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"Lord, to whom shall we go?"

Torgny Lindgren's breakthrough novel (first published in 1982) is a dark affair, reminiscent of one of Dostoevsky's heavy tomes condensed down to a 150-page "j'accuse" towards a seemingly uncaring God and the, if you will, tyranny of evil men.

The question at the start of this review is repeated like a mantra by our narrator, Johan - the grandson of a farmer in 19th century Northern Sweden who ends up in debt to the local merchant, who in these new times demands payment in cash rather than in kind. And when the family is unable to come up with the cash, the merchant - and his son after him - takes his tribute in other ways; the sins of the father are visited upon the daughter, and as the sole male heir, Johan grows up seeing first his mother and then his sisters used as currency. What follows is both a very disturbing and realistic-feeling description of what life could be deep in the woods, and a harsh examination of the themes of sin, atonement, charity and self-sacrifice. Lindgren converted to catholicism about the same time as he wrote this; it's a deeply Christian novel, but one in which faith alone will never set things right, and where Bible phrases are as often used to justify oppression as to offer comfort. If the authority that rules you claims to be in the right, and the ultimate authority offers no reply... Lord, to whom shall he go? Johan is blameless in his misery, and if he takes action to end it, he'll get the blame. It's not a pretty story, but a powerful one.

Torgny Lindgren is one of Sweden's most acclaimed authors (and a member of the Academy as well), but I only recently understood his greatness; this is the fourth novel of his I've read, and he just keeps impressing me and making me think with every short volume, straddling the line between social conscience, good old-fashioned storyteller and philosopher. I can't vouch for the English translation; I'm not sure whether to envy or pity his translators - not only is the entire novel based on the double meaning of the Swedish word "skuld", meaning both "guilt", "lack of innocence" and "debt", but it's narrated in a heavy archaic dialect which is a joy to read but must be hell to translate. But the story is universal, and this is one of the best novel(la)s I've read this year.

The architect Le Corbusier reportedly said that God was in the details; others have claimed the same about the devil. And it's in the details that Le Clézio finds Terra Amata ("the beloved Earth", if my Latin serves); whether what he finds is God or Devil...

This is the first Le Clézio I've read, and supposedly not the best starting point - most people who have read him suggest his debut Le Procès-Verbal (The Interrogation) as a sampler of his early avant-garde work, but this was the one that was still in the library, and I can't say it's scared me off further exploration. In fact, I liked it a lot.

Terra Amata is, in its way, a very bare-bones thing. It's the story of the life of a man named Chancelade (de la chance?), from his early childhood to his grave. And it's not like his life is all that special; he's a pretty ordinary guy, and not much out of the ordinary ever happens to him. What makes it more than just boring ultra-realism is how the story is told. See, Chancelade likes details. Right from the beginning, even as a small child, we see him extrapolating entire worlds from the smallest things, trying to understand his world by submerging himself in it, trying to put words to everything he sees and feels... the whole "cosmos in a grain of sand" bit.

You should be everywhere at the same time, on the mountaintops when the aurora borealis flares up, in the depths of the sea by the volcanos' mute explosions, in the trunks of the trees when the rain slowly starts falling and each drop detonates on each leaf.

Le Clézio's world isn't a cold, inhospitable place; it's a world that's teeming with beauty, and Chancelade wanders through it in constant infatuation, as if drunk on everything's existence and becoming. At times, this is a horriffic experience - anyone who's read The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy might compare it to the Total Perspective Vortex: if you see how insignificant you seem in the vastness of the world, you're supposed to go crazy. Except he doesn't, not really; he just has to find a way to live this incredible thrill ride of sensory overload that even an ordinary life can be.

The world was too alive, you couldn't defeat it. Space had too much space, time too many seconds, days, weeks, milennia. You could no longer do anything to understand. You could no longer meet the frightening gaze of the absolute. (...) You had to dive head-first into vertigo and work, love, hate, suffer, be happy, kill, give birth (...) because there was nothing else to do.

Writing something that goes more or less like this for 220 pages (well OK, there is ordinary life and dialogue and other characters in there too) requires a lot of the author, but the young Le Clézio is up to it - with a few notable snags; when Chancelade falls in love, he spends a few short chapters speaking in sign language, morse code and invented languages to try and express his inner turmoil... which, nah. But even then, the prose is... precise. I've rarely come across a writer who's this good at navigating rather complex existential morasses with a language that's this clear, vivid and, well... fun; like I've said elsewhere, I'm occasionally reminded of the extatic free-form prose of Clarice Lispector, while the slight meta-fictional overtones call Perec or Calvino to mind. OK, so the novel tends to crawl up its own ass a few times - I suppose you can only write so much about the experience of everyday mundanity, and the pro- and epilogues that talk directly to the reader don't really do it any favours. But most of the time, it's a real joy to read. As in life, you take the bad with the good, hope the latter outweighs the former, hold on in the sharp curves and feel the tickle in your belly.

