Doomsday clock is ticking at Sonnergaard

January Sonnergaard has written a clever novel with a narrator who is even smarter. It is artistically unwise.

By Bjorn Bredal


Doomsday clock here on the planet were asked back recently, and not because of winter.

Following President Barak Obama's statements against nuclear weapons, pushed the American magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists hands away from the planet's destruction.

Now time is only seven minutes to twelve, according to scientists.

There has otherwise been days when the bell was only seconds away from falling into the battle - at least psychologically. There has been disaster mood, most distinctive and well-founded well enough after the Cuba crisis in 1962.

But it's January Sonnergaard contention that much of the 1980s zeitgeist can be understood and explained by a conscious and especially unconscious feeling of the planet (especially Copenhagen) inhabitants of the earth could perish in a holocaust anytime.

Hence the well-made title for his ambitious novel: About nuclear war impact on William Funk's youth. A novel with a lot of heart and a strong will to recall that the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fell doomsday clock actually in battle in 1945.

There are moving reportage from these cities' Ground Zero at the end of the novel.

Earth goes under, so eh hell ...
The narrator dies en route, and so does the reader - so you're warned. If not Pontoppidan had taken the title 'The Dead' for his novel about the 1880s, so Sonnergaard could well have used it for his novel about the 1980s, for it is an apocalypse, a doom story.

The chapters count down from 20 to 1, and everything else also counts down. Down to the bomb drops down to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So it's time, the main character, a certain time: the 1980s.

The main characters are not in January and Iben and William, as some of the characters named, nor Turèll, Ronald Reagan or any other person from reality and fiction, who populate the novel.

The secondary characters are all of them in relation to a capital 'Mon' or 'the year' or 'in this period', which is just a few of the book's many expressions of "a paranoid time" in the shadow of the atomic bomb.

And today two distinct types, yuppies and punks, occurs just as the types that are symmetrically opposite expressions of one and the same: In a moment goes under the earth, so eh hell ...

It is black all
Each chapter of the book, 20-19-18-17 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 20-19-18-17 end_of_the_skype_highlighting ... begins with a quote from period music, everything from Iggy Pop and Peter Gabriel to the Sisters of Mercy and Neil Young.

It's all black, black as punk's clothing, and it could perhaps best be summarized by a quote from Leonard Cohen, who Sonnergaard do not use (perhaps because so many others have used it, or maybe because it's from the 1990s):

I've seen the future brother, it's murder.

A sort of 'Dr. Strangelove '
It's hard not to think of Stanley Kubrick film from 1964, 'Dr. Strangelove '. Countdown. The types. Time. But in January Sonnergaard 1980s-types are probably just wee very types that you can totally take an interest in them.

Their character generation is marked with the classical grip, the student festival, which is the starting point, which of course then follows the formative years of their year - 1980.

We come to several parties, the BZ-demonstrations and husbesættelser, we're on time in-cafes in Copenhagen, Café Turèll and Café Victor, all compounds tested from coke and AMF plain booze and expensive 'paign. "

The taste of it all is the bomb:

'The bomb has a taste. It tastes like metal when it explodes. The rays that make it: One second you see through everything, and blood vessels, bones and tendons are just as visible as an X-ray and the second after you can taste the amalgam you may have in the different fillings in your teeth. "

Forfeit the missile shield
It is well researched, well written and well sensed, but it is also equally legitimate well designed. Sonnergaard can set a scene with superior security, but the scenes are thrown chronicles into long panels to explain that the sum of it all, yes it is so bomb.

All the time there is a slight tone of better knowledge, a feeling that the narrator has seen through every pattern:

All are utterly predictable in relation to their times and their explanations.

Behind the narrator, you sense an author who is even smarter than his novel. When doing so, it begins artistic dommedagsur to count down.

Sonnergaard'll think about doing a little like Barack Obama: give up the missile shield. He can easily do without.