Toxic by Helga Flatland

When Mathilde is forced to leave her teaching job in Oslo after her relationship with eighteen-year-old Jacob is exposed, she flees to the countryside for a more authentic life.

Her new home is a quiet cottage on the outskirts of a dairy farm run by Andres and Johs, whose hobbies include playing the fiddle and telling folktales – many of them about female rebellion and disobedience, and seeking justice, whatever it takes.

But beneath the surface of the apparently friendly and peaceful life on the farm, something darker and less harmonic starts to vibrate, and with Mathilde’s arrival, cracks start appearing ... everywhere.

About the author

Helga Flatland is one of Norway’s most awarded and widely read authors. Born in Telemark, Norway, in 1984, she made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Stay If You Can, Leave If You Must, for which she was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas’ First Book Prize. She has written six novels and a children’s book and has won several other literary awards. Her fifth novel, A Modern Family (her first English translation), was published to wide acclaim in Norway in August 2017 and was a number-one bestseller. The rights have subsequently been sold across Europe and the novel has sold more than 100,000 copies. One Last Time was published in 2020 and also topped bestseller lists in Norway. Helga lives in Oslo.

Review

‘Toxic’ is a riveting tale of obsession, desire, and trauma. Helga wowed me with her previous book and I couldn't wait to see what she had done next. Again the standard of writing makes the ‘everyday’ engrossing, compelling to read and highly descriptive. This is a hard book to categorise as it covers so many different and difficult topics - family saga, abuse of power, gaslighting, mental health, covid, folklore and many more. It also feels like a prequel to the main story with that cliffhanger. As if this is the crucial information which is teased out during an invesigation by the police but is somehow the whole story.

Helga manages to weave the story of three people - Mathilde, Andres and Johs - towards the start of the book, whilst the latter of the story deals with how they come together and affect each other. None of the characters are likeable and each are ‘toxic’ in their own ways. Mathilde has been having an inappropriate relationship with one of her students and decides to escape Oslo and rent a cottage in Telemark. Andres and Johs are brothers and the owners of the family farm on which the cottage stands. Andres is riddled with anxiety, fears and hypochondria and Johs struggles with the running of the farm. Andres and Johs have the shadow of their grandfather hanging over them, whereas Mathilde ignores her familial history and hasn't even read her own mother’s books!

I loved the inclusion of folklore, songs and music into the narrative as for me it highlighted that these stories are not new. There are examples of women being mistreated, men being used, and both sexes being idiots dotted throughout history - both culturally and familial. It's the existential question of do we as individuals ever learn?

Helga likes to play with characters as an author and in particular with people we as readers might not like. Yes, there were redeeming features in all of them but I was disappointed with the actions of everyone. Families let generational trauma carry on, and individuals manipulate each other and even themselves by having a viewpoint outside of reality. It makes for an engrossing read.

Let me know if you pick this one up!