It took most of his writing career before Roy Jacobsen decided to make use of his early experience of growing up on a small remote Norwegian Island. Maybe this was fortunate because his experience of writing 12 novels has enabled him to write a brilliant novel.

Unseen (2013) recounts the struggle to survive on a tiny fictional island situated somewhere south of Lofoten off the northern coast of Norway. In 53 chapters it follows the life of the Barroy family—“God’s silent children on a small island in the sea,” as the local mainland pastor calls them—over the early years of the twentieth century. This life necessarily focuses on survival through fishing, basic agricultural, trading and occasional employment away from home. 

This episodic novel focuses on the six family members (grandfather, mother, father, aunt, two children), skillfully developing their characters through encounters with the generally hostile environment and through their interactions on this enclosed space. Jacobsen does this very economically, compressing material that could have run to over 500 pages into a compact 260-page book. Yet there is still room for some wonderful descriptive passages.

While all the family is preparing peat for the winter, 

the warm land wind that has blown over the island for many days…suddenly drops. They all notice. They stop working, gaze upwards, and look at each other and listen. There are no longer any birds screams either. There is no rustling in the grass and no insects buzzing. The sea is smooth, the gurgling of water between the rocks on the beach has gone quiet, there isn’t a sound between all the horizons, they are indoors.

A silence like this is very rare. What is special about it is that it occurs on an island. It has more impact than the silence that can descend upon a forest without warning. A forest is often quiet. On an island there is so little silence that people stop what they are doing and look around and ask themselves what is going on. It makes them wonder. It is mystical, it borders on the thrilling, it is a faceless stranger in a black cloak wandering across the island with inaudible footsteps…. In summer there is always a slight pause between one wind and the next, between high and low tide or the miracle that takes place in humans as they change from breathing in to breathing out.

Then a gull screams again, a new puff of wind springs up from nowhere, and the well-fed child on the sheepskin wakes and bawls. They can pick up their tools and carry on working as if nothing has happened. For that is exactly what has happened: nothing.

Jacobsen’s Barroy Island is visible from the mainland trading store, but it’s often inaccessible during the frequent winter storms. It’s remoteness gives the Barroy family a sense of security—until the arrival of a unwelcome visitor—“a grey shadow distinguishable against the shimmering waves”—who threateningly tells them that he has “escaped from somewhere” and has come to stay. Although he is attacked and sent packing, he “leaves behind a disquiet that he may one day return.” The Barroys are changed forever. 

This incident fits in with a major theme in the novel: a gradual loss of isolation. It starts with the building of a dock that enables a regular milk boat to visit. Then the mainland government builds a shipping beacon on the tip of the island. As well, they come to depend more on trading with the mainland store.  

But primarily Jacobsen focuses on the Barroy family. It starts with the daughter Ingrid’s christening and ends with her running the island while still in her teens. She is really the main character as many of the incidents are seen through her eyes. Throughout the novel Jacobsen provides a wealth of details about boating, fishing, farming, peat preparation and weather. Here is his description of haar, the cold and wet sea fog common in the Norwegian Sea: 

And on a hot, late summer day a grey haar suddenly forms like a wall on the horizon and slowly creeps towards them, leaving one island after another in blue-grey darkness, swallowing up and enveloping everything and everyone in a cold, raw blanket. Where previously they had an unimpeded view in all directions, now they cannot even see their own sheep, neither can they see the hay-drying racks or the bushes or the lighthouse or the gleaming house on Barroy, only a few blades of grass right in front of their feet and the tears rolling down them, even though it isn’t raining. The haar brings its gloom in the middle of the day, a solar eclipse and a loss of vision.

Above all, Unseen captures the experience of living on a remote island above the Arctic Circle—the wind, the snow, the summer droughts, the sounds, the flora and fauna, the isolation, the human struggle.

Jacobsen’s writing, immaculately translated for the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, is vivid and moving. He engages throughout. While his nature descriptions stand out, his character development is just as successful.

I’m reluctant to call Unseen a masterpiece, but there are many good reasons why I’ve read it four times in the last year or so.

Note: Roy Jacobsen has written three more novels that continue the story of Ingrid and the Barroy family: White Shadow (2015), Eyes of the Rigel, (2017), Just a Mother (2020).