Review of Them by Healy Healy – A novel that makes the reader slow down and pay attention | imaginary

TPublished in the UK in a sharp translation by Martin Aitken, Danish author Helle Helle’s book Them charts the delicate and shifting bond between a teenage daughter and an ailing mother in prose that is simple but never austere. It is one of those novels in which little is said, but everything is said in the end.

The unnamed mother and her 16-year-old daughter live above a hairdresser’s shop in a secluded Danish area on the island of Lolland, where not much happens. They walk through spring-awakening fields, shop for groceries, and join an evening class. Details of their past are scant, and fugitive: some house moves, but nothing about the daughter’s father, who exerts a mysterious presence. Mostly, they enjoy a frictionless, symbiotic closeness: “They sit near the window a lot, on the sofa, and with the free local weekly…they raise their glasses, sipping simultaneous mouthfuls.”

Sometimes, there are flashpoints. When a mother straightens her daughter’s collar before school, the precocious girl says, “You just keep doing that.” For most of the novel, the daughter is busy with her best friend, Tove Donk, and throws parties where she drinks vodka from “little cups made of wood.” She has the usual concerns about her appearance and her place in the popularity hierarchy. And then the devastating news. Sore throat and lethargy in the mother are symptoms of terminal illness. “Doctors can relieve the symptoms but the condition cannot be cured…six months, maybe a year.”

Another writer might have turned this scenario into a sentimental melodrama, but Healy astonishes the reader by making life go on as it was before, even though the daughter must now visit her mother for long periods in the hospital. These provide some of the book’s most quietly poignant scenes. There’s a tender moment when the daughter painfully breaks her toenail, and the mother asks, “Do you want a morphine tablet?” And another when they sing “If You’re Happy and You Know It” together: “They laugh till they cry, and it goes on for a while.”

When the mother returns from the hospital, their roles are reversed: the daughter is forced to prepare the apartment, and she ineptly vacuums the toilet. Sometimes her emotions break through her tight self-control. She walked into a store that sold coats with fur collars, and briefly “screamed into the hood.” Later, she develops an irrational hatred towards the carpet. Besides, Hailey embodies the strange sense of lethargy and expectation of adolescence, with its shifting friendship groups and the oppressive sense of a huge, unknown future to fill, all intensified by a mother’s limited handful of days.

While the accumulation of detail can be overwhelming, the novel is unflinching in its observation of the small exchanges that define a relationship, many of which are easy to miss. These vignettes form a powerful portrait of a mother and daughter coming to terms with the mutability of existence and what it means to fulfill a duty of care. The feeling of impending doom creates tension that can never be resolved; Instead, he forces mother and daughter to live in the moment, simply sitting together at either end of the sofa with the bowl of cookies: “They’re laughing and laughing. It’s getting dark, and the wreaths are rustling outside under the window.” Subtle, precise, and unforgettable, it is a book that asks the reader to slow down and notice.