The Emperor's Atlas

By : Erik Svendsen

Ib Michael’s books have been translated into eleven languages. His latest novel Kejserens Atlas (The Emperor’s Atlas) is like a prism reflecting many of the writer’s themes in a none-too-distant future universe with both euphoric computer technology and dystopian metropolitan culture.

Ib Michael made his breakthrough in Denmark with the novel Kilroy Kilroy (Kilroy Kilroy) (1989), the story of a fighter pilot who loses his memory and goes through post-war modernisation and its crises searching for his past. In his novels, Ib Michael likes to explore his historical roots and to take a step in the opposite direction - to dream of being able to explode the narrow perception of what time is and the dialectic between the local world close at hand and the politics of the cosmos as explored in the subsequent autofictional trilogy Vanillepigen (The Vanilla Girl) (1991), Den tolvte rytter (The Midnight Soldier) (1993) and Brev til Månen (Letter to the Moon) (1995). In the fairy tale-like, time-imploding Prins (Prince) (1997) a dead sailor narrates and is in command, and the book is borne along entirely by powers and consciousnesses that transcend normal boundaries.

In his new novel The Emperor's Atlas we are transposed into a none-too-distant future universe characterised by euphoric computer technology and a dystopian metropolitan culture. Just the thrilling description of a globalised environment suggests the issues that Ib Michael will joust with. The Easter Islands bear the unmistakeable marks of an ominous trend in society that creates ticking ecological bombs, and so the remote exotic culture begins to resemble the polluted Copenhagen with glaring social differences that the main characters in the book come from. The larger and the smaller, closer world are brought together in this way; the story addresses the great diversity and it also continually and in all sorts of ways emphasises the similarities between phenomena and identities.  Ib Michael has always been attracted by what one could call a twin psychology: the almost unlimited but intense relations there are between two people who share a consciousness. The trilogy presents a detailed description of brother and sister and in The Emperor's Atlasthe two male protagonists are twins. But they are not identical. Their parents did their best to create differences. A fatal mistake. There are a lot of fatal mistakes in The Emperor's Atlas, which are both frightening and extremely entertaining

Nina lives happily with the inventive craftsman Kim and their son Lasse.  But she falls in love with Kim's brother, the ambitious architect Toke. Her mother-in-law, Gunvor, suspects goings-on but she says nothing; the suspicions she has are revealed in music and poetic interpretations of old Asian stories, which take on their own lives: the incarcerated imperial twins of the past and the woman they love anticipate the drama which will take place in the here and now.  However, it is not as easy as it appears to summarise the plot in this book since it develops in several different directions with strands that intertwine and jump backwards and forwards in time without warning. They even merge several times and show how modern scientific thought and future computer technology can create entirely new forms. Laptop computers and the latest technology are absolutely indispensable for Toke, who is on the run at the beginning of the book. We don’t find out why until later on, but the menacing, motley company he keeps around him provide for the entertainment and mystery until then. He has a murder contract taken out on himself in Japan and ends up in a ship that for good or ill appears to be the quintessence of the future. Toke only just manages to reject his past and throw off his mask, but he has an intuitive sense of the present. Eros is in the air, and as we know, passions can realise the impossible in humans.

The impossible or the not-yet-created have a part to play in the book’s consistent interest in the physical world (with glimpses of the metaphysical or should one write the potential, the utopian?). It's not for nothing that we are reminded, while reading, of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the quotation taken from Italo Calvino is right on the mark: “The Emperor's Atlas has this quality - it can show the shape of towns which as yet have neither shape nor name.” Ib Michael’s colourful narrative is a good depiction of the forms the future will take.  But it is also a new interpretation of the forms of the past, including a classic Danish love story, Steen Steensen Blicher’s Hosekræmmeren (The Hosier and His Daughter). There is still a chance to re-write history in the middle of this dystopia. Ib Michael does that in a less flamboyant way than in Kilroy Kilroyand in a more contained way than in the trilogy.  Somewhere you hear a familiar voice saying,“You read with increasing fascination, you feel yourself caught up in a net of interpretations”.

The article was first published i Danish literary Magazin 20, autumn 2001.