One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway--and Its Aftermath, by Åsne Seirstedt

One of the remarkable aspects of Åsne Seirstedt’s One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway--and Its Aftermath (2015) is the clinical tone with which she describes one of the worst mass killers of this century, Jan Brevik, and his methodical killing of 69 victims, most of them teenagers shot at point blank range in a summer camp in Norway.  (Nine additional fatalities resulted from a bomb he set off the same day at the government headquarters in Oslo, Norway; more than 200 people were injured). This does not mean that she does not express horror and outrage.  It does mean that rather than using scenes of carnage and graphic description she relies on the nature of the murders to bring the horror out—one by one, methodically and deliberately, Brevik violently ends the lives of young people and the adults who are caring for them. The opening two chapters, which describe the murders of two groups of campers almost convinced me not to continue with the book.

Seirstedt finds fault everywhere, but especially with the social systems in Norway that did not detect the neglect in which Brevik was raised.  She faults law enforcement on local and state levels for not having prepared for a mass killing, and for responding slowly and timidly when news of the slaughter begins to spread.  Poor judgment, miscommunication, fear (in a few cases) and other factors led to delayed and ineffective reactions to the killings while they were still going on that probably led to the loss of more lives.

She also never reaches a judgment on whether Brevik was actually responsible for the murders.  He committed them—no doubt about that--but his trial rests on the question of whether he was sane, and therefore able to choose rationally to commit the murders.  The dividing line between sanity and insanity, responsibility and non-responsibility, may be less apparent, less definable, than the Norwegian legal system (and most legal systems) can accommodate. I conclude that he was both insane and responsible, an incredibly dysfunctional, psychopathic, narcissistic personality who knew exactly what he was doing.