Book review: A thrilling Oslo mystery

Catriona Shine's 'Habitat' is rich in satire, but also full of empathy

Catriona Shine: Intriguing novel set in an Oslo apartment block as odd happenings mount up. Picture: Aslak Haanshuus

• Habitat 
• Catriona Shine 
• Lilliput, €18 

Habitat is a very unusual first novel. Catriona Shine is an Irish architect working in Oslo, Norway, and has also published stories in Southword and The Dublin Review. 

The hefty 362-page paperback has a stylish cover, featuring a cutaway sketch of a small 1950’s apartment block in Oslo revealing the building’s interiors.

It is a pleasure to read, freshly observed with many a neat turn of phrase. 

Neither a parable nor a fable, the realism of the characters and their behaviour contrasts strongly with the fantastic and illogical disintegration of the building they live in, making a mockery of the saying ‘safe as houses’. 

Some will read it as a climate change warning: perhaps, but there is more going on here than that.

At the start is a sketch of two apartment blocks with one apartment per floor, and the names of the occupants of each apartment. 

This invites constant consultation, to identify the relative location of the seven characters. 

Initially suggestive of George Perec’s massive novel, Life, A Users’ Manual, inspired by the residents of a Parisian apartment block, but Habitat is quite different. 

Fritjof and Frida, a young couple, both architects, occupy the top floor of one building, facing an extended family — Knut and Une, their daughter Bibbi and her small child, Teddy — on the same floor of the opposite building.

In the opening scene, the glass marbles that Teddy is playing with on the floor in the early morning go missing, and he is taken off to A&E, in the belief that he must have swallowed them.

The elderly woman Eva in the flat opposite the architects, is proud to be the chair of the management board, and her counterpart below Knut and Ine, Hildegunn, has lived in her apartment since the 1950s.

Eva envies her for having windows on three sides of her unit, and when Hildegunn breaks her hip in a fall on the same day that Teddy’s marbles go missing, Eva wonders if her chance to make a bid for it has come.

Meanwhile out on her third-floor balcony: “A wretched coil of excrement, dog poo in fact, lay there reeking and taunting”. Alerted by the bad smell, she has no idea how it got there.

In contrast, the three Indian tech workers sharing the basement apartment are puzzled and appalled by a horrific smell, which their neighbours attribute to their cooking.

In fact they have not cooked anything for weeks. The smell is replaced by a light dusting of soil, which starts to pile up alarmingly fast.

The chapters describe ever-stranger happenings — paint peeling off the walls, bricks going missing, holes appearing in walls and floors, soundproofing failing, rain falling in through the top-floor ceiling, a rose bush growing in through the window impossibly fast — and the residents’ reactions to these events.

Each chapter opens with a statement in which the building, or its components, makes its own case for its misbehaviour.

“Descended from rock, we are also a careful proportion of clay. We were pulverised, heated to the point of vitrifcation, fused … Poured into moulds, we set, gripping rods of steel.”

The story is rich in satire, but also full of empathy. At its core is the residents’ struggle to cope with the inexplicable happenings, blaming interlopers, robbers, the mental decline of old age or dishonest tradesmen.

By the end, there are paths where the walls of the two blocks once were, and the residents’ prized possessions are in a heap. There are even fatalities. 

The buildings have disappeared entirely. “Without walls or floors to separate them in space, all these possessions become junk.”