Shallow Inspection

~ The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country. By Helen Russell ~

This is one of those rather unsatisfying books where your interest in the topic or content keeps you reading, but where the writing style and interpretation of the author actually fall short of the book’s promise, remaining pedestrian and lacking in analytical edge. Compared with a book like Sarah Moss’ Names for the Sea, where she also packed up her husband and went to live for a year in Iceland and how she interpreted those experiences as a British academic with such an intelligent consciousness and wry outlook, Helen Russell’s offering is somewhat lacklustre and even a little trite. However, without comparison, just taking Russell’s novel on its own merits, it is mediocre but readable.

Unlike Moss whose own career takes her to a new country, Russell is dragged out to Jutland, Denmark, by her husband who lands a good job with Lego. Russell goes freelance in her career as a journalist, and apparently spends the year trying to discover why Danish people are so happy. She tells us that Danes are typically trusting (such as leaving babies in prams outside restaurants), and this makes for a happier, easier, more secure life. (She even gives an example which leaves me incredulous that a bank manager would let a father transfer all his son’s money into a better investment and out of the son’s account, without the son knowing anything about it!) But Russell does point out Denmark is an exceptionally homogenous society, and its 5.5 million population are very nearly all family, in a manner of speaking, which makes the trust easier to achieve.

Part of this trust may also stem from the fact Denmark seems full of rules, and full of Danes who are willingly rule/law-abiding. (Some of the rules are social norms, some are actual laws.) There are rules about everything, seemingly, even rules about what flags one is allowed to fly on one’s own compound, and at what times, and how to fly it. Russell is told the rules of recycling by her neighbours, and also about traditions. (Russell stresses how much Danes love traditions. The following of which, she surmises, is also part of what makes them happy.) She concludes Danes want freedom and have found rules provide the boundaries within which freedom can be enjoyed. She also notes the Danes are heavy drinkers, but does not seem to have made the connection between the freeing of inhibitions in consuming copious amounts of alcohol, with the rigidity of so many rules confining one’s daily life, which may point to the personal psychological price Danes may be paying for conforming to their very many rules so readily.

Russell greatly enjoys the Danish pastries, but not the Danish craze for cycling and outdoor sports. She tries to embrace the Danish trait of being involved in clubs, societies, groups of all kinds, with the underlying idea that a sense of identity and belonging contributes to happiness. She introduces readers to Scandinavian concepts such as hygge, a notion which has no direct translation, but something to do with cosiness and family time and keeping warm and safe and indoors. She also mentioned Jante’s Law which seems to be the rules by which the country lives; involving notions of equality, flattening of hierarchies, admonishments against thinking one is special or better than anyone else, or even setting oneself apart from the pack, or standing out (or wanting to stand out).

The blurb talks of Russell’s self-deprecating humour, and there is a lot of this, overtly. But it is also an extremely limited, middle-class-21^st century-urban-British lens and reaction, and quite stereotypical too. Russell is in the privileged position of being a expatriate who can view culture as a pic-n-mix. She will only join in the bits of Danish culture she likes – she will buy lamps, light candles, have underfloor heating, get an accountant to figure out her taxes, eat many snegle pastries – but her cultural study in the attempt to assimilate goes only so far, and never outside of her extremely middle-class-British comfort zone. She purports to admire the Danes by trying to emulate some of the things which make them happy people, and represent the Danish differences from her own norms as charmingly eccentric and endearingly quirky, apparently unaware that such takes can also be tokenising and patronising, and definitely othering. But this book is written very much as a jaunty, humorous take on a British girl uprooted from her enviable London life and deposited in the sticks in Scandinavia, and how she copes. While not without amusement value, the approach is just a little tired, a little too much of a cliché. There are many light, cute, funny, but often surface observations here, with too little analytical depth to make this a satisfying read. However, if trivia is your cup of tea, this novel will provide you with a lot of hygge.