#RivetingReviews: John Munch reviews THE UNWORTHY by Roy Jacobsen, translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw

Brooding and compulsively edgy, the phenomenon of Nordic Noir police procedural films and novels has cut a swathe through Europe’s bestseller lists and fathered a memorable set of Scandinavian-inspired television series. Among the genre’s most celebrated exponents, writers such as the Swede Stieg Larsson, who died over twenty years ago, aged just fifty, and Jo Nesbø, Norway’s leader in fictional book sales, enjoy worldwide name recognition.

Norwegian novelist Roy Jacobsen, a published author since 1982, has never belonged to the high-profile mass market Nordic Noir coterie. But his output of eighteen novels and several volumes of short stories shares facets with the sensibility of his fellow writers. It is certainly as raw and gritty as theirs. But while they offer slick, high-quality entertainment, Jacobsen combines Nordic bleakness with deeper literary heft and nuance.

The power sources that supply Jacobsen’s moral universe are extensive: a close acquaintanceship with the craggy coastline of the northernmost counties of his homeland, where his mother had a homestead; the storytelling exemplified by the Icelandic Saga of Njal, which Jacobsen says ‘contains everything needed for the difficult task of becoming a human being’; the short- and long-term effects of the Nazi wartime occupation of Norway; and, last but not least, Jacobsen’s own experiences in a working-class suburb of his Oslo birthplace, where he joined a criminal gang and was convicted of weapons offences and theft, and given a six-month suspended sentence.

In his latest work, The Unworthy, Jacobsen revisits one of his marquee subjects – the crushing Third Reich invasion. He draws on his own recollections of his lived experience in post-war Norway on the wrong side of the law to provide the human focal point of the novel and to give it an undeniable stamp of authenticity. His nameless fictional gang of street-wise urchins takes centre stage in a rundown Oslo neighbourhood, where it imbibes a ‘deeper draught of life than all the previous summers put together’.

Olav, lanky, white and skinny, always has money and rations. His best friend, Carl, is expert at breaking into a local butcher’s shop, bolstering his diet with stolen neck of pork, ox hearts and tripe. Younger gang members Vidar, who ‘looked like the poor wretch he was supposed to look like’ and Jan (‘short, quiet and apparently modest’) are tasked with stealing bikes before selling them, repainted and reconditioned. Roar, blessed with chess-playing talents apparently inherited from a maternal grandfather who has been an actor in one of Oslo’s theatres, specialises in faking official documents. Disturbingly, he answers teachers in school before they have time to formulate their questions.

Against a dystopian backdrop lacking any conventional peacetime shock absorbers, the ruffians develop an unquenchable appetite for non-stop petty crime. They target everything, from stealing gramophone records through open windows and filching newspapers from doormats to slaughtering caged rabbits, in pursuit of a life-enhancing, albeit modest, accumulation of cash. Any portable loot is fair game.

But gang life tilts from a state of youthful derring-do into an existential contest for the young punks when one September afternoon Carl’s father, Erling, gives his son a mysterious street map. Without offering any clear background about their significance, Erling tells Carl he has identified nine empty houses and asks him to guard the dog-eared document like a treasure trove.

The following week officers of the Norwegian equivalent of the Gestapo ransack a flat. Worse is to follow as the gang members and their families confront a mystery conspiracy far more convoluted than any arising from their simple larcenies. Jacobsen displays his storytelling skills to the full in disentangling the complex truth.

Philosophically Jacobsen has an acute sense of the clash between historical memory and forgetting. He has said in interviews that forgetting is a necessity:

‘There must be a mixture, a fight between them. Think of your own childhood: you edit it all the time. This is the case for nations as well. I’m working in the field between these two extremes.’

Judge for yourself how well he tackles and resolves this issue in this artfully crafted work.

Reviewed by John Munch

THE UNWORTHY

by Roy Jacobsen

Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw

Published by Maclehouse Press (2025)

September 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

John Munch started his career as a reporter and editor on the Cambridge News. He then worked for the Sheffield Morning Telegraph, the Guardian and the London Evening Standard. In the 1970s, he reported for the Toronto Star, before spending twenty-five years on the Financial Times.

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