The Bell in the Lake – Lars Mytting

In the beginning there were two bells, the Sister Bells, so called as they were cast in memorial to conjoined twins, Halfrid and Grunhild Hekne. The girls, despite their situation, managed well enough with the rigours of rural Norwegian life and excelled at weaving where their four arms moved in perfect harmony to produce beautiful tapestries. They fell ill and died young, expiring at their loom, working on one last masterpiece, completed by Grunhild with Halfrid dead beside her.

That was two hundred years before the story begins, on New Years Day 1880, when the Sister Bells call the faithful of Butangen to mass. Among them is young Astrid Hekne who, while resigned to her family’s subsistence level existence, has broader horizons. Better educated than most and fuelled by her reading of the parson’s discarded newspapers, she longs to travel. She also longs for the new parson, a young priest named Kai Schweigaard. He has feelings for her, too, but with the church mission and a fiancé back in civilization, they must be repressed. Anyway, he has work to do - the ancient stave church is cold, draughty, and too small. It needs replacing.

Fortunately, it has historic value. Some well-connected Germans wish to relocate it in Dresden as a cultural icon. Enter young architectural student, Gerhard Schonauer, to record its structure and supervise its dismantling, storage, and export.

We have a love triangle. Astrid obviously attracts both men with her good looks and feisty demeanour. She reciprocates their tentative attentions, but it is complicated. Their shared mission to remove the old church, and more importantly the bells forged for her ancestors, is anathema to her.

It is slow burning and moody with repressed emotion. The landscape and the turning seasons form more than a backdrop; folk in Butangen live and die by the weather. As the snow melts, and the sap rises, things begin to move. Astrid has a plan to save the bells, but can she get her suitors to cooperate? There again, maybe the bells have a plan for Astrid.

There is resolution of sorts, but as one story ends, green shoots of another couple emerge. As the first volume of a projected trilogy, it may take some time and lots more pleasurable reading before the final fate of the Sister Bells are known.