Revisiting the Past

By : Bo Tao Michaëlis

In his latest book, De gode søstre (The Good Sisters), Leif Davidsen has shaken an exciting and hair-raising cocktail, using strong ingredients from the political thriller’s traditional bar cabinet.

Teddy, a lecturer at the University of Copenhagen, is a middle-aged, mildly alcoholic and tarnished intellectual whose academic future is already a thing of the past, his career as such being firmly anchored in an obsolete and out-of-date period, because his specialist subject was the final days of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, he is still a charming man; quick at making witty retorts, intrepid and seductive, always prepared for a little fling, an affair or a heavy flirt, with beautiful women following in his wake. However, when we meet him at the beginning of Leif Davidsen’s thriller, The Good Sisters, his latest and somewhat younger wife has recently left him. Teddy has just returned from a study trip to what used to be the Iron Curtain’s Eastern Europe and there, under strange circumstances, he has met an unknown woman who claims to be his half-sister. Their father was on the wrong side in the Second World War, i.e. he was a Nazi, and ended up as a refugee in Yugoslavia, where from his time in a German uniform he had managed to acquire wife number two. Back home in Denmark, Teddy already has other siblings, including an older sister who is a confirmed Marxist and who is also employed by the university. She too guards a secret concerning their father, who was branded as a traitor during the German occupation of Denmark. But these secrets are dangerous; they are connected with both a Nazi and Communist past, with espionage, and with a mole in the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And while Teddy was in Eastern Europe, a Dane was murdered there, possibly because he was mistaken for our anti-hero, the devil-may care Teddy.
   A policeman called Per Toftlund is called into the corridors of the secret service, where he joins the sallow characters with their typical spy trade disguises, in order to investigate Teddy’s involvement in the case. Toftlund is Teddy’s diametrical opposite. He is happily married to a successful cultural journalist, who is shortly to give birth to their child. He is a faithful husband in his loving marriage and deeply rooted in a secure, respectable middle-class world, which bears all the material trappings of well-to-do aspirations. But Toftlund too is exposed to dangers from various angles in the form of an unfortunate female colleague and a number of secret agents in the big bad world outside Denmark. One murder leads to another, and they cost the lives of people in cities far from Copenhagen.
   Leif Davidsen has shaken an exciting and hair-raising cocktail, using strong ingredients from the political thriller’s traditional bar cabinet. In a similar way to the technique used by Graham Greene in The Third Man, Davidsen allows Teddy and Per to confront each other in a latently inciting discussion on morality and human values. Whether to live on the fringe of existence as an academic bohemian with changing partners and alliances, or whether to accept a normal existence and choose an ordinary conservative, slightly boring everyday life. But Davidsen supplies us with his own version of this tantalising and dialectical conflict. He does so by employing a recurrent theme in his novels: the idea of Denmark as a country asleep in its own world of dreams, officially oblivious to the essential fact of playing an important role in both the hot and cold wars of the major political theatre. This has often had tragic consequences for insignificant people whose ethereal idealism and simple faith led them to follow the misanthropic crusades of a terrible ideology, be it Communism or Nazism. Because in Davidsen’s world so-called good intentions are always transformed into terror and holocaust when people allow themselves to be lured into the false conception that the end justifies the means. Towards the conclusion of his book Davidsen appears to praise Per Toftlund’s middle-class values, which clearly form a contrast to a more panoramic, but also more complicated political outlook. That is the kind that Teddy possesses with irony and elegance. Neither pure in heart nor soul, but as the thriller’s heroic anti-hero, who may lose almost everything he possesses in his own world, but certainly gains unlimited sympathy in our world as readers. That is what they are like, these proud and vulnerable men far from the green lawns of suburbia. Their charm is somewhat similar to the smoke from a cigarette, momentarily intoxicating but never satisfying for long. And yet the smell of such smoke gets into your clothes, like a wistful and toasted odour of something that resembled momentary romance or passion, which is sometimes brought about by coincidence. At least, in the world of the thriller…

The article was first published in Danish literary Magazine 20, autumn 2001.

Translated by Carl King