I didn’t exactly rave over my last Travel Library book, did I? And I’m afraid it’s pretty much more of the same today. This time I’m reading Helen Russell’s The Year of Living Danishly.
Helen is a freelance writer and journalist whose husband unexpectedly got offered a job at Lego HQ. They took the plunge and moved to rural Denmark for a year and it looks like she’s stayed there. Living Danishly is about learning to adapt to living in Denmark and about the peculiarities of Danish life and culture but she also goes big into Denmark being scored as the world’s happiest culture. From the look of it, she’s made Denmark and happiness her niche ever since. This is her first book and she’s recently released her fifth. Two are about Denmark, two are about happiness and the fifth (well, the second, but the fifth I’m mentioning) is about making small changes to make a big difference. Looking at her portfolio, there’s a lot about Nordicness and happiness.
But this is at the beginning of her Denmark/happiness journey. Helen discovers early on that Denmark is the happiest country in the world and this book covers both her first year living there and her investigations into Danish life and culture through the lens of happiness. Why is Denmark the happiest country in the world? What makes Danes happy? How does this and that affect happiness? I like that there’s a theme and a focus. That said, I could have been happy with the theme and focus being “I’m a Brit who’s just moved to Denmark”. It’s split into thirteen chapters – one per month plus Christmas – and that in itself could have been very interesting and entertaining. But each chapter is also given a subject, ranging from education to hobbies to the weather. That means the end effect is that she doesn’t appear to notice certain things for months and that some months only last a couple of days. I like it by month, I like it by subject, but I don’t think mixing the two works so well.
Helen does have a huge handicap in getting settled in a new country in that she’s a freelance journalist working from home. That means she doesn’t have the ready-made pool of potential friends (or subjects) that her husband does. Spending her days alone at home means she doesn’t naturally pick up much Danish beyond snegles, a particular favourite pastry from the local bakery. For all there’s an entire chapter on how much Danes are into hobbies, she doesn’t make much of her Danish lessons, which makes me think they were short-lived, and she doesn’t really get into hobbies beyond the local choir, so she doesn’t acquire a circle of friends from there either. She eventually befriends some of the neighbours, after a staggering bit of ignorance regarding recycling – the neighbours are not at all amused that she just throws everything in the same bin.
See, I sometimes wonder if this woman had ever left London. She’s never heard of hygge – we probably have a completely twisted idea of what hygge actually is but show me anyone under 91 who hasn’t heard of it. Ok, I can think of one person under 91 who’s probably never heard of it. Was it less-known in 2013, which is when I think this was set? She doesn’t realise that other countries actually take their recycling seriously and she doesn’t know that other countries demand vehicles have lights on 24/7 – or at least, when they’re on the move. But then, I also wonder if I’m the country bumpkin because her description of her life in London, in the office at dawn and not out until 9pm sometimes, with emails coming in all night and all weekend and literally living to work, is something real. At my last job, if my computer was still on at 4.59pm, the boss (well, his daughter/sister depending on which boss I’m talking about) would ask if I planned to be here all night and could I hurry up so she could lock up. We didn’t even have the capability of checking emails outside work. Maybe I’d be able to afford a house if I had a real London-style job.
Anyway, Danish work life doesn’t go like that and Helen makes quite a few sarcastic comments when her husband gets in at 4pm. Sorry, Lego Man. It’s one thing when I use blatant codenames on a blog but she’s using them in an actual published book. Lego Man. American Mom. The Viking. Helena C (because she looks like a supermodel). The names I can take, just. But the places! You’re going to write an entire book about what it’s like to live in rural Denmark and then refer to Sticksville-on-Sea and The Big Town? (from the thanks at the end, I think that means Vejle and Aarhus, by the way – Vejle has fifteen times the population my hometown does and two and a half times the population of my nearest city, so this is definitely a London idea of what constitutes “Sticksville”). If you’re going to talk about Denmark, I want to hear about Denmark, not about anonymous places that could be anywhere in the world.
And my other gripe is about how dark and cold the winter is. The bit of rural Jutland she’s talking about is marginally less far north than Edinburgh. Eighteen hour darkness? Minus many degrees? For three months? No. Nope. It’s just not far enough north for that kind of darkness. She’s the equivalent of halfway up Scotland, not up the High Arctic. Perhaps Denmark is colder than the UK – believe it or not, we’re protected from the worst of winter by the warming effects of the Gulf Stream and I guess we block that from reaching and warming places like Denmark and southern Scandinavia, but she’s really making it sound like she’s living at the North Pole. I just don’t believe it’s that cold. I can believe that in London, she went from flat to Tube to office and back again without ever experiencing the open air. Maybe I’m wrong but it sounds incredibly exaggerated to me.
Despite all that, Helen does manage to make Denmark sound like an absolute utopia. I want to move there! She makes a point of presenting the negative sides – the main one is that Danes are more violent than we realise – but for all her attempts to present a balanced picture of Denmark, it does sound like an absolute paradise. Her investigations into happiness lead to social policy and tradition, she casually phones up all kinds of experts for their opinions and she cites study after study. Too many, actually. You get to the point where every sentence has been backed up by a study where you start to think that there’s a study out there to prove any point you care to invent and she’s just cherry-picking the ones that support what she wants to say. I don’t think it’s quite the same as actually immersing yourself in the culture – there’s so much more coming from secondary sources than personal experience – but it sounds like there’s a lot of good in Denmark. I could do without Christmas lasting two full months personally but it’s it’s cold and dark (if…) then I can see why happiness and Christmas beer and lights in the dark are so popular.
Last, there was a new chapter added for the 2020 reprint. Helen has written an entire book on being an immigrant in a strange country, and talked about life and society and traditions and politics and never once mentioned race. You can almost hear the frantic email from an agent or publicist wailing that “it’s 2020 and this book needs a chapter on race nowwww!!!” So the chapter on race has been added, along with an update on her life. Namely, it’s seven years on, she’s still in Denmark and now has three children. And yes, that Danish pride you mentioned earlier is veering on nationalism and although Denmark isn’t racist as such, it’s very white and its huge socialism thing is very much for us, please. There, when you were looking for bad points to balance out “turns out Denmark’s pretty much a utopia”, this is the thing you were looking for.
I actually quite like this book. I know it might not sound like it. It’s certainly not how I would have written it but Denmark is probably the Nordic country I know least well and it’s interesting to learn so much about it, while also wishing I could live there. It’s funny, it’s not selling it at all as a holiday destination but it does make it sound somewhere I’d like to live. 7/10, I think. See, I didn’t deduct as much for all my grousing as you expected.