Out Stealing Horses

Trond’s father is his mentor and personal hero. He is careful and methodical but willing to take big risks, characteristics that served him well working with the Resistance but that now enable him to disappear from his family’s life. His disappearance is at once calculated and opportunistic, though readers, like Trond, do not have enough information to know whether planning or chance was the greater factor.

Seen through Trond’s eyes, he is a somewhat distant father whom Trond admires, “although he sometimes made [Trond] feel shy and that was probably because [Trond] did not know him as a boy ought to know his father” (137). Petterson suggests that Trond’s father tries to remedy this feeling throughout the summer, as he takes Trond with him everywhere and offers pithy lessons about strength and determination in the face of pain, such as “You decide for yourself when it will hurt” (30) and “Let it sink. […] Just leave it. You can’t use it for anything” (228). His desperate determination to shape Trond into a man and to leave some money behind suggests that he harbors guilt about his desire to leave his family for Jon’s mother; however, his brief goodbye letter demonstrates a cold willingness to sever ties, inflicting a casual emotional violence that mirrors the casual violence of the soldiers during occupation.

For most of the novel, Trond’s mother is simply a presence in Oslo and appears actively only toward its conclusion. A flat character, she says little and is directly characterized by Trond’s observations and the way she relates to his complicated feelings about his father’s departure. Reflecting on the day his father returned home after the war ended, he says, “[My mother] was still young then and light on her feet, but the way I remember her is the way she became later. Bitter, marked, and much heavier” (201). His descriptions of her mark the emotional weight of his father’s departure from their lives as a turning point.

Trond’s mother also represents his complicated feelings about moving into adulthood. During their trip to Sweden, he attempts to take the lead and act the man despite her continuing to treat him like a child. Her decision later that day to buy him a suit and put upon him the mantle of manhood marks the last day of her own youth, after which “she fell back into her own weight and remained that way for the rest of her life” (257).

Jon Haug is Trond’s nearest neighbor and best friend during the summer of 1948. During their early morning outings, Jon displays qualities of boldness and adventure-seeking, which Trond admires: “What he had taught me was to be reckless, taught me that if I let myself go, did not slow myself down by thinking so much beforehand I could achieve many things I would never have dreamt possible” (20). Jon is the leader in their adventures, telling Trond how to climb Barkald’s fence and herding the horses for him to jump onto.

Trond’s memories suggest Jon has more worldliness than Trond at that point possesses, as he seems to have some understanding of the tension between Trond’s father and his own parents: “He never spoke to my father. Never said hello to him. Just looked down when they passed each other on the way to the shop” (19). Jon is also a destructive figure, accidentally causing the death of his brother, Odd, and later robbing Lars of the farm he has tended for years by insisting on his birthright; his decision to leave the village behind to sail around the world in the wake of his brother’s death is in keeping with his characterization as adventurer but is also an abdication of his responsibility. These actions convey a recklessness with the lives of others and a disregard for their feelings, in many ways mirroring Trond’s father’s willingness to abandon his family to follow his own desires.

Jon’s father is defined by his inaction, setting him apart in a narrative where characters are mostly defined by their actions. He is a foil for Trond’s father, who is all action and of whom Trond says, “I knew of no one who did not like him, except maybe Jon’s father, but that was about something else” (137). The “something else” stems from the war years; Jon’s father’s insistence that he would have nothing to do with the “traffic” into Sweden functions as the turning point in Jon’s father’s life, when his decision not to take action and cover his wife’s tracks resulted in her fleeing into Sweden with Trond’s father.

The competition between the two men while logging—ironically, the one moment in the novel when he takes action—proves to be Jon’s father’s undoing, as his determination to best Trond’s father leads to him breaking a leg, causing “desperate howling from a grown man because he was wounded and maybe too because one of his sons had just died, and another had left home, […], and at this moment because everything seemed beyond hope” (89). However, his emotions in this moment are only surmised by Trond, as he never reappears in the narrative; this disappearance allows Trond’s father and Jon’s mother to be together.

