Vi, de drunknade

Call us Ishmael.

It takes almost 100 pages until I'm struck by this strange, recurring "we." After all, it's not as if the narrator takes up a lot of room in Carsten Jensen's 700-page novel; for the most part, We, The Drowned is narrated in the same way as many other novels with no clear protagonist, some sort of omnicient storyteller who never gets personal, never says "I" or reveals his or her name. It's just that the reader is occasionally reminded that this story, the history of the little Danish town of Marstal, where every man is a sailor and every woman is left waiting on shore, is narrated by this "we." "We" saw the cocky sailor Laurids Madsen go to war with the Germans in 1848, survive the destruction of the Danish navy by a miracle worthy of a Salman Rushdie character and return home a changed person. "We" saw his son Albert, like a modern Telemachos, try to fill his disappeared father's boots, help build the last sailing merchant fleet that took the town's men all over the world, only to return home to find out that the u-boats of WW1 weren't nearly as big a threat as steam and diesel. "We" saw his adopted son Knud Erik and his mother take the step into the modern world and humanity's great suicide from 1939 to 1945. It's this ghostly choir of unnamed men (and occasional women), "we" who saw the birth of a modern world, a modern land - from the sea.

We, The Drowned spans a century, with scores of characters, echoing Homer, Melville, Lindgren, Kipling, Márquez and Grass in one great sailor's pidgin of influences. As the years pass, the great ideas and seamen pass along the horizon, from Cook to the Tirpitz, from 19th century optimism to 20th century mass-production of death, but the focus is always on the ones manning the oars. It's a simple, but incredibly effective trick; use the standard sailor's stories that anyone from a country with a coast will be familiar with, and then have the sailing routes connect the dots. There are boys' adventures to keep you reading, pirates and convoys and impossible love stories; but the sailors from the insignificant little town sail across waves of larger stories, larger philosophies shifting underneath them; visit the whole world, see it all happen, tie the world together, make it bigger and smaller at the same time, and always returning back home. The focus is on half a dozen people, but in the background there's always this echo of "we", everyone.

You can find weak points in We, The Drowned. Over 700 pages there's room for the occasional lull, very little room for women, etc. But somehow, it's the kind of novel where the weak points only emphasize how great the rest of it is, how solid a novel it is. Carsten Jensen sends his constantly ruminating Marstalians out on that ship that we're all on, where both navigare and legere necesse est.