The Strawberry Girl

Lisa Stromme

Chatto and Windus, £12.99

Reviewed by Nick Major

LIKE John Everett Millais’ Ophelia or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Edvard Munch’s The Scream is a painting even the most culturally illiterate recognise. In May 2012 the superlative version was sold at a Sotheby’s auction for the princely sum of £74 million. In his home country, Norway, Munch is a gloomy hero. But in the late 19th century, when he created his notorious gaping figure, he was desperately poor, so much so that he once painted on cardboard. He was also not too popular with the hoi polloi. Munch was loosely associated with the Kristiania [Oslo] Bohemians, a rag-tag bunch of thinkers and artists who drunkenly tottered between anarchism and nihilism. Their central architect was Munch’s friend Hans Jaeger. Jaeger was the author of The Kristiania Bohemians, a pornographic roman-a-clef he was imprisoned for publishing.

Lisa Stromme’s debut novel The Strawberry Girl is set during the summer of 1893 in the Norwegian seaside town of Asgardstrand, where Munch rented a summer retreat. Tullik Ihlen, the daughter of a wealthy admiral, owns a copy of Jaeger’s novel. She shows it to Johanne, the 15-year-old narrator and maid to the upper class Ihlen household. It is about "free love, free will, a free society…freedom from rules and constraints," says Tullik. This would be appealing to any teenager, but Johanne is a young artist herself. She also has synaesthesia, experiencing different emotions in colour – the nearest thing to a genetically-endowed Expressionist you could think of. When Tullik Ihlen and Edvard Munch start discreetly courting, Johanne becomes Tullik’s co-conspirator and confidante. As the summer flourishes and dies, so does the relationship between these three outsiders.

It is somehow suspect when an author includes an afterword explaining the history of a novel. Nevertheless, Stromme, who lives in Asgardstrand, tells us that her story is loosely based on an "old memoir by a local woman called Inger Alver Gloerson, whose stepfather was a friend of Munch." This book is about a rich young girl who had a summer romance with the artist, and receives a cache of his paintings, which are burnt when found by some maidservants. It is a nice idea to create a fiction out of a fabrication, and it adds to the sense in the novel that books give a comprehensible form to a chaotic world; each chapter in The Strawberry Girl is given its own mood with an epigram from Goethe’s Theory of Colour, a book Munch gives to Johanne. The problem with Stromme’s novel is that she does not pick a very good lie to embellish.

The Strawberry Girl purports to be the story of how Munch came to paint The Scream, but this is the least convincing part of the tale. When Tullik’s family find out the inevitable, they deny her contact with Munch, and in a fanciful section her screams of emotional pain merge with the ghastly painting. As Stromme must know, the scream in Munch’s work is coming out of Nature, and best represented by the whorl of colour around the central figure, who is covering their ears. It conveys a sense of worldly isolation which reaches far beyond the confines of a doomed love affair. It does not matter that Stromme’s story is told from the perspective of Johanne. The painting as a depiction of a broken heart still seems like the natural denouement of the plot.

What is more appealing about The Strawberry Girl is the subtle and ephemeral relationship between Johanne and Munch, and their shared artistic temperament. Whilst Johanne is discovering how to be an artist, Munch is learning how hard it is to live as one. Like the pair of them, Stromme has a strong eye for capturing a scene, from the hubbub of a small fishing port to a quiet woodland in full blossom. The novel also cracks open the strictures and striations of Norwegian society, and the impact censorship has on all kinds of artistic expression. Johanne’s mother tells her that local doctors consider Munch’s paintings detrimental to health, as though their exposure to the populace will result in a mass outbreak of Stendhal syndrome. So, it is in the interstitial passages between Tullik and Munch’s love affair that this novel takes flight, and where we see the dangers art and artists posed to Norwegian society at the end of the 19th century. More than 100 years later, the only danger Munch’s paintings now pose to the populace comes in the form of a hefty price tag.