The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  ‘Yes, quite,’ Bangstad agreed. ‘Of course, Norway was implicated in the Mohammed cartoon business; we actually got our embassy in Damascus burned down.’

  ‘It’s all rather depressing, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Is immigration from non-Western countries perhaps inevitably doomed to failure in the small, homogenous and traditionally isolated countries of the North?’

  ‘Interesting question.’ He paused. ‘I mean, the way I see it, there are grounds for valid concerns over particular issues – homophobia, anti-Semitism, the treatment of women in certain sections of Muslim communities in Norway, but I don’t necessarily see immigration from non-Western countries, or any other country for that matter, as a good or bad thing. Certainly it brings challenges, but I don’t think they are insurmountable. I am certainly not among those from the radical Left – who you don’t hear much from these days, admittedly – who campaigned saying “Let’s have a million immigrants;” I am certainly not an advocate of that kind of head-in-the-sand approach. But if you look at the measures of success, Norway seems actually to be dealing quite well with immigration from non-Western countries: if you look, for instance, at the figures on background of students in higher and tertiary education, particularly females.’

  I had put the same question to Thomas Hylland Eriksen the day before. Did the Right perhaps have a point about non-Western immigration to Norway, and by extension Scandinavia? Were these kinds of societies inherently hopeless at integrating people so markedly different from themselves?

  ‘Look, most Muslims are just like you and me. They want to live in peace with their neighbours, they want a peaceful life. You get dilemmas about hijabs and halal meat all over Europe and you need pragmatic solutions,’ he said. ‘We’ve got very good research on this which shows that second-generation immigrants have been very much “Norwegianised”. They think like Protestants. When you look at the girls, they have replaced honour and shame with bad conscience, which is a very Protestant thing, and your relationship with God becomes an individual relationship, instead of it going through the community.

  ‘You know, actually, Protestants and Muslims very easily reach a common understanding because they find out that they have a lot in common in how they see the world in questions of the sexes, fidelity and the idea that everything in this world is not random, that there is a transcendent mind behind things that gives life meaning. I sometimes think that, had the Pakistanis and Turks arrived in this country in the 1950s, it would have been easier for them to integrate because we were more rural, there was still gender segregation: in northern Norway, when the women were in the kitchen doing the dishes, the men would sit and smoke in the dining room, that was the norm for my parents’ generation. If only they had arrived before we became so egalitarian and individualistic it would have been easier for them to relate.’ Eriksen, a tall, bony, demonstrative man in his early fifties, laughed at the irony of this. Denmark was though, he said, a different matter.

  ‘You know, Islam does seem a bit incompatible with the Danish way of life because, well, what do the Danes do in their leisure time? They go out and they drink a lot of beer and they eat dead pigs, and then they go home and have sex with strangers afterwards. And then they say to the Muslims, “Why don’t you integrate better? Aren’t you grateful for being in Denmark?”

  ‘I always say this when people say to me, “Oh you’re just another of these bloody multiculturalists who accepts everything, aren’t you?” I say, well, no, but if you want to live in Norway there are a couple of things you need to make peace with: one is the cold and the darkness. If you can’t cope with it, then go somewhere else. And the other is the equality of the genders, because otherwise you are never going to be happy because you will always feel there is something fundamentally wrong with Norway.’

  Chapter 4

  Friluftsliv

  I HAD TO leave Oslo, ‘that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon them,’ as Knut Hamsun puts it in the opening line of his masterwork Sult or Hunger. I had begun to feel increasingly nauseous at the sight of Breivik’s self-satisfied grin on the television screens and front pages every day.

  I had tried to find a few other distractions while I was in the Norwegian capital, but Oslo is, as I have mentioned, fiendishly expensive. According to a recent study by the Brookings Institution of the world’s 200 richest cities, its residents are the second wealthiest in the world (just behind those of Hartford, Connecticut), with an average annual income of $74,057. They would need to be. This is the only city I have visited where the drivers of its public transport apologise to you for the fares. ‘Sorry, this is Norway,’ a tram driver said to me with apparently genuine remorse when I had appeared startled by his request for 50 kroner (£5) for the briefest of journeys.

