The Reindeer Hunters: The Sister Bells Trilogy Vol. 2
Butangen, Norway, 1903: two decades have passed since the events recounted in Mytting’s first novel in his Sister Bells trilogy, The Bell in the Lake. Pastor Kai Schweigaard still mourns the death in childbirth of Astrid Hekne, descendant of the conjoined twins in memory of whom the two great bells of the village’s demolished stave church were cast. One of the bells hangs in the old church, reconstructed in Dresden; the other lies at the bottom of the lake, where legend says it cannot be raised but by two brothers. Schweigaard has educated Astrid’s surviving son, Jehans, one of the reindeer hunters of the title. The other hunter is an Englishman, Victor Harrison. The two young men’s diverse motivations encapsulate the gulf between their two worlds: Jehans and the villagers must eat, whereas Victor seeks a fine head and antlers to grace his Northumberland home. Yet when the older inhabitants of Butangen catch sight of the Englishman, they are convinced they are seeing a ghost. Jehans and Victor are drawn to each other until a bitter estrangement, yet even at a distance their stories entwine. The stubborn and headstrong Jehans, with the support of the practical and indomitable Kristine, reveals himself to be a talented and farsighted engineer and she an astute and instinctive businesswoman. Victor becomes a fighter pilot; it takes the Spanish ‘flu epidemic at the end of the war to reunite the two friends.
The first novel of the trilogy was a hard act to follow, but Mytting has triumphed again with this sequel. As in the earlier novel, Deborah Dawkin is a sensitive translator. The books can be read as standalones, but there is a different richness in the combination, just as there is in the sound of two bells rung together rather than apart.
