Chaos Theory

By Paul Gray

The publishing sleeper of 1993 proved to be, rather surprisingly, a , translation from the Danish. Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow enchanted reviewers and book buyers alike with its suspense -- a wise woman detective tries to track down a child's murderer -- and its eerie rendering of the landscapes and atmosphere of Greenland. This intense but accessible philosophical thriller spurred considerable interest in what Hoeg, 37, would do for an encore.

The first answer is that he has done something quite different and not nearly as engaging. Borderliners (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 277 pages; $22) opens with a question that may seem, to most readers, groan inducing: "What is time?" The query comes from a narrator whose name is Peter (a detail he drops a third of the way through his story). Now a grown man, he looks back on himself at age 14, an orphan who, after a brief lifetime in various institutions, has unexpectedly been sent to Biehl's Academy, a prestigious school on the outskirts of Copenhagen.

Peter recognizes Biehl's as an improvement over the previous places to which he was assigned. There is adequate food, heat in the buildings, and 26 teachers responsible for only 240 students. But there are occasional cuffings for rule infractions or poor lesson performance, plus the dictatorship of clocks and bells: "It was not just the classes and assembly that began on the dot. There was also a study period and the meals and the chores and voluntary sports and lights-out and when you had to get up if you were to manage a proper wash ..."

Unhappy with this regimen, Peter finds a covert ally in Katarina, a girl two classes ahead of him who has lost both her parents over the past year and grown understandably rebellious as a result. And then Peter is given responsibility for August, a new arrival who has murdered both his parents. "He is chaos," Katarina says, wondering why August has been admitted. "If their plan is order, why have they taken him?"

Peter and Katarina set out to discover what purpose really lies behind the discipline under which they are forced to live. He gains what he thinks is a crucial insight when he hears Biehl mention Darwinism, the survival of the fittest, and then add that "we alleviate its consequences." Peter realizes that his classmates, saved and damned, have not grasped Biehl's comment: "Understanding is something one does best when one is on the borderline."

It becomes clear to Peter and Katarina, and perhaps to August, although it is hard to tell, given his autistic demeanor, that their condition as castoffs, as people on the borderline of normal, makes them particularly wise, so they must fight the mentors who "could single out those who were on the borderline, who could not finish the tests on time, and help them up."

Their joint rebellion produces some narrative fireworks but also a few nagging questions in the aftermath. August and Katarina suffer unhappy fates for their refusal to be drawn into any plan that would include them in what passes for a regular life: he dies, she vanishes. Peter fares better, if a strong penchant for pomposity can be considered an improvement. He is now married and has a daughter (he calls them "the woman" and "the child") and writes things like "The life of every person contains something of significance" and "Nature is a blessing, an opportunity for growth that has been bestowed on all living things."

For all its avant-garde mannerisms, Borderliners seems shackled to the time it records, the early 1970s, when anarchy and madness were heralded as liberating and the only crazy people were the ones running things. It would take a better novel to make that case now.