The Mountains Wait

THIS book about Narvik by the young lawyer who was its mayor for six years before the Nazis came is a real story, limpidly told. With humor and a sense of strange beauty under the midnight sun, he first acquaints us with the town by sketching how he came there with his wife, finding it not too easy to make a living among the law-abiding, reticent people. But he was interested in the town and one day he found, rather ruefully, that he had been appointed its mayor. At this time. Hitler was still a far-off yelp. Mr. Broch introduces us to all the human beings who made up “young, vigorous Narvik,” the town that came bravely through the depression, Narvik that read good books and discussed them in the long sunless winter. We feel that it was into our town too that the shots burst one day, out of the fog in the harbor, precursors of the Nazis who occupied Narvik before anyone quite knew what was happening.

Within two months, the Mayor of Narvik walked among the ruins of the town he had built up and loved. But he continued to administer it through all the horror, himself the heartheat of its still living organism. He escaped two death sentences. Horror, as he describes it, is not a nauseating experience, nor something incredible. It is credible and, by the manner in which Norwegians meet it, purifying.

At last Narvik was almost destroyed by a thorough Nazi bombing, while the Mayor and his steadfast helpers maintained order to the last minute, having evacuated all that they could. When he picked up the telephone for last-minute instructions, it went dead. “I threw the receiver on the desk. Our city was no longer functioning. ” There is tragedy in those simple words, but the reader has been made to feel that it is really the Nazis who are homeless. Narvik lives in its people.

The many vignettes by Rockwell Kent are worthy of this clear, beautiful text.

S. T.