A nameless narrator arrives in a “remote northern country” to run her eldest brother’s household. The position comes naturally: she has been a “faithful and perennial servant” to her siblings since infancy. But her brother soon departs, leaving her alone to struggle with the traumatic legacy of a vaguely outlined past event.
She quickly learns that the inhabitants of the nearby small town all hate her. Or fear her. Mothers cover their children’s eyes when she passes. At a cafe, unable to speak the language, the narrator points at a woman’s coffee cup and she bursts into tears while other customers surreptitiously make the sign of the cross. Later a shopkeeper crouches behind his counter in “some manner of defensive manoeuvre” while the narrator browses the shelves.
What about this woman – such a nonentity at the start of the book that she fails to trigger an automatic door sensor – prompts such extreme responses? The only answer can be her Jewishness. She describes the country she has moved to as the home of her ancestors, “an obscure though reviled people” who had, some time ago, been “put into pits”. I’m not sure what “obscure” means in this context but no such uncertainty surrounds Jews and pits: the Holocaust is being invoked.
At this point, just a few pages into the book, the abstraction of Study for Obedience, the second novel by Sarah Bernstein – a Canadian based in the northwest Highlands of Scotland and recently named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists – began to preoccupy me. We are in a modern northern European country, with very cold winters and midnight sun through spring and summer. Norway or Finland, I thought, except no one can – or will – speak English, and it becomes apparent that the health service is terrible. Lithuania or Latvia, then, but they lack midnight sun.
My attempts to figure this out might seem misplaced; specificity clearly isn’t something that interests the book. But it puzzles me that it should talk so much about place and history while presenting such blurred versions of both: “I was not from the place,” the narrator remarks, “and so I was not anything.” Of the townspeople, “whose history I knew was so entwined with mine”, she says they represent “the closest thing to an inheritance I could be said to have”. But what specifically is that history, or that inheritance? We know some Norwegian, Finnish, Lithuanian and Latvian citizens participated in the Holocaust. Plainclothes Norwegian policemen rounded up Oslo Jews for transportation to Auschwitz. The Finns deported a small number and handed over others to SS units stationed within Finland. Lithuanian and Latvian collaborators shot Jews into mass graves alongside Nazi Einsatzgruppen. These bloody histories all interconnect, of course, but I can’t help thinking it matters which specific history the narrator is referring to and which descendants she is living among. Without that knowledge the Holocaust is reduced to a plot point and history to a vibe.
At the same time, reading a book in which details are so vaporous seeds interpretative doubt: might the fact the story’s setting doesn’t match any real-world country, and that the locals the narrator interacts so uneasily with remain ciphers, mean it should be read as a fable? Indeed, some of its most powerful writing, as when forest paths seem to close up and previously open gates are found locked, “as if the land itself … was working to expel me”, or when the narrator grooms her ailing brother like a horse, have a fable-like energy. But elsewhere we read about streaming services, inappropriate pictures on group chats and work meetings on Microsoft Teams. If the fabular offers any advantages, surely it’s to spare us from work meetings on Microsoft Teams.
Reading Study for Obedience I was reminded of the geographically obscure stories of Anna Kavan, and Catherine Lacey’s mysterious novel Pew, but most of all VS Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, another book in which the narrator moves to an isolated region of a foreign country and goes for long, lonely walks that emphasise their dislocation from their surroundings. Naipaul writes: “I saw what I saw very clearly. But I didn’t know what I was looking at. I had nothing to fit it into. I was still in a kind of limbo.” This could be Bernstein, but whereas her narrator spurns geographical detail, Naipaul’s maps alien Wiltshire with a desperate thoroughness. As Salman Rushdie points out, Naipaul gives the impression that if the narrator didn’t create the world on the page “in the most minute detail, then it won’t be there. The immigrant must invent the earth beneath his feet.”
Bernstein’s narrator, by contrast, is more like a tourist, free to select her level of involvement. “I would work to allow the world its right to illegibility,” she announces, which seems to help her even as it leaves us in darkness. The nature of her crisis, withheld like so much else, is revealed as a generational form of survivor’s guilt, but its rapid resolution, and the vagueness of her engagement with its root cause, makes for an oddly frictionless, even privileged, journey into trauma.
• Study for Obedience is published by Granta (£12.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
• This article was amended on 20 July 2023. Sarah Bernstein is a resident of the north-west Highlands of Scotland, not Edinburgh as an earlier version said.
