Ostensibly, the villain of Peter Hoeg's novel about the rebellion of three tormented children at a progressive Danish boarding school is the tyrannically self-righteous headmaster. "Borderliners," though, is more a philosophic allegory than a story; and its real villain is linear time -- time, that is, as an inflexible progress that the powerful misuse to constrain the circular talents and zigzag impulses of human nature.
Hoeg's second book to be translated into English makes an austere contrast to his "Smilla's Sense of Snow," a novel of suspense about a turbulent Greenland woman who investigates the death of a child and comes up against a vast political-economic-scientific conspiracy. "Smilla" offered a churning narrative excitement and a vivid and affecting protagonist. In the drier "Borderliners," the characters are drawn finely but much more abstractly. At bottom, both are novels of moral and social argument, but in "Borderliners," the bottom eddies right up to the top.
Mr. Hoeg's pervasive theme in both books is the abuse of children by the means that civilization -- especially, perhaps, an enlightened Scandinavian civilization -- has used to advance itself. More generally, his children stand for humanity's instinctive and unspoiled possibilities; by making them the victims, Mr. Hoeg is able to distill the passionate rage that gives energy to his writing.
What gives distinctiveness to the rage is the supercooled bleakness with which it is conveyed. Peter, the 14-year-old narrator-protagonist, and the 16-year-old Katarina share a bench and a kiss in the school shed they've managed to escape to; it is a blinding consummation, but more celestial than material. Biehl, the headmaster, shamefully slaps students who break the rules of his Utopian establishment; the pain is not in the blow but in the seconds preceding and following it. It is in the abasement.
Biehl's school is set up, in cooperation with the state authorities, as a model educational experiment, "a workshop of the sun," as he lyrically puts it. With 26 teachers and 200 students, the pedagogical attention is overwhelming; big brothers and sisters continually watch everyone. It is entirely dedicated to the notion of progress; specifically, measurable scientific progress. It is a temple to linear time -- year by year, not only do the students learn more, but they are also advanced to higher floors in the school building -- and it is ruled by the bell that signals where everyone is to be, and when.
Part of the rigor is justified by a utopian aim: the eventual integration of all students, from the gifted and cooperative to those who have been placed in centers for the disturbed and the delinquent. As a preliminary experiment, three such children are introduced; and they are the three who serve as the novel's protagonists and the vehicles of Mr. Hoeg's passionate anti-utopian thesis. Peter is an orphan who has shuttled between reform schools of greater and lesser rigor. Katarina comes from a more privileged class, but her mother has died of cancer and her father, unable to cope, has hanged himself. And finally, an extreme case has been admitted: August, a violently abused child who has killed both his parents.
Peter tries to conform; to be expelled would be to perish. Katarina questions, and her questioning soon enlists him in a compact to explore and try to understand the system that oppresses them. To test out the constraints, Katarina makes herself deliberately unpunctual. Peter steals school records. Their hesitant experiments take on urgency when August is put under Peter's care.
"Borderliners" moves back and forth between a part-magical story of childhood rebellion and a wide-ranging series of speculations by Peter, now an adult and speaking retrospectively. Neither Peter nor Katarina is particularly distinct as a character -- August, the child psychotic, is much more affecting -- and Biehl and the teachers are little more than sketches of different kinds of baleful authority.
The speculative asides are awkwardly integrated. They have their own strength, however.
Sometimes Mr. Hoeg's argument is dry; nor does it, in itself, have notable originality. Sometimes, though, an image will transfigure it. Take spider webs. Rarely, Mr. Hoeg writes, are they more than two feet across. A spider could not handle more information than a two-foot web brings in. It would destroy its nature. Too much information, too much perfecting, can destroy human nature as well, he argues. Again, it is not the argument that particularly stands up. But Mr. Hoeg on spider webs and the dew that hangs on them between two trees on an early morning manages to enhance the notion of limits, and how necessary they are to humanity, in ways beyond argument. He does for spider webs and us what he uncannily did for snow and us in "Smilla."
BOOK REVIEW
Title: "Borderliners"
Author: Peter Hoeg
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
Length, price: 277 pages, $22