  At the Museum of Cultural History I had taken in the display on the Sami, featuring the usual Nordic tiptoeing around the subject of their oppressed indigenous minority. The Sami – ‘Lapps’ is, these days, a racist term – are effectively the sixth Nordic people, Europe’s only nomads, whose territory spans the borders of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and parts of north-west Russia, depending on where their reindeer roam. I learned that they probably number around 13,000 in Norway, their language was only officially recognised in 1987, and that, ‘Some Sami still live in close contact with nature, but others spend their free time in front of the TV set and use their car even to visit a neighbour.’ There was a small tableaux to illustrate the Sami’s new, dissolute lifestyle, featuring a teenage bedroom with a computer and a mobile phone. Most odd.

  Naturally, the museum had a copious collection of folk costumes, as well as a major exhibition on knitting patterns. In the rooms covering the country’s more recent history, Aha’s ‘Take on Me’ played in a continuous loop as I perused newspaper front pages from the past thirty years: Norway’s first female prime minister (1981); the arrival of AIDS (1983); the first 7-Eleven (1986). Nowhere was there mention of the great lottery win of 1969 when the Norwegians first discovered oil. Odder still.

  Even the most bewitching of knitting patterns can begin to pall after a while and, as the saying goes, ‘When a man is bored with Oslo . . . he has probably been there for more than three days.’ I am being unfair; Oslo is quite lovely and tries awfully hard to live up to its big-city billing, but for me it is the least interesting of the Nordic capitals. It can’t compete with Copenhagen’s dynamism and diversity; the scenic spectacle and architectural grandeur of Stockholm; or the edgy thrill of Helsinki’s ‘otherness’, with its vestigial, Cold-War ambience. And Reykjavik has volcanoes and glaciers right on its doorstep, which is hardly fair. Oslo somehow feels like some other country’s second city, which it of course was for many centuries.

  It was time to see more of Norway, something natural. Time and again when talking to Norwegians about their Norwegian-ness they would bring the conversation back to the special relationship they have with their landscape, to their love of the friluftsliv, or ‘open-air life’. Though the Swedes might argue (were they inclined to argue, which they are not), the Norwegians seem to have the strongest bond of all with their natural surroundings; their scenery is the source of their fiercest patriotic fervour. I suspect this might be because, historically, they have been distributed among it more widely than their neighbours. According to my Encyclopedia of the Nations, Norway is the least densely populated country in Europe, with eleven inhabitants for every square kilometre, three-quarters of them living within 10 miles of the coast. This has always been a country of peasant farmers and fishermen, with a decentralised population of small, isolated communities speaking hundreds of regional dialects. And because it was a colony for so long, and its capital city was a hub for the dissemination of foreign cultures, Norway has never looked to Oslo in the way that the Danes have to Copenhagen, or the Swedes to Stockholm. Denmark and Sweden have also reflected, and defined, themselves in and by each other, through their shared history of conflict and rivalry, but Norway has tended
to mind its own business, separated by the great physical barriers of the mountains and the sea.

  This decentralisation, coupled with a heightened respect for their natural surroundings, are two of the keys to understanding the Norwegians. Still, today, while Denmark struggles with its udkants problem and Sweden grows more and more centralised, in Norway people live out in the regions, way up north, in mountains, by the sea and on frozen islands. The contrast is striking when you cross from northern Norway to northern Sweden: on the Norwegian side there will be small towns with shops, perhaps a takeaway, decent roads and civic buildings, on the other . . . nothing. In Norway, the right to live wherever you want is enshrined in law: it is part of a strategy to maintain the populations in the north of the country, particularly those close to the strategically vital territories of the Barents Sea and Spitsbergen.

