Norwegian by Night, by Derek B. Miller

This brilliant novel by Derek B. Miller moves seamlessly from Oslo to Gramercy Park to the wars in Vietnam and the Balkans. Seen mostly through the eyes of an 82-year-old Jewish ex-Marine living in Norway, the story weaves in and out of conversations with people living and dead.

Sheldon may be feeling his age, possibly even suffering from the onset of dementia. His mind teems with thoughts and memories. A Vietnam vet, he carries a heavy burden of guilt and regret, even though he knows the deaths he feels worst about were dealt by the hands of fate and history.

When the aftermath of the Balkan wars arrives in Oslo, all hell breaks loose in the apartment of his granddaughter and grandson-in-law while they're out. Sheldon's military training kicks in, and he steps up to do what he can.

Miller's work is full of pithy lines that carry weighty ideas. "Only the educated stop to look for words -- having enough to occasionally misplace them." His characters' thoughts are also freighted with philosophy.

In a serious mood, Sheldon recalls how soldiers in Vietnam were imprinted with horrible smells. When ordered to approach a plane crash in case the pilot is still alive, the soldiers smell "fuel, which burned with a different odor than napalm, rice paddies, cattle and people." But burning fuel is "only a 2 on the gag-ometer" the soldiers have devised to classify the stenches that surround them; a 10 is reserved "for the smell of letters received from bureaucrats."

Looking back, Sheldon recalls that "It was not a grand moment" when he "watched as his son became a man." Without witnesses or heroics, Saul's "small gesture of dignity and respect between one man and another," opened "the possibility of a better world." Behind these simple words, we glimpse the vast and complex requirements demanded by society to satisfy honour among men.

The rules of honour also extend to ordinary life, causing Sheldon, in the presence of his young son, to shrug aside two bodyguards and punch out an anti-Semite who refuses to let him play golf at a country club. He is confident that the man will not complain to the police, reasoning that "The only thing worse for an anti-Semite than a Jew is being beaten up by a Jew." And therefore, "The fewer people who knew about it, the better."

Once father and son are safely away from the scene of the fight, Sheldon lectures Saul, saying 'This country is what you make it...you don't make excuses for America's bullshit. That's what the Nazis and commies do. The Fatherland. The Motherland. America isn't your parent. It's  your kid. And today I made America a place where you get your nose broken for telling a Jew he can't play a round of golf.' Sadly, in spite of its important lesson, this moment "that Saul would never forget... ruined the whole day."

Lars, the gentle modern Norwegian who still hunts animals ponders the condition of being a Jew as he rides along the back roads of Norway on his motorcycle. He finds something unsettling about the way they speak as witnesses to history. "Since Egypt. Since the morning of Western civilization, when its light shone west from Jerusalem and Athens, and blanketed Rome and all that it would leave behind. They've watched the Western tribes and empires rise and fall--from the Babylonians to the Gauls, from the Moors to the Habsburgs to the Ottomans--and have alone remained. They have seen it all. And the rest of us wait for the verdict that is still, even now, to come."

Behind him on the bike, his wife Rhea wonders if her beloved grandfather really is succumbing to dementia. "Imagining what Sheldon would say in response to her doubts, she can't help but smile. 'Sanity is the thick soup of distraction we immerse ourselves in to keep from remembering that we're gonna bite it.'"

Sigrid, an Oslo police officer with her finger firmly on the pulse of the era, reflects that, "Recent immigration from Africa and Eastern Europe--and Muslim countries farther east--created a new social tension in the city that still lacked the political maturity to address it." With the liberals expounding "limitless tolerance," and the conservatives "racist or xenophobic," people "debate from philosophical positions but never from ones grounded in evidence, and so no sober consideration [is] being given to the very real question haunting Western civilization--namely, How tolerant should we be of intolerance?"

This novel portrays themes of deep resonance: guilt, regret, revenge, war and the cycle of violence; the pressures of history and the inescapable solitude of the self. Underpinning the stunning novels of Derek B. Miller is an impressive resume. Undoubtedly, his work with the UN, governments and think tanks, as well as his American - Swiss education and the fact that he lives in Norway add to the broad international perspective of his work.