The seas around Norway’s coast are rich in history, this key trading route holding many secrets beneath its dark waters. Aslak Nore’s The Sea Cemetery takes the true story of the sinking of a passenger ferry as the starting point for his own deep dive into the dark recesses of family conflict and the still-open wound of the German occupation of Norway during the Second World War.

Factually the SS Prinsesse Ragnhild sank in 1940 off the northern coast of Norway with the loss of 78 people on board. Attributed as a result of striking a mine, the sinking is more of an open question in Aslak’s novel.

This is more than a look at Norway’s Titanic, however. Aslak weaves the wartime drama into a modern tale of a wealthy family divided after the death of the matriarch. The Falcks are one of Norway’s most successful business families, yet there’s no love lost between the Oslo and Bergen branches of the clan. Think Dallas or Dynasty but relocated to Norway. When Vera Lind, matriarch of the family dies, the whereabouts of her will prove to be a matter of contention. The famous writer has instead left an unpublished manuscript, The Sea Cemetery, the contents of which threaten to tear her family apart.

As the race to discover the fragments of this manuscript interweaves with tales of conflict in Kurdistan and Afghanistan, the Norwegian Secret Service and flashbacks to occupied Norway during the War, this complex tale slowly discovers that what has been held as truth may not be as first seen.

Part family drama, part history lesson, part spy thriller, The Sea Cemetery is an ambitious work. It’s an ambition that isn’t fully realised, however. This is very much a slow burn of a book, the opening half weighed down with detailed exposition so deep that it’s easy to lose track of plot, characters, or direction. There is much-repeated talk in the early chapters of the need to find the lost manuscript, so much so that the reader is tempted to shout at the pages to tell them to get on with it. 

However, it’s a slow burn that is worth persevering with. This is a novel within a novel approach, and when we get to read Vera’s own novel, delivered in three parts, the tension really begins to build as all the jigsaw puzzle pieces begin to fall into place. The ending does provide the plot twist one has been hoping for in the preceding three-quarters of the book, and when it is finally delivered it is handled well

Aslak gives us a huge cast of characters, and while some of the subplots do seem to get lost in the bigger picture with, for example, the sections on the conflict in the Middle East perhaps better suited to a stand-alone work, those characters are detailed in their depiction.

While pace would benefit from some judicious editing, The Sea Cemetery is worth persevering with, even if only to learn more about a fascinating part of Norway’s modern history that still holds secrets to this day.

The Sea Cemetery by Aslak Nore, translated by Deborah Dawkin is published by MacLehose Press on April 25 2004