Echoland by Per Petterson review hits the reader like a hammer blow

“They sailed across the sea to Denmark.” From its very first sentence, Per Petterson’s debut novel, originally published in 1989 and now available for the first time in English, in a translation by Don Bartlett, offers a compelling mix of fable with the day-to-day account of a working-class boy, just about to turn 12, as he visits his maternal grandparents in Jutland. This is not surprising: the boy, Arvid, is steeped in old stories, especially Martin Andersen Nexø’s classic, Pelle the Conqueror (1906-10), whose hero is also the child of Danish migrants. Arvid’s inner life is built around a fantasy of his own heroic ancestor, a Neapolitan baker’s son who left his native city two generations earlier in order to build bridges and travel in the north. This dark-haired, dark-eyed Italian’s looks have been handed down through Arvid’s mother to Arvid, making him an exotic figure among his classmates and an adventurer-in-waiting in his own eyes. As the book opens, a new adventure has begun: having sailed across the sea to Denmark, Arvid is about to discover his true self, to declare his growing independence from his parents, and become someone who, as his frequent refrain states, can take care of himself.

Around him, however, the adults – haunted by the recent loss of a child and a terrible betrayal – are less confident. Arvid is aware of the lost child, a brother for whose survival he had prayed fervently to no avail, but he is incapable of appreciating his parents’ grief, and ignorant of the other troubles that have plagued the extended family for years. At 12, he is naturally self-absorbed, lonely and defiant, beset by sexual fantasies and terrors; at the same time, all the pain and tension weathered consciously by the grownups registers in his unconscious the way unseen radiation registers on a Geiger counter. The hidden nature of his growing awareness is crucial to what happens in the closing pages of the book.

Though the title of the novel comes from a poem by the Danish inventor Poul la Cour, it is clear that the real echoland here is Arvid’s imagination; his intuitions and suspicions and, in the end, his inability to come to terms with a grief that is left hanging, unspoken and unmediated, while the family struggle, individually rather than collectively, to come to terms with their history.

Naturally, this echoland is seen from Arvid’s perspective. There is much that goes unsaid about the other actors in this drama, but as always with Petterson, even the most seemingly incidental characters are vividly painted, from the neighbour boy, Mogens, who takes Arvid boating and fishing, and with whom he experiences a frisson of sexual insecurity, to the anonymous, possibly paedophilic stranger he encounters on the ferry in the opening pages of the novel, a man at once sinister and pathetic.

But perhaps the most intriguing character is Gry, Arvid’s sister, who presents the confused boy with a living mystery that he is unable either to fathom or respond to: “He stood up from the grass when Gry arrived on her bike. Her hair was a yellow flag, her shorts were green and her long legs brown with light-coloured down. She was his sister Gry and yet so unfamiliar, he didn’t know her.”

For Arvid, everything around him – not just the people but the land and the sea, the animals, even the weather – becomes mysteriously and frighteningly more and more sexual. So much so that the reader shares the horror and fascination of the decisive encounter he has with a local woman on whom he had earlier spied while she was having sex with her boyfriend.

When the tables are turned, in a scene that is deliciously awkward and at the same time highly sensual, it is difficult to know how far the encounter influences Arvid’s later behaviour. Indeed, it is hard to think of a novel that so precisely and vividly conveys the pain and disorientation of puberty. As the book progresses, one’s apprehension becomes more and more acute, until it is close to unbearable. Even then, it is no preparation for what comes on the very last page, a dramatic turn of events that, even while it seems to have been inevitable all along, still hits the reader with all the force of a hammer blow.

John Burnside’s novel Ashland & Vine will be published next year. Echoland is published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy for £12.29 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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