If you’ve ever taken an extended overseas holiday, chances are you’ve experienced the interesting existential remove that happens when you are plucked from your everyday life and find yourself looking back at your life and into your soul in ways you simply don’t do when the priorities of the day are catching a train or making sure you get your mountain of work done.
The day-to-day is so unceasing and demanding that stopping to think for a minute, and beyond that, to actually ruminate on what your life is like and whether it’s actually what you want is all but impossible; but once you’re out of that pell-mell rut, you have a rare chance to sit back and muse on who you are, who you want to be and where you’d like to go.
It can be quite revelatory, something that Londoner, doctor Holly Greene, experiences when she accepts an invitation from her brother Alex to come and visit him and his Norwegian wife Ninni, and their infant daughter Rosie, on a small North Sea island off the west coast of Norway.
It’s her flight from a pianful reality, a literal and figurative one that includes a ferry ride in the dark of the Norwegian early evening, which forms the beating exploratory heart of Christmas Island by Natalie Normann, a cosy rom-com story of one woman’s escape from the crushing weight of an incident of an incident at the hospital where she works which has the potential to end her career.
‘My phone is charging by the television. Feel free to use it,’ he said, all the time watching Frøy.
When the big cat rolled around and put a paw on her hand, he smiled. Silly cat, he though before going to the kitchen.
‘Thank you,’ she called after him.
Mad woman, he thought.
She desperately hopes it won’t, but having no power over the resolution of a traumatic situation partly of her own making, she decides the only sensible place to be is far from London, and where further than this small island of a few hundred souls in a country that has enveloped and adopted her brother and which she hopes will, temporarily at least, do the same for her.
Initial impressions aren’t that favourable, what with icy slush and winter rain and a near-miss when she almost falls off a towering cliff in the dark – the absence of street lights, while romantically evocative, does make navigating your way around an unfamiliar landscape a distinct challenge – with Holly only rescued from a messy death on the rocks below by a giant, furry cat named Frøy and his taciturn owner, Tor (not “Thor” as he’s keen to point out), a man who’s renting a house on the island and has become known in the short time he’s been there as “the recluse”.
The meeting of these two people, fleeing their unpalatable realities and landing in the same isolated spot, isn’t exactly a meet-cute with Holly suspicious of the gruff, cranky man who takes her back to his home to recuperate for the night after the scary incident, and Tor groaning inwardly that his bleak isolation, freely chosen and zealously guarded, has just been rent asunder.
While they get on well enough, with Holly grateful for Tor’s gentlemanly hospitality and Frøy’s boundary-crossing willingness to snuggle with anyone who offers him affection, this initial meeting doesn’t augur well for an enduring connection between two people who simply want to keep other people at bay for a while.
But this is a romantic comedy and a Christmas-centric story of healing and wholeness in the lead-up to the festive season, and so you know that sooner or later Holly and Tor will see in each other what they need to figure out the rest of their lives.
While the overall storyline of Christmas Island is well and truly by the rom-com book, Normann crafts a refreshingly warm and original take on the idea of escaping from your usual setting to a wholly different one and finding unexpected answers there.
Both Tor and Holly, who quickly bonds with store owner Alma and her husband Jens, school teacher Britt and a host of other friendly islanders while she waits for Alex, Ninni and Rosie to return from spending time with Ninni’s mother in Spain where’s she’s fled for warmth and light, are in search of something out of the ordinary, and while neither will openly admit to that, it’s what drives the narrative in this charmingly lovely novel which brims with the verdant appeal of accidental new beginnings.
The use of the word “accidental” is deliberate because neither party, Holly in particular, is thinking in those terms – they just want to get away from immediate emotional stress and strain, driven by an instinctive need to lessen the emotional pressure pushing down hard upon them – but a new beginning is precisely what they get in a story that is filled with gorgeously warm characters, flirty, fun dialogue and the perfect antidotal adventures for taking a good hard look at your life and inadvertently working out the what’s next part of proceedings.
‘Yes, they do.’ Holly looked at him. ‘I’m sorry.’
Tor touched her cheek. ‘Don’t be. I’ll see you on the island, right?’
‘Right.’ Holly wasn’t sure what that meant. Tonight, tomorrow? What?
She was about to ask him when he leaned in. The intention was clear and she had no problem with it when he kissed her.
No problem at all.
Christmas Island‘s chief joy is that it takes the time to invest in Holly and Tor’s getting to know you time.
It’s tempting in these stories to have the happy couple come together reasonably quickly because who doesn’t adore the fizzy payoff of instant gratification love, but Normann bides her time, introducing us to Holly, Tor and the islanders, who all become a temporary found family of sorts, and letting us sink happily into their Christmas anticipatory world which, quite apart from its remote and unusual quiet setting, feels magically removed from the everyday.
Granted, it is the everyday of the people who live there, for the most part in bucolic contentment – though Normann is quick not to make them into Stepford Wives‘ cardboard cutouts of bliss; these are real people with warmth and humanity who happen to love their set-apart lifestyle out in the oceanic middle of nowhere – but for Holly, and Tor, this is different, away from the normal and restorative, and in such a setting, they can’t help but be drawn to each other and to what might happen if Tor follows his instincts and leaves some Christmas gingerbread men on the doorstep of the home Holly is housesitting.
We all know he does just that, and that he and Holly find a home in each other because rom-com, but peppered with Norwegian cultural insights (and recipes since food features heavily in the story) and the inclusive warmth of island life, Christmas Island is filled with the lush promise of the new and the inviting, of finding a sense of place and home which defies what you thought it looked like, and of a season ripe with festive promise which certainly delivers for Holly and Tor which will change everything they know, for the better, going forward, taking us happily and festively, along with them for the (sleigh) ride.