Magnus’s mother has always impressed upon him that he is the son of Norway’s late King Olav V. The flat in which he and his mother live reclusive lives in the small town of Tønsberg is regally furnished in velvet, silk and gold. One day a neighbour gives the boy a picture of a dissident Vietnamese monk who set fire to himself, and also tells him of the man who parked his car, then vanished. The neighbour’s daughter, Maja, induces Magnus to open up, and the story of the self-immolated monk lives on.
Harald Rosenløw Eeg has a highly personal style of writing, a style which, with layer upon layer of underlying text, is both oblique and challenging.