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Powderhouse: Scientific Postscript and Last Protocol

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POWDERHOUSE is the second installment of Bjorneboe's trilogy, generally known as "The History of Bestiality." The narrator is a "renovation worker"--i.e., "sanitation engineer"--at an asylum for the criminally insane in the south of France. The institution occupies the buildings of La Poudriere, a former munitions depot with a stone tower (the powderhouse), which is surrounded by a large park; the renovation worker occupies one of the outlying peasant cottages and has a delightful little sunlit garden. Here he rests from his daily chores, eating simple but satisfying meals, drinking a variety of wines, entertaining guests, sometimes smoking hashish, sometimes taking a hit of LSD, sometimes enjoying the embraces of a little brown nurse and every night feeding a friendly hedgehog. His chief occupation after cleaning the grounds is writing The History of Bestiality, and his discussions with visitors deal either with this theme or with the doings of madmen. Nevertheless, the halcyon air of the garden lends a pastoral atmosphere to the proceedings, an idyllic enchantment to recitations of the most zealous campaigns of carnage in history. Thus paradise, realized here and now, is contrasted with the hell that has become the wide earth, and the reading is oddly both horrifying and delightful at the same time.

Bjorneboe gives more attention to form in this novel. He draws a series of colorful characters with independent roles, creates a bit of a murder mystery and devises a mechanism for the insertion of factual horrors: Dr. Lefevre, the chief of staff, believes that it is good therapy for residents of the Powderhouse to deliver and hear lectures on themes that disturb them. Thus three long lectures are laid out in chronological order and provide a solid structure to the six-chapter novel, leaving no gaps, expanses of uncertain time or cessation of forward movement as in MOMENT OF FREEDOM.

The centerpiece is the second lecture, delivered by an inmate named Lacroix. It has no title, but might be called "Sympathy for the Executioner." Speaking from experience, Lacroix reminds his audience that executioners carry out the will of society; they are hired for their "special qualifications," paid with taxpayer money and approved for their performance. They execute criminals legally condemned to death by a court, yet they are shunned and despised by society. He then bemoans the difficulty of killing people neatly, especially when they turn to the executioner and ask for a speedy dispatch. Each method of execution designed to be merciful, such as long-drop hangings, beheadings and firing squads, proves to be unreliable, so that the executed may struggle to live for a long time. For the executioner these experiences are ultimately debilitating; the profession brings physical and mental illnesses and often leads to suicide. Although approved by society, the executioner bears the blood of the human race and stands guilty before humanity and before God; but who, Lacroix cries out in despair, who thinks of him?

The speech is nothing less than a masterpiece of world literature, as piercing in its humor as Voltaire's CANDIDE (1759) and as consistent in its wrong logic as Desiderius Erasmus' IN PRAISE OF FOLLY (1511). It takes the reader into an extreme reach of black humor which passes beyond definition--something way over the top, revoltingly gruesome and wildly hilarious and close to the quick at the same time. After this, the novel tends to get preachy, yet it deserves to be read for its entrancing mood and its flashes of bitter genius. Once again, the work is beautifully translated by Esther Greenleaf Murer.

I read this book in my early teens, and it made an enormous impression on me. This is the first book in the trilogy "History of bestiality" I read, I have also read the last two. This is painful book to read! Many times I wanted to throw away the book, and forget that all this pain, madness and evil existed, but I couldn't. In many ways I think it changed the way I saw the world. This is book is meant for a more grown up public than I was when I first read it.