Book review: One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway
HE’S writing a book, his mother proudly tells her friends down the cafe.
He had been playing computer games an awful lot lately but it finally seems like he’s about to fulfil his potential, she says.
He relaxes by treating himself to three-course meals at local restaurants, watching The Shield — he downloaded all seven seasons in May and is watching a couple of episodes a night — and he loves the Eurovision; he’s rooting for Germany.
He’s also got a sweet tooth: “I bought a lot of exquisite food and candy today,” he thinks.
“Good food and candy is a central aspect of my reward system, which keeps me going. It has proven efficient so far.”
In a lot of ways he seems like a normal guy. Except he isn’t.
He’s plotting what turns out to be one of the deadliest terror attacks seen in Europe this century, single-handedly responsible for killing 77 people in Norway on one chilling, devastating afternoon.
On July 22, 2011, eight people were killed in a van bomb blast in a government district of Oslo, while 40 minutes’ drive away, on the island of Utoya where the Labour party’s youth wing, the AUF, was holding its annual summer camp, 69 people were massacred, 33 of whom were under the age of 18. Many more were wounded.
All at the hands of this man, who had spent days and days playing World of Warcraft in what he called the ‘fart room’ at his mother’s house.
His name is Anders Behring Breivik.
Asne Seierstad sat in court for the 10 weeks of Breivik’s trial in April 2012. A renowned war correspondent (“While Norway was grieving, I went back to the Middle East”), she says she was not prepared for what she sat through.
She writes in the epilogue to One of Us — her true crime account of Breivik’s life, encapsulating in harrowing detail the planning and execution of the attacks and their aftermath — “After the trial had finished I realised I had to go deeper to find out what had really happened, and I started searching. I found Simon, Anders [Kristiansen], and Viljar. I found Bano and Lara. This is their story.”
And their story is heartbreaking — they are but a handful of Breivik’s victims on Utoya.
Simon Saebo was a rising star in the AUF. His dream was to one day make speeches like JFK and Barack Obama.
He is shot on a rock face on Utoya while protecting a girl, Margrethe, with whom he had walked Lovers’ Path the previous night. Four shots to the back and stomach.
Bano, her sister Lara, and their parents had fled the war in Iraq when she was seven, reaching Norway. Bano, 17, is not even meant to be on Utoya as she is sick but she convinces her parents she’s fine.
A day later, as Breivik’s gunshots ring closer, she’s trying to reassure colleagues: “We won’t die today, girls. We won’t die today.”
She is shot while pretending to be dead.
One of Us, written in the same vein as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and translated by Sarah Death, is built on this impending tragedy.
It is a compelling psychological study of how someone who doesn’t feel accepted by society can turn extreme, of how evil becomes manifest.
Seierstad talked to Breivik’s friends, family, classmates, former business and political associates, and refers to psychological reports from his youth to try and explain his life and actions.
Breivik is raised in a broken home, but he has friends and interests. He’s never really accepted in his enveloping hip-hop and graffiti circles, or later in politics with the Progress Party.
“He was behaving like a king, but he was only a toy [a wannabe],” his peers decide. It is to the internet and its forums that he turns, twisting his thoughts as he consumes extreme postings by users called things such as ‘Fjordman’.
These keyboard warriors are annoyed at Norway’s increasing loss of nationality as it accepts more and more immigrants. Breivik can relate to such thoughts and starts posting himself, though
Seierstad basically tells us he was trolling.
Alongside this, he’s also spending increasing hours — and days — in the ‘fart room’ playing World of Warcraft and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
(Later, when he is engrossed in his Utoya rampage, he decides against going inside a building because, as he learned from WoW, entering such a space leaves the player vulnerable; Seierstad is not condemning video games for their influence on this killer, but they certainly contributed to his processes.)
Neither Seierstad nor the police are sure when he started planning his attacks.
He claims it was as early as 2002 but it was probably as late as a year before they took place. He retreats to a remote farmhouse in 2010.
“You’ll be a great farmer,” his mother tells him.
And suddenly we are in the preparations for July 22. He sets about building a bomb.
“He had six tonnes of fertiliser, half of it non-detonable, ordered so as not to arouse suspicion.”
He takes steroids, deciding he needs to be physically ready for the day. The cold-blooded calculating seems unreal, at times too in-depth on Seierstad’s part.
Come July 22, 2011 Breivik, in full police uniform, subjects us to death upon death upon tears.
They are recounted in detail by Seierstad. Among the regrets of that day are the number of opportunities the police had to apprehend Breivik.
Seierstad is incredulous at how they botched it. Security guards were told about a van illegally parked outside the Tower Block, but had become used to such activity, so did nothing about it.
Devastation shortly engulfs Oslo. Nine minutes later, a tip-off is made about a suspicious man in a police uniform. It is not acted on for what seems like an age.
There are no roadblocks set up to potentially stop the suspect. No police alerts are sent out to the force, the public, or the media.
Later, while Breivik is killing a person a minute on Utoya, police are finally ready to move in on the island.
While a former military vessel is forgotten about and a helicopter not utilised, police are trying to decide on the rendezvous point. Instead of a spot 600m from the island, it is decided to meet 3.6km from Utoya.
It is infuriating. It is devastating.
Breivik’s trial takes up the second half of the book, where his delusion is on full display.
“Breivik had constructed his life story as a shining suit of armour. In the lustreless courtroom, within those matte grey walls, a pack of professionals had descended to try with a variety of tools to push, worm, and force their way inside his defences.”
He is jailed for 21 years, a sentence likely to be extended for five years at a time until his death.
One of Us is a horrific, essential narrative of the victims behind the numbers, of how Breivik nurtures his ideology and twists the truth to sickening effect.
With the Parisian attacks still fresh in our minds, Seierstad’s investigative reportage reminds us what is really lost when someone decides to take the law, along with a couple of guns, into their own hands.
Innocent people simply do not deserve to fall victim to a person invoking God or ideals such as protecting nationality.
