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The Silence

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THE SILENCE is the last of Bjorneboe's trilogy of novels called
"The History of Bestiality" and departs markedly from the
preceding two. The first, MOMENT OF FREEDOM (1966), focuses on
"Germania" as the outstanding source of mankind's brutality: the
two world wars, the concentration camps, the racism. Bolshevism
figures in it as just another face of fascism. The second novel,
POWDERHOUSE (1969), delves into more remote history as it offers
examples of the hero's research into the Inquisition, exposing
the pious instinct as an instrument of control and the crowd
mentality as a blood lust. In THE SILENCE (1973) the autobio-
graphical hero finds himself in northern Africa, conversing with
a character named Ali, who has much in common with Frantz Fanon.
From this remote station his eyes peer at Europe, the
colonializer and source of misery for the Third World. Germania
no longer stands out. As Ali instructs him, the perspective
inside Europe is wrong, for it holds up Hitler as a moral
monster, a boogeyman, an exception to the rule; whereas, seen
through the eyes of the colonialized, he is the rule--the
colonial powers were equally ruthless, killed more than the
Nazis and lasted longer than the Third Reich. Accordingly, the
author of The History of Bestiality now catalogs the crimes of
the first conquering Europeans, the Conquistadores: Cortez over
the Aztecs in Mexico and Pisarro over the Incas in Peru.
Incredible scenes of carnage roll across the pages with the same
remorseless attention to detail and biting sarcasm as before,
but with even greater urgency and rage than in the preceding
novels. However, the account has become one-sided: the
sacrifices of children by the pre-Columbian Indians and their
pleasure in wearing human pelts replete with face and scalp
until they rotted and fell away are minimized and excused by the
rapacious gold-lust of the detestable foreigners.

Thus Bjorneboe arrives at a position anticipating the leftist
platforms in America and Europe that dominated the last three
decades of the twentieth century: Political Correctness and
selective Multiculturalism. All history is reinterpreted to the
detriment of the First World and to the credit of the Third. All
filth and evil come from the former; all goodness and hope come
from the latter; and the speaker, who happens to belong to the
former, is absolved of his sins by promoting the latter. It is
a sham doctrine the same as Leninism, from which it derives--the
vanguard speaking for the proletariat. Yet unlike the high
priests of PC, Bjorneboe is not interested in changing
university curricula, dominating the scholarly press or
dictating hiring practices, meanwhile winning a cushy spot for
himself while stabbing non-conformist scholars in the back, but
rather he retains the old fire of the sixties and finally, at
long last, puts his faith in revolution. The subject peoples of
the world, he asserts, the insulted and the injured, the
wretched and the ragged, the downtrodden and the disadvantaged,
will one day rise up to claim their freedom, their rightful
portion of the Earth's bounty and their sunny place in history.
The present moment is but the still--Stillheten, The Silence--
before the storm.

Given this ideology, the didactic tone and the absence of form
(the novel is mostly a series of conversations) THE SILENCE
should not work. And yet it is brilliant and highly readable,
thanks in part to Murer's excellent translation and in part to
the author's sheer inventiveness. The hero meets a penitent
Christopher Columbus in the street, converses with Robespierre
and debates with God, who looks like a shabby street vendor,
only "without a cart." These scenes are absolutely brilliant,
and the trilogy itself, despite its flaws, voices a passion that
is exceptional in world literature and a spiritual peak for
mankind.

Bjorneboe did not find a solution to the problem of evil. How
could he? But after reading him, one cannot fail to be a lot
more distrustful of authority, a lot more skeptical of do-
gooders and a lot more critical of everything. Which is good.

Hope and destruction are intertwined, evil is contemplated, yet not stated, historical facts are the basis of philosophical uncertanty and diffuse political firmness. This low-pitched novel has the strength of coping with brutality with both irony and fearful seriousness. Time is not a straight line, but a melting pot of friendship, arrogance, torture and thought. The crecendo of time and history leaves room for a profound silence, fluently and mastefully communicated by one of the great authors of our time.