“Trondheim” is a contemplative novel set in the ICU TRONDHEIM
Alba is a translator. Lil is a personal trainer. Alba deals with anxiety by counting rosary beads; Lil, with bouts of intense, at times bruising, physical training. Together, they are the parents of three children. One day, they receive a phone call: Their son Pierre, who lives abroad in Trondheim, had a cardiac arrest at a bus stop and now lies in a coma at a hospital. And so, the nightmare begins. The two women pack their bags, arrange care for their other children and travel, fragile relationship in tow, to Norway.
There, they find their son on life support. Having arrived at the hospital comatose, Pierre has been placed into a second, artificially induced coma from which, when the time is right, the doctors will attempt to rouse him — though without any guarantee that the original coma will in turn also lift. Nor are the doctors able to say “whether or not he would be brain-damaged — as matters stood, there was no way to know.” To Alba, the situation is overwhelming, rife with “so many things to go wrong.” But to Lil, the question is simple: “Either Pierre would come back or he would not.”
Much of “Trondheim,” the third novel by the Irish writer Cormac James, is set in the I.C.U., a place of terrible dread. But hospital time has a particular and peculiar quality, and “Trondheim” is dedicated to capturing the way it unfolds. The sensation of continual anxiety and continual boredom, the fits and starts of activity, are closely observed. Here, time and hope are united. “You don’t know anything for definite yet, wait for the tests, take it hour by hour,” one character reflects. “In here time is your friend, not your enemy.”
In its study of medical crisis, “Trondheim” calls to mind Tom Malmquist’s extraordinary novel, “In Every Moment We Are Still Alive.” That book, a work of autofiction, is about the death of its narrator’s wife, one week after she gives birth to the couple’s daughter, moving backward and forward, into the history of their relationship and through to the husband’s wild grief and fragile recovery. “Trondheim” is narrower in scope, both in timeline and tone. It’s quieter, in some ways more contemplative. But both novels take place in the land of medical emergency, where information is difficult to parse, highly mutable, and rarely coheres into a single, definitive narrative.
Perhaps as a result, the characters in “Trondheim” forcibly reject the consolations of storytelling, and the clarity and meaning it can lend to moments of crisis. Alba in particular associates storytelling with dishonesty and false hope. In keeping with the tunnel vision of emergency, “Trondheim” is primarily situated in the present, with little in the way of flashback. The problems between Alba and Lil, and their presumably deep catalog of small resentments and failings, are never recounted in depth, but in James’s careful depiction of the couple, we feel how their history has left them isolated from each other, even as they try to navigate the strain of their son’s collapse.
Though “Trondheim” both delicately and deeply probes the mothers and their relationship, the one character who is perhaps ill served by the novel is Pierre himself, who remains the absent heart of the book. From one perspective, this makes a certain kind of sense — he is, after all, in a coma for much of the story. But he is also the conduit through which nearly all the characters relate to one another. Apart from a general sense that he’s popular and an intimation that he left home to escape his parents, we learn little about him.
As Pierre’s medical situation evolves, the book — much like Lil and Alba themselves — seems to lift its head up to consider other matters, stepping outside the hospital and into the fresh air. And though the episodes that follow remain fraught with danger (Lil has an ambiguous encounter with a young woman, there’s target practice with firearms, etc.), it’s danger of a different, more exuberant kind, laced with reckless discovery.
“Trondheim” is set during the official start to the holiday season — the period when Black Friday offers are flooding inboxes and lights are strung up in the street. But it also involves a child in a coma, the twisting anxiety of the I.C.U., and the potentially irreparable fracturing of a relationship. It’s a Christmas story from hell.
Toward the end of the novel, the meaning of that seasonal backdrop shifts, and questions emerge about faith, superstition and the possibility of miracles. Those questions are sincere but not cloying, and never dogmatic; they are framed as part of a natural response to catastrophe. Because superstition, belief, hope: They’re all complicated. They may be part of the type of storytelling Alba deplores, and yet they also work hand in hand with the religious.