Vertigo

By : Thomas Thurah

Imagine that on the third day of the Gulf War the American news channel CNN suddenly broke off its pictures of heavy shellfire over the Iraqi capital and instead showed a sobbing, terrified Saddam Hussein begging an American emissary for mercy. And imagine those pictures at the same time reaching the Iraqi people via American satellite transmissions. Or imagine television screens all round the world showing the president of some meddlesome satellite state at the head of a death squad on a routine murderous visit to a village. And imagine a major military power twenty-four hours later launching a successful lightning attack on that country and with a single, well-placed missile liquidating the president, who, taking three foreign hostages with him, has sought refuge in an international hotel. Or imagine in the days preceding the next parliamentary elections in Denmark a picture landing on all the editorial desks of Danish newspapers showing the Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen in a compromising situation with a leading opposition politician. And then imagine that it is all a deception and that you - or for that matter the critical press - have not the slightest chance of discovering this.
   For we are talking of picture manipulation, but not that accomplished with the help of scissors and paste. Nor about modern picture scanners. But about advanced animation systems capable of creating pictures of a fake world indistinguishable from the real world. It merely presupposes sufficient information on the segment of reality which it is intended to animate within the dimensions of the fake world. And then a mathematical ability fifty times greater than that in the very most powerful computers at present in existence.
   All this according to Michael Larsens novel.
   For this is the idea he does more than play with in this monstrously thrilling story about the journalist Martin Molberg´s attempt to get at the real events behind the murder of his fiancée. Thrills and excitement, then. And murder. But more than that and far more than simply an imaginative projection of the potential for manipulation which is at the disposal of the picture media today and exploited by them to a limited extent every day.

A few discrete indications of the contents of Larsen´s own animation: On medically prescribed tablets, large amounts of drink and under the cloak of his profession, the journalist Molberg stays at a luxury hotel in Los Angeles in an attempt to find Jack Roth Pascal and an explanation of the death of his own fiancée. The name, the hotel, the number of the room, 505,  and a photograph are all he has to go on. For the moment it goes as far as an intimate acquaintance with a Danish stewardess who for the moment takes up the empty space left by his beloved Monique. Then there is Copenhagen: The flat containing the things Monique has left behind, strange events in the flat opposite and anonymous figures who seem to be interested in Morberg´s activities.
   And then the characters around him: his friend and computer freak Lindvig. Monique´s friend Marianne. Stella, who helps the newspaper staff with research into all conceivable databases. The nervous psychologist Dr Phillip, who offers the same kind of services, but in a different kind of electronics. A host of other more or less significant secondary figures. And Molberg´s parents somewhere in the far distance.
   It is in this confused assortment of characters, stored and hidden knowledge and an array of localities in and around Copenhagen that an (almost) feasible picture gradually materialises of what lies behind the outward appearance. The components in the picture are - it emerges - traditional, but the way in which they are joined together is extremely cleverly done, without any clumsy transitions or wrongly placed shadows. And that is all that is to be told here.
   It is wrong to say that the real value of the novel lies elsewhere than in this excellent structure of concealed and visible elements. Or to assert that the book only pretends to be a thriller and really has a more important and honest aim. For it does not; it is exactly all this excitement, this groping your way forward in obscure territory, this infernal, self-destructive attempt to perceive firm outlines and achieve certainty. In brief, its form is its statement, and that is the author´s real achievement.
   In this way, the novel constantly focuses on a multiplicity of subjects. It is indeed a criticism of the media. And it certainly intends to be taken seriously in its warning of manipulation by means of advanced animation systems. And in its castigation of the financial interests that ensure the astronomical pace of all research into media and weapons technology. But at the same time it plays through the conflict in a down-to-earth, contemporary perspective in which the manifold and obscure realities of media technology find their counterparts in basic psychological and social conditions: in the tension between Martin Molberg´s attempts to penetrate the external manipulation and his somewhat blasé relationship to his own chaotic and befogged consciousness. And in the tension between his demand for trustworthy pictures, for honesty in the profession devoted to portraying the surrounding world and for clear parameters determining guilt and innocence, and on the other hand his deep reluctance to know the real truth about Monique and his own relationship with her.
   In this, in this ambiguous relationship to rational analysis and in the profound fascination with the grey area between strict reason and demonised rationality, Michael Larsen´s Martin Molberg resembles another Danish fictional figure - Peter Høeg´s Smilla.  And the two novels are in fact closely related both in genre and to some extent in action, without either of them for that reason being more original than the other. If one were to raise an objection, it might be that this threatening, impelling duality so to speak stops at the principal characters and those closest to them. And neither in the case of Peter Høeg nor Michael Larsen does it encompass the principal thematic figures in the action, the baddies. They - Peter Høeg´s scientists and Michael Larsen´s researchers into advanced technology - all stand as pure evil and therefore lack the repulsive, abhorrent qualities that a certain measure of humanity would have ensured for them. If you see what I mean.
   On the other hand, the somewhat stereotype characterisation is an integral part of the whole of the novel´s virtual and highly veiled setting. We remain tied to appearances, even when Martin Morberg makes his closest approach to the truth. The conventional figures of the psychoanalyst Dr Phillip, the comic version of a femme fatale, the erotic stewardess, Molberg´s shadowy parents and - indeed - Mr Nicholson by the pool in Los Angeles are all paraphernalia from the stage on which Michael Larsen makes his main character grope his way.
   It is a grotesque, forbidding and inescapable world. And it is not least this last quality that is the point Michael Larsen is making. Read it if you dare.

This review was first brought in Berlingske Tidende 25.3.94

Translated by W. Glyn Jones