A Finnish novel on the dark side of the beauty business

Norma. By Sofi Oksanen. Translated by Owen Witesman.Knopf; 306 pages; $26.95. Atlantic Books; £12.99.

LOOK at a female celebrity’s head and you will often see a product of the world’s fastest-growing yet least-regulated businesses. The traffic in human hair for use as extensions had its traditional headquarters in India and China. Its spread to South-East Asia and, above all, Ukraine fuels the latest novel by Sofi Oksanen, a Finnish author. In previous novels, notably the award-winning “Purge”, Ms Oksanen linked the oppression of her mother’s Estonian homeland by both Soviet and Nazi occupiers to the cross-border exploitation of women today. In “Norma”, the commerce in hair shorn from poor women to beautify their wealthier sisters propels a many-stranded thriller. It also threads the surrogate-pregnancy industry and “rent-a-womb tourism” into its dense weave.

Norma, a lonesome heroine with locks that lengthen at a supernatural speed, has just lost her mother—the “born hairdresser” Anita—after she supposedly jumped in front of a metro train in Helsinki. To Norma, this looks more like murder than suicide. Anita had fallen under the sway of a shadowy entrepreneur, Max Lambert. His unsavoury but above-board harvesting of Asian and Ukrainian hair conceals a booming adoption and surrogacy racket. Under cover of the hair-extension trade, Lambert aspires to be “king of an embryo empire”.

Norma not only suffers from the “hereditary hypertrichosis” that makes her cascading locks top-grade material for Lambert’s brutal clan to plunder. She has a paranormal ability to “read death, cancer, and disease from people’s hair”. As Norma probes the mystery’s roots, Ms Oksanen piles twist upon twist: the mental illness of Lambert’s first wife Helena; the double-dealing of their daughter Marion; the renowned golden tresses of Norma’s great-grandmother Eva, first a postcard model then a Finnish immigrant in 1920s America. The plot thickens, and tangles. As a thriller, “Norma” is more an unruly bird’s-nest than a sleek, neat bob. It gels in Ms Oksanen’s clear-eyed concern with the injustice that drives underprivileged women to surrender body-parts. Every enterprise Lambert runs depends on “women’s sweat and tears”. Our heroine’s occult gifts become a spooky sideshow. The grubby reality of the business she unmasks is quite enough to curl the reader’s hair.