  Elsewhere in the world, industrialisation led to urbanisation, but not so much in Norway: the fishing industry (which remains strong, and these days of course includes massive industrial salmon farms), and the oil industry, which is based on the west coast with Stavanger at its heart, have helped counter this trend. Thanks to the wealth generated by the latter, these days the Norwegians who live a long way from their capital live well, with decent infrastructure, cultural and sports facilities and impressive public buildings, like the Knut Hamsun Centre I visited in Oppeid, a village of around five hundred people. It is a stunning piece of contemporary concept architecture: a black tower with jutting perspex balconies, designed, I was told by my personal guide, to represent aspects of Hamsun’s Sult. It cost the equivalent of £8 million of public money to build and would not look out of place in any modern capital city; but it only receives around 20,000 visitors a year, simply because it is so far away from everywhere, way, way up in the Arctic Circle.

  One Norwegian I spoke to about this, Yngve Slyngstad, head of the country’s oil-investment fund, likened the way the Norwegians are defined by their landscape to the way the French are defined by their culture: ‘It is extraordinarily important for Norwegians to tell each other on a Monday morning that they have been out skiing, mountain walking, and so on,’ he said. ‘Norway has this fascination with having mountain cabins and ocean cabins, this fascination with nature.’ Slyngstad also pointed out that an unusually high number of Norwegian surnames are connected to the landscape. ‘Our names often come from actual physical places in nature, and it is not so long ago that people knew the places they came from ancestrally, and these were actual, physical places,’ he said. ‘My name refers to the place where the river bends and, exactly where the river bends, there was my father’s farm, so there is this very strong identity and connection with nature. And if you live in cities, you only tend to reinforce it.’

  One indication of this strong connection the Norwegians have to their landscape has been the remarkable success of two stupefyingly boring TV shows that aired in recent years. The first tracked the progress of a train from Oslo to Bergen through the mountains in real time for 7 hours, with just a fixed camera mounted on the front of the train. The tunnels must have been especially gripping. However, the unprecedented viewing figures for this show encouraged the national broadcaster, NRK, to go a step further and broadcast a 6-day, non-stop live transmission from a camera mounted on MS Nordnorge, one of Norway’s Hurtigruten ‘express’ ferries, as it sailed from Bergen in the south, to Kirkenes, on the Russian border, in the north. Despite being billed by NRK with refreshing candour as ‘Watching paint dry – live on TV’, the programme was a massive viewing and cultural phenomenon, with half the population tuning in to watch: people hosted Hurtigruten-watching parties and, as the boat progressed further up the coast, crowds came out to light bonfires and wave from the shore, while smaller flotillas bobbed in the merry ferry’s wake. The Hurtigruten programme was also streamed online and picked up 200,000 viewers in Denmark (a phenomenon the Norwegian media gleefully ascribed to ‘mountain envy’), as well as viewers in other countries around the world. It ended up being one of the most popular Norwegian television programmes of all time, and all it was, was scenery . . .

  But what scenery.

  I look around at my fellow ferry passengers, who are mostly either playing cards, drinking beer or watching the TV screen mounted at the front of the boat. Haven’t they seen what is passing by outside the window? My face is glued to the glass, as it has been for the past hour. Norway is passing by at a steady ferry pace, its landscape rendered with such clarity by the sharp Arctic light that I can make out every crenellation of the white mountain peaks, every facet of the granite rocks. The laser-etched scenery beyond my window appears to be being transmitted in the highest of high definition, that is the only explanation for the laser-etched scenery beyond my window. The mountain peaks look like the jaws of a shark magnified a thousandfold.

  I am aboard the Hurtigruten, heading from BodØ to Nordskott, a microscopic fishing village, little more than a jetty and a handful of wooden houses, just inside the Arctic Circle.

