Downstream

Laura

Laura rebuilt her social position after the divorce by posing as a deserted mother, then discovered that the ladies bored her and that she preferred men, cards, and financiers to mothers' circles. Her dressing table is an altar and her mirror a god; her egoism flourishes under that spell while Georg is boarded out, hidden, and half-forgotten. She is the novel's clearest study of charm as a survival strategy, and her household is where the Selamb men's money troubles and romantic entanglements quietly converge.

Peter Selamb

Peter has just failed to be promoted and spends his summer holidays grinding at algebra in the dilapidated room once used by Old Hök to surveil the estate. He cannot concentrate, cannot look anything straight in the face, and steals out to hide in the lilac hedge and watch the bailiff hang lanterns for a crayfish party. His furtive watching is the book's central nervous habit: he is the heir who has inherited suspicion instead of authority, and everything he sees from the window will shape how the family's decline reaches him.

Hedvig

Raised on old Kristin's threats about the sugar box and the Bogey Man, Hedvig grew up fearing a God who punishes incendiaries and watches brownies, and she never escaped those first impressions. Now a trained nurse, she speaks of a patient's death as a thing to be waited out before she can take the next case, and her voice carries an unnaturally tense anguish even when she knows her lesson. She is the book's most disturbing figure precisely because her dread is sincere: she runs toward dying people the way the frightened haunt cemeteries.

Stellan Selamb

Stellan lives on an inborn conviction that the best belongs to him and his kind, which is precisely why he stays afloat while his finances rot. He shrugs off his debts as a way of keeping from getting fat, dodges his colonel's hints about marriage, and cheerfully extracts Percy Hill's signature on a bill on his way out the door. He is the family's elegant, doomed credit system: charming enough to keep borrowing, and too proud to do the one thing everyone tells him would save him.

Tord Selamb

Tord has withdrawn to his log castle on the dark hill of Järnö, where he fires warning shots at boats and is pursued by the provincial governor for neglect. The family tells stories about him at dinner with a mixture of embarrassment and relish, calling him mad and a philosopher in the same breath. He is the Selamb refusal carried to its logical end: a man who would rather be a living protest against sentimentality than be reconciled with anyone, and the visit Stellan and Laura pay him is one of the novel's great set pieces.

Percy Hill

Percy is dissatisfied with his nurse and desperate for a face and temperament worth an artist's attention, so Stellan promises him his sister Hedvig and casually collects Percy's signature on a bill before leaving. Percy's gratitude is touching and entirely genuine, which makes him easy prey for the Selamb habit of trading favors. His illness brings Hedvig into the household orbit, and his eagerness to be looked after by someone strange and sombre sets up the novel's most charged caretaking relationship.