THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 18, 1994 TAG: 9412140400
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY AUDREY KNOTH
LENGTH: Medium: 92 lines
BORDERLINERS
PETER HOEG
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 277 pp. $22.
PETER HOEG worries about children.
The mesmerizing Smilla's Sense of Snow, his first novel to be published in English, tracked the circumstances behind the death of a neglected boy.
The Danish author's latest venture into fiction also presents young people at menace. But fans of Hoeg's earlier work may be disappointed by Borderliners, which is a hard-to-follow and, ultimately, less compelling read.
The story is told as a memoir by a man in his 30s. It centers on his experience as a teenager at Biehl's Academy, a private school near Copenhagen. The facility is renowned for its excellence.
``Even so, now and again, they took in the odd backward pupil who, for example, required special tuition. In due course, these pupils were raised up to the same standard as the rest.
``This was common knowledge, it was part of the thinking behind the school.
``In recent years they had, moreover, taken in pupils for whom special circumstances came into play. For this there was no explanation.
``That was how I got in.''
The narrator is a self-styled ``borderliner,'' living on the edge of normal society. Parentless since infancy, he has grown up in Denmark's extensive orphanage system. He recalls it as a loveless, and sometimes brutal, structure that's short on the human touch and long on personality and intelligence testing.
His acceptance at the elite school, which is not part of the orphanage system, surprises him. He's even more astounded when Biehl's Academy takes in a boy who murdered his abusive parents.
The two youths befriend a female student who is well-off, but emotionally scarred from her own parents' recent deaths. The trio comes to believe that in accepting a ``borderliner'' and a murderer as students, the school is up to something more nefarious than just teaching. They set out to unravel the mystery.
Parallel to this exploration is a meditation on the nature of time - whether it is linear or cyclical. The narrator concludes that at the rigid Biehl's Academy, where students are strictly regulated by the school clock, it is both.
``From the outside. . . the days seemed the same . . . the same subjects and the same classrooms and the same teachers and the same pupils came around again and again. In reality, the requirement was that you should, with every day, be transformed. Every day you should be better, you should have developed, all the repetition in the life of the school was there only so that, against an unchanging background, you could show that you had improved.''
The youths' investigation of Biehl's Academy and the narrator's ruminations on time converge when they discover the truth of what school officials have been doing.
Along the way, readers make their own discovery. The narrator's name, like the author's, is Peter Hoeg. According to the narrative, Hoeg was eventually adopted in his teens.
Hoeg's beautiful writing expresses the passion he brings to the subject of children and their well-being. But the plot and structure of Borderliners are, frankly, rather confusing. Relationships, such as those between the young Peter and his two schoolmates, aren't developed well enough to engage emotion.
The exception is the touching friendship with another orphaned boy that the narrator makes earlier in his life. In speaking of this friendship, he remembers that the institution in which they lived required them to shower by running through a warm spray and then through two cold showers. He tells of the time his friend went ahead of him and deliberately lingered in the first icy blast.
``He did not move, he just stood there, while his skin went first red and then white. He looked at his feet, I knew he stayed there so that I could stay in the warm shower and not be made to get a move on. I had shut my eyes, the warm water closed up, like a wall. I had never stood for as long before.''
There's no question that Hoeg is an extremely promising writer. While Borderliners doesn't equal Smilla's Sense of Snow, his talent makes for eager anticipation of the next outing by an exceptional author. MEMO: Audrey Knoth is a free-lance writer and executive director of public
relations at Goldman & Associates in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
RIGMOR MYDTSKOV
Danish writer Peter Hoeg's novel ``Borderliners'' is both a mystery
set at a private school and a meditation on the nature of time. by CNB