Decent Norwegian realism built on a flawed premiseJohan Bojer (1872–1959) is a Norwegian novelist who achieved some popular and critical success in his native country. Several of his books have been translated into English. His novel The Power of a Lie (Troens magt) was published in 1903.
The story takes place in a rural provincial Norwegian town. I don’t believe the town is ever named, but it’s somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Mjøsa and the city of Lillehammer. Knut Norby is one of the wealthiest landowners in this region. In years prior, had invested in the business venture of a neighbor named Wangen. Norby co-signed a loan to help Wangen establish a brickworks. Desiring to keep this financial dealing a secret from his wife, Norby hasn’t told anyone about his involvement in Wangen’s business. Now that brickworks has failed, gone bankrupt, and the creditors have come a-calling. Norby is liable for about two thousand krone—not an exorbitant sum for a man of his standing.
Since nobody knows that Norby has co-signed as surety on Wangen’s behalf, a rumor gets started that Wangen forged Norby’s signature on the document. Norby does nothing to dispel this rumor, and, as the story of forgery spreads, he becomes hesitant to counteract the ever-growing lie. Hoping to avoid the ire of his wife and some embarrassment in the face of his friends and neighbors, Norby decides to affirm the accusation. Thus accused of forgery, Wangen faces prison time. If the forgery is disproved, however, Norby could also face a prison sentence for bringing a false accusation against an innocent man.
I had previously read Bojer’s novel The Great Hunger and liked it well enough. I was less satisfied, however, with The Power of a Lie. The premise on which the plot is based just seemed unreasonable to me. Once the lie gets started, then the book becomes a good naturalist novel with realistic human behavior and an inside look at Norwegian village life. Establishing the lie in the first place, however, seems to me a hurdle over which the novel stumbles. First of all, Norby himself doesn’t come up with the lie, so that lessens his moral culpability somewhat. Then, the fact that he would reinforce this false rumor feels unrealistic and farfetched. I’m certainly not a paragon of moral virtue, but I wouldn’t send a man to prison just to pacify my wife and avoid a little embarrassment. The hearings, depositions, and trials would be more trouble than it’s worth. This whole crisis seemed avoidable. Norby could have easily come out with the truth early on, and he really wouldn’t have suffered much from it. Instead, the novel needed a plot premise to get the snowball rolling, and here that plot premise feels forced.
The novel does have its moments, however. Potential witnesses face compelling moral dilemmas of whether they should testify of not. There are some interesting revelations of class struggle in the story. Within this isolated country corner, Norby is somewhat of an aristocrat, a feudal lord of sorts who governs over a corps of peasant laborers. He has conservative views on capital and labor, while more liberal views are starting to encroach into his domain. Wangen, on the other hand, is decidedly less well-off, and the destruction of his reputation clearly creates a financial burden on him. His wife, who suffers along side him, is a particularly sympathetic character. The Power of a Lie is a decent but flawed work of Norwegian literature. Bojer’s probably got better novels in him, but I can more consistently count on the works of his countrymen Knut Hamsun and Alexander Kielland.
Norwegian naturalismNorway’s Johan Bojer is known as one of that nation’s important realist authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bojer garnered enough critical respect to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Several of his novels were translated into English in the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s. He is known for writing novels about Norwegian immigrant life in America, but his novel The Great Hunger, published in 1916, takes place entirely within Norway.
Peer Troen is a typical boy growing up in a small town in Norway. Troen is not his birth name, however. Peer is the illegitimate child of a prosperous former military officer from Christiania (today’s Oslo), Captain Holm, who pays the Troen family to board and raise his son. Peer’s mother was a prostitute, so his father, though friendly enough, refuses to claim him as a son. In fact, Captain Holm has another, legitimate family, and admitting that Peer exists would be an embarrassment to them all. Though Peer is certainly not happy being disowned, he learns to come to terms with his lot in life. He dreams of becoming a priest, at that time an upper-class profession requiring higher education. When both his parents die, however, there is no one left to pay the Troen family for his upkeep. Peer finds out his father was not as wealthy as he thought, and his inheritance is paltry. Peer is dropped into a life of poverty, but he still manages to work his way through engineering school in hopes of succeeding in a career.
The title of the book is both literal and figurative. While there is no mass famine here, the story does deal with the poverty and hunger of one Norwegian family. The “hunger” in question, however, more pointedly refers to the desire of humans to create, accomplish, and/or conquer and to leave behind a legacy for posterity. Bojer asks the question is enough to simply enjoy life? Are love and happiness the purpose of our existence? Peer seems to think so, for a while anyway. But can a man, or mankind, be truly satisfied with blissful complacency? One of Peer’s close friends begs to differ, asserting that the irresistible force of evolution imparts to everyone a Promethean drive to create, build, and strive toward progress, even at the expense of comfort and joy. This novel is chiefly concerned with the conflict between these two attitudes toward human nature and the meaning of life.
The Great Hunger is strongest in its first act, when it adheres most strictly to the tenets of naturalist literature. Peer must deal with the hand that’s dealt him by his heritage, and through him Bojer realistically depicts the struggles of poor and working class life in Norway. At about the halfway point, the novel starts to get more didactic and preachy, as if Bojer were delivering a sermon. This sermon, however, is a secular one that appeals to my personal freethinking inclinations. Bojer makes many openly atheistic statements that are a breath of rationalistic fresh air. By the early 20th century, more Scandinavian writers were penning literature from an atheist viewpoint, such as Bojer in Norway and Jens Peter Jacobsen and Johannes V. Jensen in Denmark.
I was less impressed with the later chapters of the book. For a while, it seems like Bojer is going to follow up on Peer’s bastard upbringing. Peer becomes friends with his own half-brother, who is unaware that they share the same father. That plot thread is never followed through, however, and remains inconclusive. The ending of the book in general is rather week, but adhering to realism often means that expectations of closure remain unsatisfied, much like real life itself. Nevertheless, I found Bojer to be a writer certainly worth investigating further, and I’m sure this won’t be the last of his books that I’ll read.
