Karin Altenberg: “I’ve always felt like an outsider”

In a novel that spans four decades, Karin Altenberg weaves two disparate narratives: in the first, a young boy mourns his father, who hasn't returned from the war, and is brutally bullied in scenes of uncomfortable rawness; in the second, an ageing professor returns to the village he grew up in, lives a life of fragile loneliness, and falls in love with an ethereal Afghan woman.

The characters, the reader soon realises, are the same person: parted by decades, yet united by their otherness. “I’ve always felt like an outsider. I think most of us do, it’s a universal topic that most people will relate to,” says Altenberg. Tellingly, it’s a theme that she handles aptly. “I hope that there’re some people who feel content and happy, and are completely at home where they are, but I think for a lot of us there’s always that search for somewhere that we feel we belong. That’s something I wanted to explore.”

Craving a sense of belonging is something Altenberg understands well. She is Swedish, but has spent much of her adult life in the UK. It’s a common symptom of a globalised world- a feeling of being neither entirely at home in an adoptive country, nor in a homeland. “Going back and forth between London and Stockholm became quite exhausting. I always felt I was betraying somebody with my absence wherever I was, and that was getting to me a bit.”

At its core, Breaking Light is a coming of age novel. Young Gabriel struggles to make sense of the adult world and find his place in it; forty years later, his older self, Mr Askew, still seems uncertain – though it is a tale that is ultimately redemptive. "It’s a story of trying to come to terms with the way your life turned out, about forgiving yourself and forgiving the world for what it’s done to you. It's a book about home and being able to find a place to fit in,” says Altenberg.

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“I wanted to get away from all the planning and just write” – Karin Altenberg

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It is in her descriptions of nature that Altenberg’s prose becomes vividly beautiful: lines such as 'a couple of ravens were soaring and carousing in a courting game, their wedge-tails stencilling cuneiform on to the spring skies' jump out from the page. It is no surprise that Altenberg is attuned to her environment in such a startling way – she has a PhD in Landscape Archaeology, a subject she likens to learning to read the land like a book, peeling back layers of history to uncover the land’s past. “Every one of us has got a landscape where we feel comfortable, but I think for me the outdoors has always been where I feel most at home.”

Indeed, the landscape becomes almost a character in the novel. Set in an unnamed village on Dartmoor, Altenberg skilfully contrasts an isolated and insular village on the moor's periphery with the sea-like expanse of the wild land, seemingly lawless and electric with possibility. It’s a terrain she knows well; when she first moved to England, she spent several years studying Dartmoor: “Like Gabriel, I came of age on the moors, and I think the seed of the idea for the novel stems from that period in my life. I spent a lot of time on my own walking through these ancient landscapes, thinking about the duality of the land, the duality of self and the sense of belonging.”

Altenberg’s first novel, Island of Wings, was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book Award and longlisted for the Orange Prize. Second books are notoriously difficult to write, and the author was not immune to the pressures. “With the first book you write without thinking about publication, and then suddenly you have a publisher, a contract and a deadline so it’s a very different process. It was quite terrifying in many respects,” she says. Wisely, she began working on Breaking Light while still promoting Island of Wings, using the momentum from the success of her first novel to begin her second. She also chose to approach the writing process in an entirely different way. Island of Wings was a richly researched historical book set in 1800s St Kilda (“My walls were covered with timelines and charts and character maps!”), while Breaking Light is a much more personal book. “I wanted to get away from all the planning and just write. The joy was the creation of the characters – watching them come alive and start taking shape was completely thrilling.”