Bjarne Reuter wins The Nordic School Librarians' Children's Book Award

By : Hanne Holck

Bjarne Reuter has extraordinary skill "in creating atmosphere, often inspired by his own childhood experience, and he has the ability to give this experience universal expression. So it doesn't matter whether his readers were born in Houston, Texas, or Hverargardi," the Nordic jury wrote in their motivation for presenting the award to the Danish author on Iceland on 30th July. This ability to capture, describe and visualize atmosphere has led to many scripts for radio, television and motion pictures. The author's latest book Den korsikanske bisp (1993) (The Corsican Bishop) was conceived as both a book and a television series, but the exciting and disconcerting TV series happened to come first.

The starting point, and the basis of the story, is a legend with roots in Egyptian mythology. In the legend of the Nubian Water Wheel, it is said "that the gods gave the little Water Wheel to Sudan, and this gift brought to the land - which today is dry, barren and desolate so much water that the desert once was a fertile oasis." In the middle of the 16^th century, the Water Wheel was stolen from its cave in the Nubian Desert, in all likelihood by a group of monks from a Corsican monastery. Hence the name of the Water Wheel. Only a hundred years later, did it turn up again as a gift to the Vatican. Here, among a thousand curios, the Corsican Bishop's presence went unnoticed until three explorers, friends until then, Dr. Joachim Zeth, Hasse Brandin and Folke Magnusson - discover that "The Bishop" is in a crypt under St. Peter's. The villain in the story is Zeth, a re-incarnation of the god Seth, the personification of the desert or the heat of the sun. According to mythology, Seth killed his brother, the fertility God Osiris, out of jealousy. In a daring coup, Zeth and his fellow explorers abscond with the magic object. Zeth then tricks the other two into an ambush; Brandin, who is hurt and unable to flee, is imprisoned for the crime, while Folke Magnusson escapes with "The Bishop".

The setting of the story is anchored in real locations Elsinore and the Swedish archipelago, but the story itself hovers between two genres - a down to earth thriller and a fantasy with supernatural elements. From the day Folke died, four years before the actual story begins, The Corsican Bishop has been uppermost in Dr. Zeth's mind, for it is worth a fortune.

On the island of Korn”, in the Swedish archipelago, Folke's twelve-year-old son, Kalle, awaits the arrival of his Danish cousin, Max, who is the same age. The boys have grandiose plans for a fishing- swimming-loafing holiday without the company of parents. At the cottage, Kalle receives a package that contains a video with "a voice from the past". Kalle's deceased father is suddenly "present", talking about a secret, his voice earnestly urging his son to help prevent an unnamed "enemy" from “coming first", as he mysteriously puts it. He claims that Kalle is the only one who really can help.

The boys' attempt to gain insight into that which is puzzling and intangible the past and future ‑ is reminiscent of another current book for youth. In Jostein Gaarder's Sofies Verden (1992) (Sophie's World) the main character, the double‑person Sofie/ Hilde also seeks an "explanation" of what strikes her as mysterious and inexplicable. She, too, receives a video from the "absent one", who in the form and capacity of "the philosophy teacher" bodes future events. In Den korsikanske bisp the father (Folke) reactivates what is past; death, the inevitable, and the feeling of loss again become part of the present. The past in the service of the present. The experience moves Kalle from what is mysterious and frightening to the recognition that he has lost and misses his father, and further yet, to an insight one could call the past in the service of the future. He discovers his place in the present by way of the novel's adventurous "project": to find the Water Wheel and thereby bring rain and life back to Sudan's desert people. The father's project (that of the past) is completed and points to antecedents of the future.

Not to disclose the entire plot and the conclusion, suffice it to say that surprisingly there is truth in the legend! The Corsican Bishop truly is a magic object. As the mystery is unravelled, the reader is exposed to outright mystique, though on the limits of what is believable; and through Max the reader perceives in a hair‑rising manner that the inexplicable does, in fact, exist.

This article was published in Danish Children’s Literature

Translated by Virginia Allen Jensen