For One Author, the 2011 Terror Attack on Norway Changed Everything. But Could He Write It Into Fiction?

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There was a moment during the 2012 Utøya terror trial when I realized I had caused pain to a man who did not deserve it. He was speaking in the Oslo courthouse; he had lost a loved one in the attacks a year before. I was there as a British journalist, trying, as we all were, to understand how one man could murder 77 people one summer’s afternoon in the safest country in the world.

As the witness testified about his loneliness and grief in the aftermath of the attacks, the man who had murdered his wife stared at him, unblinking and unrepentant. The witness reached the end of his testimony. He turned and looked out towards the public. “There’s been a lot of talk recently about how awful the people of my area are. I want to say that the support I have received has been amazing, and that I don’t recognize the depiction.”

I didn’t mean you, I wanted to say. It’s not about people like you. I had written an article—Is Ullern the Worst Place to Live in Norway?—for a tiny English-language internet newspaper. But what I was describing—the snobbishness and selfishness my wife and I experienced in our suburb ten minutes from the Centre of Oslo—had struck a chord. Yes, there were good people there, living quiet and decent lives, but the persona the area projected was vulgar, money-obsessed, and the opposite of what we expected. Norwegians began to share the article with each other, and it quickly went viral. It seemed the rest of the country felt the same way about Ullern as we did. But then, here was this man, and I had added to his grief by writing my article. It was a sobering moment. Because I did not mean him, or the friends and neighbors who supported him through his ordeal.

And now, as we near the tenth anniversary of the attacks, I have written a novel with roots in those same traumatic events, and I know that I risk opening old wounds. Although the island in my novel Love and Other Lies is not the island of Utøya, and although the Curtis family in my novel is invented, I can’t simply kick sand over those roots and hope that no one will notice. I felt compelled to write a book about what happens when a peaceful society meets an act of extreme violence, and there really isn’t a country that represents that more clearly than Norway. The book had to be set here.

On the afternoon of 22nd July 2011, a white supremacist set off a bomb at a government building in central Oslo. His bomb killed eight people and drew a massive police response. The terrorist slipped from the scene, drove for half an hour, and took the ferry to the island of Utøya. On the island was a camp for the youth wing of the Norwegian Labor Party. There this man shot dead sixty-nine people, many of them under eighteen. It was the worst spree killing by a single gunman, ever. His youngest victim was fourteen. This was not a random attack. The terrorist wrong-footed the police, sending them towards the bomb and away from the island. He targeted children, because they were the coming political generation. He dressed as a policeman so they would trust him. This would be a horrific attack in any society. In a country of five million people, it was devastating.

So why write about it at all? Why not avoid the very real danger of causing hurt to the people who least deserve it? Well, for a start, the attack felt close. A year before, drunk and belligerent in an Oslo bar, this same man had threatened to kill some female friends of mine after one of them refused his advances. The women wrote the incident off—just another sexually rejected man venting his frustrations. They could not possibly have known what he would go on to do. One of those women was my wife.

My wife and I were in Oslo together on the day of the attacks. We heard the bomb go off. I really did look at her and say ‘Thunder’, stupid as that sounds. Within minutes we knew it was something more than thunder. Friends had all the windows blown out along one side of their apartment. Another friend lost the hearing in one ear. Islamic terrorism, people agreed. No one believed then that a white man from the wealthiest part of the city could be responsible.

It was our wedding anniversary that day; in the evening we went out because you don’t let terrorists win. And after the police arrested the perpetrator, I remember a friend in a bar arguing that the man in custody could not truly be Norwegian, that he had to be a well-integrated Chechen. But he was white, and a Christian, and believed he was starting a race war.

I was surprised at how angry the attacks made me. Norway was my wife’s country; it wasn’t mine. I had been living a double life before the attacks, working and paying tax in the UK, seeing my Norwegian family in Oslo every other weekend. When we talked about our future, I pictured London. But the attacks, and the anger I felt, revealed something I had not noticed before: a sense of belonging that had quietly grown over time.

Something valuable, beyond the obvious, was attacked on that day. I was angry at the deliberate targeting of children; angry too at the man’s lack of repentance, at his calculated use of the courtroom as a stage to promote his agenda. “I have been called a child-murderer,” he would go on to say at his trial. “I want to point out that the average age of those I killed was above eighteen.” And I was angry at this assault on Scandinavian values, because the terrorist took that most fundamental of Norwegian virtues, trust, and turned it against the country. I quit my job in London. I applied for leave to remain in Norway. A year later I was covering the trial as a journalist.

For some, using a real traumatic event as the basis for fiction is wrong. Entertainment from pain; grief tourism—those are the charges, and they are legitimate concerns. I write about the effect of violence, and how it changes individuals, and families, and societies. That’s something I’m more comfortable doing in fiction, because we can never truly know the mind of a radicalized individual. But radicalization presents a more prosaic problem too; because it happens on the internet these days, it is inherently undramatic. A novel can take the radicalization process off the internet and out into the world.

The two definitive nonfiction accounts of the attacks are One of Us by Åsne Seierstad and A Norwegian Tragedy by Aage Borchrevink. Seierstad speculates in places on things we cannot know—that a terrorist thinks while planning his act, for example—and of course a writer should speculate. This was after all a new form of terrorism, in which the aim is for the terrorist to survive, so that he may use the courtroom as a stage from which to publicize his act. I wanted to go further, to speculate more than Seierstad does. Not so much about the terrorist, because stripped of their guns such people’s single-mindedness is inherently boring, but about the process by which ordinary people become radicalized in what looks from outside like the perfect society.

I spent weeks in that courtroom in Oslo, watching the man who killed other people’s loved ones. He was strangely unreadable, though he told us what he did, and what he thought about what he did, and he told us his reasons for doing it. This man was not sorry for the pain he had caused. He was certain that he had done the right thing. When allowed to speak freely he complained that white Norwegians were underrepresented in the Eurovision Song Contest. And when people in the court began openly to laugh at him, he reminded them that he had murdered their children. That’s a moment I cannot shake. The effect of it stays with you long after the trial has ended. It feels wrong to be able to return to your own family at the end of the day in court, knowing that other people there cannot.

That is what happened in Norway ten years ago. It doesn’t stop at Norway, because men like this man are everywhere. We see the seeds of low-level radicalization in the Capitol riots, in unshaven militias who believe an election was stolen. Even as we hope that the radicalization ends there, we can be certain that it does not, that there are plots to cause violence similar in scale to the Norway attacks. Extremists are ridiculous and unthreatening—until the moment where they become a credible threat.

Novels present realities that nonfiction cannot. They dissect and rearrange the world to make visible the invisible. That is what I have tried to do, at least, with the Curtis family and their encounter with terrorism. Will Love and Other Lies cause pain? That is not my intention, of course, but all writers know that intention and effect are two very different things. What I hope is that I have written a compelling thriller that asks a couple of important questions: What do we do with people who would cheerfully murder our children, who smile as they tell us that it is for some greater good? I can never fully answer that question now, though I know what I used to think before the attacks. And the second question is tightly bound to the first: radicalization is a long, slow process, so why don’t we see these people before it’s too late?

These questions and their answers don’t belong only to journalism and to non-fiction; they belong every bit as much in fiction.

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