  Norway’s fjords are staggeringly, CGI-ishly beautiful. No wonder The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s Slartibartfast won an award for designing them. Looking back, I can only conclude that it was the magic of this bewitching scenery, and my hosts’ enthusiasm for it, which led me to take complete leave of my senses and – though it was February, and though all was snow and ice, and though this was the Arctic – allow myself to be persuaded to don a drysuit and wade into the waves in search of sea urchins. My friend, a Scot called Roddie, lives here with his Norwegian wife and children and fishes for these ‘crows’ balls’, as the locals call them, selling them to top restaurants in the region. They were extremely good sea urchins, but it was fucking cold. Without gloves on my hands literally burned in the water.1

  The landscape of Nordskott was, though, a feast for the soul. Each morning as I crunched through the snow to the fishing boat, I would stop for a moment amid the deafening stillness, the only sound my own tinnitus, and stare up at the mountains, my gast truly flabbered, thoughts of Oslo far from my mind.

  * * *

  1 Visit Norway in the winter and you soon realise the single greatest challenge the Norwegians face every day is figuring out what to wear in order to stop the weather killing them. Their ability to plan ahead for the myriad extremes of temperature they will face during each day rivals the greatest of chess grandmasters. In Oslo I was forever finding myself either sweating buckets in my insulated jacket and overtrousers, and then trying to strip this cumbersome gear off while sitting in the confines of a tram (like some kind of downbeat escapologist act), or making sure no patch of skin was exposed while walking through the snow in temperatures as low as -15ºC. Parents must spend an age getting their kids dressed for school.

  Chapter 5

  Bananas

  Come and listen to a story ’bout a man named Jed,

  A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,

  And then one day he was shootin’ at some food,

  And up through the ground came a bubblin’ crude.

  The Beverly Hillbillies theme, by Paul Henning

  TO COME TO Norway and talk only of integration and immigration would be like visiting the Klondike in 1897 and preoccupying oneself with the plight of the Native Americans. For the vast majority of Norwegians, for the vast majority of the time, issues of Islamisation, immigration and populist politicians have been of little relevance because, over the last four decades, Norway has experienced a gold rush beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, not least the Norwegians’.

  The discovery in 1969 of what turned out to be gargantuan oil reserves in Norway’s North Sea territories has shaped contemporary Norwegian society more than any other single factor – for the better but also, as we shall hear, for the worse. This black gold touches every Norwegian’s life, pretty much every day. The success of modern Norway – of its welfare state, its virtually unparalleled standard of living, and its strong regional infrastructure, services and random, expensive and archite
cturally innovative museums – is to a great extent founded on oil.

  This country of just over five million people now has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. And I don’t mean per capita, we are talking in absolutes. It overtook Abu Dhabi’s when it hit $600 billion in 2011, and continues to rise. The fund currently stands at £395 billion, or $617 billion, and is conservatively estimated to pass £1,000 billion before the end of the decade. To put that into perspective, the Norwegians could comfortably pay off all of Greece’s national debt twice but, crucially, up until now, they have heeded their economists’ warnings not to spend the money within their own borders, limiting themselves to using a mere 4 per cent every year and investing the rest elsewhere in the world.

  I think it’s fair to say that the Norwegians were not to the manor born. Norway has always been the downtrodden, economically disadvantaged poor relation of the Scandinavian triumvirate; a rural backwater whose population clawed their hardscrabble existence from barren soils – a mere 2.8 per cent of Norwegian land is farmable – and dangerous seas, often against the almost insurmountable odds presented by their climate and topography.

  And then, one day, along came a man named Jed1 and: Boom! Glug! Kerching!

  The story of the Norwegians’ transformation from dirndl-wearing peasants to dirndl-wearing Rockefellers has its beginnings in Holland, with the discovery of natural gas in Groningen, in 1959. This find prompted speculation that there might be more fossil fuel further north on the Norwegian continental shelf. Holland’s Philips Petroleum requested permission to explore there and the Norwegian government moved quickly to assert its sovereignty over the shelf – at that time their territory only extended 12 miles out into the sea. Norway’s claims raised eyebrows in London and Copenhagen, whose governments also felt they had dibs on part of the North Sea. And this is where the story of the Norwegian oil miracle takes an intriguing twist, one that has given rise to one of Scandinavia’s most entertaining conspiracy theories.