With Uden sikker viden (Uncertainty) and Slangen i Sydney (The Serpent in Sydney) Michael Larsen has taken a place at the very top of the list of the most translated Danish authors today. The two novels are topical, hard-hitting, 100% international thrillers in terms of plot, construction, imagery and dialogue, added to which they share an inexhaustibly wide and demanding theme: knowledge- knowledge as obsession, knowledge as destroyer, knowledge as killer. But above all, knowledge which is vast and yet still not enough when today, for whatever reason, one comes face to face with the mystery of oneself, one´s immediate surroundings or the unfathomable depths of the cosmos.
With his big international breakthrough, Uncertainty, Michael Larsen probed this theme for the first time, a theme which laid an accurate psychological trail for the pulse-raising story about a young journalist hunting through Denmark and the USA for the truth about the death of his lover.
It is a story in which the main character and the reader are never on firm ground, but are, on the contrary, flung further and further into a web of uncertainty. Technologically, this is achieved through a sinister illustration of how computer science today is able to distort and warp our picture of such basic factors as love and reality. Psychologically, it occurs via whisky-induced highs and pill-induced hallucinations and the slow exposure of the raw, erotic, shady sides by which Michael Larsen with great assurance of style makes his narrative I-voice ´unreliable´.
What starts off looking like a cynical, single-minded pursuit of the simple truth about a murder, develops into terrifyingly complex apparitions in which no one knows for certain who is the hunter and who is the hunted.
Uncertainty is extremely sensory and cinematic. This does not lessen its towering perspective. Quite the reverse.
The panorama in Michael Larsen´s ambitious recent novel The Serpent in Sydney (1997) is also seen from dizzying heights. Devices which make for the chill of a film thriller are again featured in abundance. The research infrastructure for this novel is the vast map of the natural sciences and theories of knowledge which has been laboriously charted over the years. And a central, powerful fascination, almost an extension of its predecessor, posing questions about this very knowledge.
Whereas Uncertainty moves, both in terms of topography and psychology, in a very pragmatic and internal space, in The Serpent in Sydney such intangible, immense phenomena as cosmos and parapsychology play their part. Consequently, the perspective is more objective and spacious.
The Australian doctor and snake expert, Annika Niebuhr, treats a young girl at a hospital in Sydney. It becomes apparent that the girl has been bitten by the most dangerous of all Australian reptiles, the taipan. The curious thing is, the taipan is not found in Sydney, but only in the northern part of Australia. When one of Annika´s best friends, an expert in electronic espionage, is found dead, and Annika thinks she can see a connection between these two strange incidents, the story really takes off. She soon becomes a player and a key figure in a dangerous state of warfare which ominously goes far beyond all rationality, even - or perhaps especially - for her brilliant, practical, inquiring scientist´s mind.
The Serpent in Sydney consolidates Michael Larsen´s strength as an author of the two-track thriller which does not just rely on an elementary level of action to provide the thrills, but also draws on the great riddles encountered in an active examination of science, nature and religion and our relationship with them in the modern world.
As these are still early days in Michael Larsen´s career as a writer, it is far too soon to start designating genre. In his first novel, for example, Med livet i hælene (Pursued by Life - not translated), he experimented with a satirical stand-up comedy form and he has said in an interview that his next book could very well be an out-and-out love story. But with the fascination and zeal revealed in Uncertainty and The Serpent in Sydney, all the signs are that Michael Larsen will not, for the moment, be loosening his grip on either the thrill or the ´uncertainty´.
