to Else’s story. Even if its setting is foreign, the idea of challenging the restrictions of your life and looking for something different – something more – is recognisable. The novel is about mothers and daughters, but it is also about judgment and how we never really know the full extent of someone else’s experience. Else could be any girl or woman in any small town, trying to keep it together when circumstances are beyond her control.
What is next for you?
I’m working on a new novel set in Norway (the north this time) in the years right after the end of the Second World War. But it’s still early days, so I’m not saying anymore!