That writers slip into the narrative reflex of the mother as too powerful or too central to allow for a character’s development is revealing. Space must be cleared for the daughter to suffer, individuate and grow. Yet, these novels also show that we never fully cast our mother out. She remains at the edges of our identity, both threat to the self and origin.
Ashworth-Beaumont, a super-fit and sunny former Royal Marine from Edinburgh, would go on to spend six weeks in an induced coma as surgeons raced to repair his crushed body. But as he lay on the road, waiting for the paramedics, his only thoughts were that he was dying. He did not have the wherewithal to consider the irony of his predicament.
In the late 1990s, after he had left the marines, Ashworth-Beaumont, now 59, studied for a degree in prosthetics and orthotics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Clinicians in these disciplines help patients with pain, function and mobility by making and fitting devices such as prosthetic limbs and orthotic braces. He had written research papers and trained prosthetists while specialising as an orthotist at the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital (RNOH) in north-west London. “Now I was the patient,” he says.
I meet up with them on Unstad beach, at the north-western corner of Vestvågøy, one of the best places on the islands to catch the midnight sun, thanks to its unobstructed views across the bay. Even at 23:00, surfers cheer each another on from the waves. Families enjoy snacks on the rocks while children shriek in the shallows as they splash in the frigid, single-digit Arctic waters. Mountains hover on either side of us, framed by a sky a few shades paler than the sea.
"When I used to travel abroad and said I was from Lofoten, people looked blank," says Haugen, as we stroll the beach. "Now they've seen pictures online and can't believe this is my everyday view."
"That's part of the problem," adds Berg. "This is our home – not just a backdrop for a Facebook selfie. When people litter or block roads, it's so frustrating".
The book, beautifully and amusingly written and prodigiously well-informed, is part travelogue and part history. Martin enjoys the whimsical fantasies of English seaside arcana — and it was the railways which spawned the crazy golf courses, the lidos and aquariums, the end-of-pier, what-the-butler-saw diversions; and although railways didn’t invent adultery, they greatly facilitated it.