Lars Bonnevie had produced some rather uneven works before 1986, when he found his voice and his material in his great novel of Africa, En grav i vinden (A Grave in the Wind).
In this novel, he united his political interest in the Third World with an extremely sensitive portrayal of this incomprehensible continent through a series of very different but vivid and convincing characters, both black and white, representing the various possible – and more or less hopeless – positions in a chaotic land, torn by civil strife. The action is set in Zimbabwe shortly after independence was achieved in 1980. The new regime has already established itself so firmly that the "softer" and more idealistic elements of the old resistance movement are about to disappear in prisons or disillusionment, and the last white desperadoes are self-destructively rushing to meet their demise.
In Botswana Blues from 1990, Bonnevie presents his own experiences as a foreign aid worker in the form of a diary, which is nevertheless called a novel, allowing the reader to presume that work is based freely upon actual events and local characters. Read from a political point of view, it is yet another disenchanted description of the struggle of the poor against a brutal and bureaucratic regime, and the lack of capability and opportunity for well-meaning white aid workers to make a difference on a human level, where Bonnevie consistently places himself.
However beautifully it is written, the harsh sado-masochistic myth, Vera K.´s hemmelighed (Vera K.´s Secret) from 1993, which, inspired by the Frenchmen de Sade and Battaille, describes the freedom to be found in oppression and sex orgies as the path to a sort of religious redemption, seems to backslide into his earlier writings.
But Africa returns in full force in 1998 with the novel Dommeren (The Judge).
Its background is the civil war and genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Two years after these horrific events, a Danish judge Albert Berg travels to the country as a representative for the International War Crimes Tribunal. His struggles with his own personal demons - first and foremost, his complicity in his son´s suicide - are played out against a background of the great national trauma of Rwanda, where it gradually begins to dawn on Berg – and the reader – that it is virtually impossible to talk about justice, guilt or punishment in a land in which everyone, to one degree or another, has blood on his hands and is now simply in state of shock, wanting only to forget.
Once again, Lars Bonnevie has created a steamy, rancid, powerfully-realized and morally complex picture of the continent to which he has lost his heart – without compromising his artistic integrity.
(1999)
