Skill Is in the Telling, Not the Endings, of Trio of Tales

TALES OF PROTECTION

A Novel

By Erik Fosnes Hansen

Translated from the Norwegian by Nadia Christensen

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

$26, 500 pages

Think back to the childhood enchantment of bedtime stories. Safe amid the covers, your head propped on a pillow, a captivating voice lulled you into foreign worlds. Perhaps you fell asleep before the resolution came, but no matter: The point of the tale wasn’t the outcome, but the story itself. Tomorrow night, there’d be a new tale.

And though you might often miss the endings, you didn’t much care. As long as the voice kept flowing, all was right with the world.

Reading Erik Fosnes Hansen’s rich and detailed “Tales of Protection” is a similar experience, adjusted for adults. As readers, we relax into the author’s skillful hands, allowing his luminous writing to carry us, and the tale, along. The Norwegian author (“Psalm at Journey’s End”) has crafted in “Tales of Protection” three distinct narratives, each of which is as self-contained as a novella.

Hansen offers only the thinnest of filaments to link them: the premise that chance and coincidence are more than meet the eye, that seemingly random events are linked in a web of synchronicity we cannot fully see. In this triad of stories, Hansen strives to illustrate in quiet, enigmatic ways how everything is connected.

The first tale, set in modern-day Norway, establishes this theme. Wilhelm Bolt, a wealthy retired mining engineer, has become a recluse, researching and documenting accounts of coincidences. “Whether one calls it coincidence or fate is completely irrelevant, because the strange thing is that anything even occurs.... That it is, when it could just as well not be. That time passes at all, when it could just as well not pass. That something happens, when it could just as well not happen.” By studying the social culture of bees, he hopes to identify the veiled mesh beneath the surface of chance.

Out of the blue--a coincidence?--his great-niece Lea happens on his doorstep. A runaway, she finds a sense of belonging with the old man, and Wilhelm, for his part, finds solace after decades of loneliness. Together they study bees, looking for clues to the “paradox of coincidence” in the behavior of drones, workers and queens.

The second tale is set in 19th century Sweden, on the remote mouth of a fiord where the lighthouse keeper, Kalle Jacobsson, is distraught after a ship has gone aground and all the sailors have perished. His daughter Josefa, who sometimes sees and hears ghosts of deceased sailors, falls ill while preparing the corpses for burial.

Her birth, which had nearly ended in tragedy, we’re told, was saved by one of the lighthouse keeper’s assistants, Enberg, who had the foresight to row to the mainland for medical help although there’d been no early sign of distress. Interestingly, it is Enberg who was on watch the night the ship in question ran aground in clear weather.

Hansen’s writing about lighthouse-keeping (like his scientific analysis of bees) is skillful: how, exactly, a run-aground ship is boarded, how the missing sailors are located, how lighthouses function, how an isolated life on the mouth of a fiord unfolds. He has a remarkable ability to pique our curiosity and then provide lavish, satisfying details to sate that interest.

Renaissance Italy is the scene for the final tale. Lorenzo del Vetro is an exiled Florentine nobleman living in Rome who’s been afflicted with a painful, unrelenting skin disease. During a night of revelry, he travels as a joke to view an old altar painting said to have healing properties.

Lorenzo is cured and spends the remainder of the tale trying to figure out who painted the work, and what occurred during the painting’s creation that might explain its miraculous properties. We learn of the painstaking process of gold-leafing, witness artists working with egg tempera, and making charcoal with which to sketch.

In approaching these tales with an analytical eye, it seems we’ve entered independent stories, each utterly captivating yet lacking individual endings and a collective conclusion. It becomes possible to glimpse coherence only if we accept the author’s premise that everything is connected.

Still, like the best bedtime stories, we’re so wrapped up in each tale’s unfolding that we don’t necessarily care whether last night’s narrative fits with tonight’s. So wooed are we by Hansen’s abilities to take us to new worlds that we abandon the need to stay awake to make sure it all adds up, giving ourselves over instead to the joy of remarkable storytelling.