Borderliners by Peter Høeg

Peter Høeg is a bestselling Danish writer who achieved great acclaim in the 1990s with Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, a philosophical thriller which broke through to become an international bestseller and subsequently made into a film with Julia Ormond and Gabriel Byrne.

Of Høeg’s 6 published novels, not one of them is in a similar style or genre. I have to admit to never getting on that well with Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, although most people I know loved it. However Høeg also happens to have written one of my all-time favourite books, Borderliners, and I returned to it recently to see if it was still as good as the first time I read it 12 years ago.

Plot

This is the story of Peter, Katarina and August – three damaged children in an experimental school in Copenhagen in the 1960s.

Biehl’s Academy accepts both “normal” pupils and those from various care institutions in an attempt to integrate them into “normal” society. Some of these “borderliners” are borderline in terms of mental age or ability. Others, like middle-class Katharine, perform well in tests but are extremely traumatised, in her case due to the death of her mother followed by the suicide of her father.

Into the lives of Peter and Katarina comes August, watched at all times by the teachers, not allowed to move more than a foot away from the playground wall, gassing himself on the cooker in order to sleep at night. Peter and Katarina are mystified as to why the school has taken him and Peter is worried he can’t survive school life and will be sent elsewhere, perhaps to be permanently institutionalised.

August would never learn, that I already knew. When Flage hit him that first time, he seized up; the head moved from side to side, but the body was rigid. I came up behind him, I sensed what was going to happen.

He went for Flage’s fingers, which had remained midair after he had thrown the jotter. He grabbed hold of the outer two on his left hand, but did not get a chance to break them. I stuck a thumb over each of his eyes and pulled him back.

In the course of trying to help August, Peter and Katarina decide there is some system, some “grand plan” behind the school and set out to find out what it is.

System versus Humanity

This, to me, seems to be the great overarching theme of the book. Biehl’s Academy is seen to be enlightened from the outside, but is so controlling, so sure of its rule-bound authoritarian way of bringing these children into the mainstream, that it neglects all human relationships. The school believes all things are measurable – relying on psychologists and intelligence tests to separate and categorise its pupils, deliberately destroying all independent bonds and relationships between the children.

Here is a piece of writing from the book. Katarina and Peter have formed a friendship and the school have therefore separated them. They correspond by letters, about abstract ideas. Katarina is being tested by the Binot-Simon psychology tests (an early IQ test). She is highly intelligent. Peter (who is categorised as average mental age) receives letters put into his pocket. They do not talk.

A letter came from her. It was not in her own words, it was a quote straight out of Binet-Simon. She must have learnt it by heart, just by reading it. “There was once a grasshopper, who had sung merrily all summer long. Now it was winter and he was starving. So he went to see some ants who lived nearby and asked them to lend him some of the stores they had laid up for the winter. “What have you been doing all summer,” they asked. “I have sung day and night,” replied the grasshopper. “Ah, so you have sung,” said the ants. “Well, now you can dance.”

Beneath this she had written: “What is the moral?”…

…At the time I had been given this story I had been close to answering that the moral was, ants are not helpful. But this would not have fitted in well with the other problems. Instead I had sussed out Hessen and then I had said that the moral was that one must make hay whilst the sun shines.”

It becomes clearer as you read Borderliners, how inappropriate this system and whole way of thinking is for these children – whose experiences have been so far from “normal”. Peter tells us you must develop a strategy. Passing intelligence tests is not about honesty or about what you really think – it is about survival. And themes of evolution and survival of the fittest come into the book again and again.

Peter’s urge to survive is strong but some of the children he talks of – both at the school and in his carehomes – do not have the wish to survive enough to construct a strategy. They are classed as lunatic or moronic and their chances in life taken away from them altogether.

What Hoeg is talking about is how we judge, categorise and label people. How, by doing this, we can end up imprisoning them forever. What damaged children need are not systems, authority, assessment and judgement; but love, connection, humanity, individual understanding.

Style and Form

What some people find frustrating about this book is what makes it particularly special to me. That it is mysterious, enigmatic. That it doesn’t fully define and explain. Partly, I think this is deliberate – that Høeg is refusing to define, label and categorise as Biehl’s Academy does. Partly, it is because the character, Peter, is at sea. He is a child without a place, without explanation. But he is never allowed access to his own files. There are gaps in his knowledge and understanding and gaps in his record.

But it is this same mysterious enigmatic quality – both about the background and in the writing itself – that allows you, as a reader, to really explore the issues. In yearning to understand the mystery, you end up engaging more fully with the themes, and – what’s more – in an emotional rather than an intellectual way.

The unusual narrative structure is also controversial. Made up of short pieces, sometimes in the present, sometimes in the past, it is as though Høeg is deliberately trying to sidestep time with his structure, as though to communicate his character’s discomfort with the linearity of time itself.

The Theme of Time

One of the difficulties some critics and readers seem to have with the book are the sections on time.

The main character’s philosophising about time irritates some who view these sections to be unnecessary, even pretentious. For me, Høeg is trying, straining to capture something, express something that is, perhaps, not so much intellectual as emotional.

Peter, the narrator, is oppressed by time. Time is what is used to control him, regulate him, stop him thinking. It is only in the gaps between time that he feels he can have his own thoughts, ideas – and most importantly – relationships. The other characters, too, have difficulty with time. Time is not only control but represents trauma, memories, damage. Time becomes synonymous with emotional pain.

Autobiographical Elements?

There is a note of bitterness and real anger in Høeg’s writing.

The fact that the main character is called Peter and he is eventually adopted by people called “Høeg” is even more frustratingly intriguing. Is there an autobiographical element? Is the Peter of the novel the writer or is it a fictional Peter, a person the writer might have been? Or is it both? When I was younger I wondered and wondered, now I scour the internet desperate to find out what truth there is to these experiences outlined. But I find nothing but a few other people speculating about the same thing.

Parallel of the Present and Past

The main story of the children at Biehl’s academy is offset by sections where the main character in the present talks of The Woman and The Child – his family in the present, we assume. We see how Peter struggles with his role in the present when he has experienced nothing but an institutionalised life. The Woman leaves him with The Child and he is terrified. He cannot offer her anything. He does not know how to behave. He feels useless. He cannot relate.

Little by little, the bonds are forged. Putting paid to both his own difficulties and also the assumptions – those categorisations – of his past. We find out that the system has decided that he can never form stable and significant relationships. Yet, all the way through the book we see him forming relationships, but it is the system itself that deliberately sets out to break them.

The past and the present become a mirror of each other: Peter, Katarina and August become Himself, The Woman and The Child. And the message of the book is clear. To survive, to be human, you need human relationships – not systems. You need to be understood – not categorised. You need to be seen not judged. You need to be cared about. Loved.

The ending of the book packs a huge emotional punch and I have rarely felt so much for a set of characters. August is a towering character in the form of a tiny boy. He has remained vividly in my head ever since first reading this book. August’s story provides the huge dramatic climax to the book whilst in the present, a different outcome leads us forwards.

More than a decade on and book seems as powerful to me as ever. This is an angry, beautiful, profound and moving book. It makes us feel rather than intellectualise about a subject that is still as relevant – how we, as a society treat our “problem” people. How we judge rather than care. How those on the borderline can survive or be lost to us.

And how we fail them.

The Harvill Press; New Ed edition (4 April 1996), 252pp. ISBN: 1860461433. Translated from the Danish by Barbara Haveland.