Nerves, nerves everywhere.

I've always been rather fond of the idea of children killing each other; not in real life, I should probably point out, but in fiction. It's not only a concept designed to horrify the reader, but it's also a great opportunity for the writer to reflect on mankind's innate abilities and emotions, to say something about us a species and as a society. The idea of judging a society by how they treat the weakest among them is an old one, and setting it up so that the children get to battle it out themselves can be a great recipe for some pretty harsh satire. Of course, the benchmark is Golding's Lord of the Flies, though the book that really suckerpunched me in my own youth was Stephen King's overlooked The Long March.

Battle Royale shares traits with both of those: the theme from Golding, and the tightly plotted genre sensibilities (and clunky prose) from King (and a slight dash of Orwell for good measure). In a world where things went differently from WWII and onwards, Japan (AKA The Republic of Greater East Asia) is a tightly controlled dictatorship in which American influences are very much frowned upon. Children are kept ignorant with strict discipline and harmless entertainment... and kept on their toes by the Battle Royale: a yearly competition in which entire high school classes are kidnapped and taken to a remote place, given weapons and told to kill each other or be killed. Only one child is allowed to survive. This, of course, is broadcast as entertainment, the ultimate reality show, and is also a popular sport for gamblers. (This is both the strength and the trappings of genre literature; it allows the writer to take elements of a society - the conformity of Japanese culture, the tendency to look down on others, the very strict patriarchy - and amp them up, make them tangible.)

The novel follows one class of 15-year-olds who suddenly find themselves caught up in this; trapped on a deserted island and having to slaughter each other if they want to survive. The horrible thing about Battle Royale is precisely that it's a Japanese book. It's about children who have been taught from an early age to conform, to dress alike, to not question authority... and who are suddenly handed a gun and told to kill each other. To be individuals. Cut-throat competition at its most non-subtextual. In a sense, if Golding's book was about the animal underneath the thin layer of civilizaion, then Takami's is about how thick that layer can be, and how hard it can be to ignore it.

Battle Royale was initially savaged by the critics in Japan for being violent, and yes, it is. Very very violent. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing; again, there are very strong elements of satire and social criticism and Takami isn't aiming for subtlety. Japanese society is (in)famous for its high pressure, and when the children get the scoop on what they're supposed to do before they die, they all react in different ways; some kill themselves rather than compete, others lose their mind completely and are quickly killed off by their more cold-blooded classmates, most fight desperately for their lives and fail; in the end, only the best and the worst are left standing. Yet Takami does his best to give all 42 of them their own story, present them all as individuals with bad and (except in some cases) good sides, and while this is admirable it's also one of the major problems of the novel. Even if Takami is very inventive when it comes to killing them off, they soon all start to look a little too much alike, especially since he uses the same tools to characterize them all; which bands they like, what their family is like, whom they have a crush on, etc - at times, this reads less like a novel about 15-year-olds and more like a yearbook by 15-year-olds. That, along with the fact that nobody ever seems to have told Takami about "show, don't tell", tends to make it a well-plotted but not always very well-written book. Of course, another problem with genre literature is that it rarely gets the sort of translator that could do it justice, and some of the aforementioned clunkiness feels more like a bad translation. Still, a skilled editor could easily have tightened up the plot by cutting some of the overly verbose and repetitive character descriptions (which are even repeated several times for our main characters) out of this book.

I watched the movie version long before I read the novel, and it might just be familiarity, but I must say I preferred the movie; it cuts down on the number of protagonists, focuses on fleshing out the ones that carry the plot, and leaves characterizations more up to the camera than to endless backstories. What the book really has going for it in comparison is the dystopian angle, which it milks pretty well, and which in a sense makes it a more relevant work than the rather self-contained movie. For all the gore (and it's good gore, if you're into that sort of thing), the scenes that tend to stick are the ones where the more fleshed-out characters interact in desperate (and mostly futile) attempts to find their way out of an oppressive society - it's no coincidence that the main character keeps quoting Springsteen: "Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run." And while I can't help wishing Takami had had a better editor and translator, it's still a vicious if blunt piece of satire and quite the pageturner. Though mostly, of course, it's about 15-year-olds in sailor suits blowing each others' heads off.