Jon’s mother is also the mother of the twins Lars and Odd. Franz’s descriptions of her work with the Resistance suggest she is courageous and determined, and Trond observes that she is physically as strong and able as the men. What she thinks and feels throughout the novel is ambiguous, though her actions indirectly characterize her as having complex motivations. Franz’s story suggests that her rejection of Jon’s father in favor of Trond’s is due in part to Jon’s father’s apathy during the war. Her rejection of Lars, who had run the farm for years, in order to grant Jon full rights to the land upon his sudden return from the sea, is less straightforward. Lars’s description and refusal to speak to her suggest that her actions are disloyal or unjust, stemming at least in part from a sense of guilt or blame because Lars accidentally shot and killed Odd when he was a child.

Her characterization is filtered through Lars’s and Franz’s stories and Trond’s impressions of her as a 15-year-old boy, when he suddenly finds himself physically attracted to her during haymaking: “She was tanned in a nice way, her dress blue, and her eyes were blue and glittering, and she was only a few years younger than my own mother. She was simply shining, and it was as if I saw her for the first time in a clear light” (61). Trond’s admiration is shared by his father. Trond’s father and Jon’s mother’s implied history as lovers is the cause of the tension between Trond’s father and Jon’s father, which reaches its climax when she says nothing to stop their timber-stacking competition: “[A]s far as she was concerned they could go on to the bitter end to settle once and for all something [Trond] did not know about, and possibly that was just what she wanted” (87). Trond’s discovery of her meeting with and kissing his father in the early morning hours implies that she gets what she wants.

Lars is the younger brother of Jon, twin brother of Odd, and contemporary and coincidental neighbor of 67-year-old Trond. The sudden meeting between Lars and Trond when Lars’s dog runs away serves as the inciting incident for Trond’s memories of 1948, though at the time Trond only recognizes “the weather-beaten, lined face of a man who had undoubtedly been out on a cold night before and dealt with wayward things, complicated things in a contrary wind, things of high gravity” (12). Lars is likable and kind, as demonstrated by his willingness to help Trond deal with the fallen birch in his yard. His pointed admission that he knows who Trond is, acknowledging their past while tacitly agreeing not to speak about its weight, shows him to be forthright and sensitive as well.

In their past, Lars is also the catalyst of the tragedy that altered the course of the summer of 1948. As with other characters, his feelings about his culpability in his twin’s death are known only through Trond’s assumptions, as he wonders whether Lars “lay awake and alone in his bed trying to keep hold of his world, while the shot whose trajectory he could not possibly grasp still filled each cubic metre of air in the small house until he could not hear anything but that shot” (103). Lars’s connection to the past and his life in the present make him a kindred spirit and a double for Trond: A man who lives alone in the woods with his dog, still trying to move beyond the repercussions of that long ago summer.

Franz is a lumberjack and former Resistance fighter; he has a tattoo of the red communist star on his forearm, and he serves as a kind of guiding star for Trond, providing direction and context for understanding the events happening around him. However, Franz is given no life beyond his role in contextualizing Trond’s father’s actions and representing a form of loyal and quick-thinking masculinity. In the war, his decisive action in blowing up the bridge to keep German soldiers from crossing saved the lives of Jon’s mother and Trond’s father; when Trond meets him later, Franz is steady and unshakeable, daring in a way that Trond admires deeply, “with his bulging muscles and peals of laughter” as he dodges a falling tree (82).

During tense moments, he often relieves tension through wry comments or short quips, as he understands the history between Trond’s father and Jon’s mother. Trond’s adoration of Franz grows throughout the summer, until he wishes to have “a friend like Franz [he] could swing [his] axe with and make plans and use [his] strength with and laugh and cut logs with” (187). As a friend, Franz is frank about people’s flaws but accepting of them, characteristics he demonstrates when he knows felling the timber in summer is foolish but helps Trond’s father anyway; his friendship and frankness also play a role when he tells Trond about the events of the war, allowing Trond to see his father in a new light.