Our friend Grim at the Grim’s Hall blog has the honor of posting the first blog review of Troll Valley. And what he has to say about it is extremely intriguing:
There is a wider lesson to her example. A family home is like a broader human community in that it has rules that establish a way of life, and under that way of life a community is possible. We see in the early chapters how the traditions of Norwegian families at Yuletide sustained a broad community through hard work. It is at that feast that the mother first uses her power to force a change in the rules, in her interest and against the interests of others. It is by forcing continual alterations of the rules of life that she destroys the community within the house, so that finally no one can live with her at all.
Each of these rules is meant to represent moral progress, but each of them destroys the living community in which human kindness is possible.
Grim sees the book as a drama of modern ideas of societal reform in conflict with the old traditions, and traditional relationships, that actually bind society together.
I find this fascinating, because I honestly didn’t have that in mind when I wrote. I was thinking of politics vs. religion, not politics vs. tradition. But now that he mentions it, I can see that the lesson is there. What I did was try to represent factually the kind of changes that were going on in the first couple decades of the 20th Century, and the “lesson” grew kind of organically from the events.
This all pleases me immensely. I like being smarter than I intended.