The simple life beckons in 'The Colony.' Enlightenment is not forthcoming

Burnout’s thing new. Just inquire Henry David Thoreau, who was lamenting successful 1854 that our lives are being “frittered distant by detail.” The smartphone whitethorn past person been unimaginable — Alexander Graham Bell was hardly retired of infancy —yet the impulse to scope for it was already there. “Hardly a antheral takes a fractional hour’s nap aft dinner, but erstwhile helium wakes helium holds up his caput and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ arsenic if the remainder of mankind had stood his sentinels.”

Thoreau’s solution? “Simplify, simplify.” For 2 years, arsenic anyone who’s work “Walden” volition know, helium took himself disconnected to the woods “to unrecorded deliberately” and unsocial — notwithstanding that his idiosyncratic wilderness was lone a mile and a fractional from Concord, Mass., and helium inactive sent his laundry out.

When we conscionable Emelie, the sometime narrator of Annika Norlin’s debut novel, “The Colony,” she’s already gone afloat Thoreau. Modern metropolis beingness — “the shops and the cars and the lights, and the screens, screens, screens” — has go excessively much. She’d erstwhile prided herself, successful her temp jobs and societal life, connected her dependability: “First I stayed late, past I went out. I went to shot games, to plays, to parties, to the gym. I drank cocktails astatine bars, went running, joined publication clubs.” But hyperactivity has taken its toll, and 1 time she finds herself incapable to get retired of bed. So disconnected she trots to the bluish Swedish countryside, wherever she tosses her iPhone successful a water and settles successful to bask the din of silence.

(Europa Editions)

But Emelie is not alone. Shortly aft her isolation begins, she spies the “Colony” of the title, an intriguingly heterogeneous radical of seven, eating and bathing and singing together. We volition observe they’ve been determination for immoderate 15 years. But tin their off-the-grid idyll past the accomplishment of an “Outsider”?

“The Colony” was a bestselling, prize-winning sensation successful Sweden, wherever its writer has enjoyed a agelong vocation arsenic a popular star. On the look of it, the book’s entreaty to an American assemblage is obvious. The hunt for meaning, authenticity and escapade successful the wilderness is simply a Great American trope. From the canon, not conscionable Thoreau but besides Melville’s Ishmael sought a alteration of country erstwhile beingness became excessively much; much caller examples mightiness see Chris McCandless successful “Into the Wild” and memoirist Cheryl Strayed. These works typically connection sociopolitical commentary on with the sportfishing and sleeping bags — and “The Colony” is nary different.

Norlin seeds the publication with ideas from her ain wide reading. We’re told that Sara, the Colony’s de facto leader, finds inspiration successful some Thoreau and Arne Næss, the Norwegian philosopher whose ideas astir “deep ecology” gave emergence to the conception that humans should beryllium considered connected a level with immoderate different species. (Worth noting that Næss, too, was wont to retreat to the wilderness — albeit his Walden Pond was a mountainside cabin.) Sara besides reads Pentti Linkola, a much utmost thinker sometimes linked to ecofascist ideas astir extremist depopulation, though Norlin doesn’t supply overmuch of a gloss if you’re not up to day connected your Finnish environmentalists.

That the publication fails to decently research immoderate of these ideas is simply a large shortcoming. Indeed, Norlin spends truthful agelong connected backstories for the Colony’s idiosyncratic members and their applicable motives for seeking isolation that there’s not lone little abstraction but little communicative necessity for them to stock a philosophy. Three of them person bully origin to fearfulness the law; each 7 are complicit successful benefits fraud. The youngest, the straggling teenaged Låke, was calved disconnected the grid and has nary identity, legally speaking. It’s yet little ideology than crippled that binds the members of the Colony. Contra Thoreau, they each look funny little successful surviving beingness deliberately than deliberately avoiding life.

What’s near is simply a radical of misfits blessed with the clip and abstraction to deliberation without distraction yet weirdly contented not to bother. The debased strength of dialog and statement is baffling, particularly fixed the aboriginal signs of discontent that Norlin cautiously plants. When Sagne, who was an entomologist earlier retiring to the woods, compares the radical to an ant colony, everyone appears to judge astatine look worth the superficial aptitude of her analogy. “Everyone has a task for the community, said Sagne,” Norlin writes. “Everyone is needed. No 1 has to cognize everything.” Perhaps connected these precise constrictive presumption the examination works, but it’s hard to ideate it would carnivore the benignant of productive scrutiny that much extended dialog mightiness person provoked. What astir ants’ prodigious industry? Their tremendous and increasing populations? Without specified dialogue, we indispensable simply believe that the Colony is blessed with its berry-picking and breathwork routines. Without dialogue, there’s small to person the scholar — thing that a Thoreau oregon a Næss mightiness accidental to adhd rigor and ballast to the Colony’s alternatively flimsy ethos. Yet implicit time, we’re told, speech simply fizzles out.

Two characters are much finely drawn: Emelie, chummy and self-deprecating, irritating but believable, and Låke, whose unsocial benignant we brushwood successful the book’s champion and shortest chapters. His appealingly eccentric dependable arrives afloat formed connected archetypal introduction: “We tin consciousness it successful our Bodies, erstwhile summertime begins to measurement over. There are galore small clues astir us! Now it’s precocious summertime present everything is successful bloom. & erstwhile it’s clip we shall consciousness the telephone to instrumentality to our nest.” Alice E. Olsson, successful her English translation, locates a naive lyricism successful the dependable of this agleam but unschooled boy, who learned the mode of the satellite from the meager lit astatine hand: “Wuthering Heights,” “Flowers successful the Attic,” aged Jackie Collins novels.

If lone the full communicative had been told from Låke’s funny and blinkered perspective, “The Colony” mightiness person ended up much amusement than tell, and the much eloquent for it. As it stands, the characterization is thin, the motivations are overdetermined, and the Colony’s endurance demands excessively steep a suspense of disbelief. Perhaps a different, amended publication mightiness person been recovered had Norlin followed Thoreau’s proposal and simplified.

Arrowsmith is based successful New York and writes astir books, films and music.