Naboth's Stone is the middle book in a sequence of historical novels dealing with the impact of the railway on the remote and thinly-populated inland regions of northern Sweden (Lidman grew up in Västerbotten herself). We are somewhere in the 1880s, and the ambitious Didrik is Chairman of the council in the raw settlement of Little Crane Water. He is eager to see the community develop: the imminent construction of the railway is the key to that, and he is determined to make sure that it will be routed through Little Crane Water. Didrik and his neighbours are only the second generation of farmers in the area, the economy is still largely one of subsistence farming, and the only way the settlers can get their hands on cash is by selling their trees (and/or their labour) to the big timber companies from the coast. As Didrik comes to see in the course of the book, the timber companies are exploiting their capitalist advantage remorselessly, doing irreparable damage to the forests, and giving farmers far less than the market value of their timber.

But this isn't just a political novel - most of the story is to do with Didrik's relationship with his wife Anna-Stava, with his elderly parents, with the mysterious wet-nurse who turns up when Anna-Stava isn't able to feed their son, and with Didrik's absent foster-brother Naboth. All of which feed into our understanding of how the community works, what its values are, and how it makes rough-and-ready arrangements for looking after people who can't support themselves (widows and orphans are taken into the farmers' extended families, but treated as unpaid servants).

Lidman's text, which is full of broken sentences, dialect, and bits of biblical/liturgical language, was obviously a nightmare for the translator. Tate makes a pretty good job of it on the whole, but there are some odd choices here and there. The generic dialect she uses seems to be a mixture of Scots, Northern English and rural Shropshire - there's probably no good answer when translating dialect, and I'm sure it would have been a mistake to pin it down to somewhere specific, but the mixture does sound a bit artificial sometimes, and lacks internal consistency. In the religious language, she has a tendency to re-translate the Swedish rather than use corresponding passages from the AV, which must have saved valuable time, but undermines the effect of the familiarity of the language that Lidman was presumably trying to get.

I found this a very interesting book - a sort of communist Swedish Middlemarch, perhaps... ( )