Waves of modernity

In the third of his surveys of the European novel, Julian Evans explores Denmark and Sweden

Waves of modernity


If one thinks about nothern Europe, Denmark's Sealand coast comes to mind first: a low, intricate shoreline where the waves run in and wind rakes grass, and the villages still count the boats and livestock of their fishermen-farmers. It's a beautiful place of meditation, almost exempt from time and ambition, content with its elements - sun, exposure, solitude, and the darkness of a Danish winter. By a strange paradox, for that reason it also became the harbour of Denmark's modernity. Notorious for his Seducer's Diary, Søren Kierkegaard walked alone, often for miles, by this sea.

It may seem eccentric to introduce an article about novelists with a philosopher. But look again at Kierkegaard's enterprise: in terms of method, it is a giant edifice of broken-off novels. His best books (Either/Or, Repetition, the Journals) are stuffed with narratives, autobiographical facts, anecdotes, parables, discovered papers and pseudonyms, a form that bears comparison with the great modernists: Kafka, Joyce, Thomas Mann, Proust. I think of Kierkegaard as a novelist first, and a philosopher by mistake.

A surprising fact about materialistic, provincial, conservative Denmark is that its two literary icons of any status - Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen - emerged simultaneously at the extremes of the national character. Both lived and wrote in 1840s Copenhagen: Andersen the ingénu, Kierkegaard the boy wonder of the awkward squad. They enriched the European canon, one with a new colloquialism, the other with his assertion of human complexity, and practically all modern Danish fiction is influenced by both.

Novelist Ib Michael is the author of Prince, a tale that fuses the child's world with the self-imposed dramas of the adult's. "If you could ever read Hans Christian Andersen in the original, his language and his incredible ability to create images, then you would know that there is something special. It's very expressionistic, and it's also longing and dreaming so much. I think that comes from the long, dark winters, because when it's dark you are longing for the light, longing for the summer days."

In literary terms, Andersen's stories, if read in a good translation like RP Keigwin's, have kept all their freshness. In personal terms, Andersen was a far from successful adult. Without love, his chief pleasure seems to have been accepting invitations to grand houses (never without a length of rope in his travelling bag, in case of fire). I mention this because elevating childhood, as he did, as the only place to go for clarity and innocence is a dangerous path. At least Kierkegaard's complicated honesty has the value of his deep subjectivity. In his archipelago of frock-coated Protestants, he alone plunged into the foaming equation of modernity: that the more you seek your identity, the more you understand that, in Nabokov's words, "the cradle rocks above an abyss".

Suzanne Brøgger, one of Denmark's most polemical novelists and author of The Jade Cat, betrayed an undisguised reverence for Kierkegaard's achievement. "[He] discovered or imagined a new way of being a human being. He's been able to map the whole continent of human emotions and traps and temptations and shortcomings, so he knows the human being from the inside out." At the end of his life - he died in 1855, at 42 - he had become, as she said, a mirror of God.

Danes are not over-proud of being Danes. This, I think, is a reason for Danish fiction's diversity - it is the cultural aspect of a longing, a desire for otherness. On the Sealand shore I discussed this with Ib Michael. "I recognise this feeling from when I was a child," he said. "I was standing at the seaside and I would see a wave coming in, and I would think: 'What's in this wave? A little green island, it's coming from the world, and the world is out there.' It's true of all North Sea people - there's a longing here, a vision and a dream quality of trying to relate to what is going on in a world like this."

Back in Copenhagen, at Kierkegaard's graveside in the Assistens churchyard with Jens Christian Grøndahl, author of the excellent Silence in October and, most recently, Lucca, I was hardly surprised when he immediately began to talk of the "strange dialogue between us and these places, which is a way of speaking with death, I think... We need that dialogue in our minds, we need to imagine that we can actually transgress those borderlines in time and space that divide us, because we do have something in common, we do have something to say to one another." Where there's death, there's hope. As Kierkegaard himself might have put it.

The further north you travel, the more disarming the landscape. Fewer people, fewer dwellings, a diminished appetite for urban pleasures, signify what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once called "a rustic conviction". The town of Dalarö in Sweden, for instance, 40km south of Stockholm - I had heard so much about it, I expected at least a small city. Instead there lay at my feet a charming maze of gabled, timbered houses next to a grey Baltic. Once more it seemed implausible that the winds of literary modernity began to blow here; yet August Strindberg's attachment to Dalarö and the skerries south of Stockholm has made them famous.

To British audiences Strindberg is a playwright, Sweden a shelter; the one neurotic, the other super-safe. In fact, the playwright's intensity and artistic focus were a constantly moveable feast. He was also a novelist: his first novel, The Red Room (1879), made his name, and was the first book to bring a European narrative and critique to Sweden.

I don't greatly care for Strindberg, but occasionally he was spot on. "God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people's secrets we want to know - it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years and everyone must and can leave their contribution."

Per Olov Enquist, whose seductive novel of political practice and love, The Royal Physician's Visit, is published in Britain soon, is clear about the debt Swedish literature owes. "He put in front of us the idea that the writer can be a political animal, that he shouldn't be afraid of writing about society, about day-to-day subjects. He was not afraid of dirt. Stockholm was a very small city, and backward, and Strindberg came in the 1880s like a storm."

Today, Stockholm is a water-city of glittering vistas, but the country's modern novelists are to a startling extent creatures of the provinces - in the countryside or far away up north. Enquist, Nobel academician Torgny Lindgren, Sara Lidman and crime writer Henning Mankell are all from Norrland, country of plains, forests and rivers, a world cloaked in silence, like the silence Strindberg found out in the skerries.

In Norrland, in the province of Västerbotten, it struck me forcefully how silence is an engine - perhaps the engine - of narrative. Cervantes began his novel in speechlessness, in a jail cell; in northern Sweden I found the silence between human beings and their topography.

Sara Lidman, who has returned to the north since her period of political reporting in Africa and Vietnam, described it: "Imagine if a man is coming on skis in winter, and he can see another person approaching on skis, and it will take half an hour before they actually meet - imagine all the ideas they can have about each other. Whether it is a foe or a friend, it is necessary to stop and have a long talk with each other - very often just shouting, because of the enormous width of empty air that has to be covered with people's presence." For shouting, read writing; shouting the world into existence, and yourself.

The shelter, the welcoming umbrella of Stockholm and Sweden's social policy, is no more. Jan Hendrik Swahn has written a trilogy of novels set beneath the city's modern roofscape. In an experiential sense, he is more Strindberg's heir than the Northlanders. Living rough in Stockholm, he said, "for the first time in 15 years, with my beer cans in my hand, I could see the beauty of the town and feel that this town was mine".

Similar sentiments are offered by Henning Mankell, author of the successful Kurt Wallander mysteries. Mankell's is a Sweden on the brink, a country of which he has been openly critical for its racism, selfishness, and moral fracture. "I work in a very old tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks, where they used the mirror of crime to see what's happening inside society, between power and people without power."

Is that what novels are for? In Sweden, one is equally tempted to say that the fear of loneliness in an empty world is a spur to write into existence a world that didn't exist before. But novels are not social workers. What secures us from loneliness is not particularly reading (or writing) books, but the connection we have to our selves. A novel may satisfy a deep metaphysical thirst - provided physical hunger has been satisfied.

· This is an edited version of Julian Evans's radio journey through the European novel, which will be repeated on Mondays from August 19, on Radio 3