The Sharks by Jens Bjørneboe

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Haiene

Translator – Esther Greenleaf Mürer

Source – Personal copy

I have been a fan of ship-based books over the years.  I’ve recently been looking at some of Joseph Conrad’s ship novels to read but then remembered I had this book by a writer I have been meaning to read for a number of years.  Jens Bjørneboe is one of those writers whose own life story sounds like an epic novel. Childhood spent in bed, then fleeing to Sweden in World War II to avoid forced labour camp.  Falling for a Jewish German woman gave him a huge love of German Culture.  Add to this drinking and depression, and we have a man who died too young. This was his last novel and maybe his best-known work.  But he has a trilogy as well about the evil inherent in the human race called The History of Bestiality that like this book, has been published by  Norvik press this is one of those small presses that should be better known they have brought out a lot of Selma Lagerlöf books The first woman to win the Nobel Literature prize and maybe a great pick for Woman in Translation month Next Month.

The Greeks called him Poseidon, and in very ancient times also Psyche, who only later became a goddess – the human soul, the higher, unearthly love, énere ennobled – I could almost say: Holy Venus. (It occurs to me that Sancta Venere has been forced to lend her name to those diseases which medical science calls ‘venereal”, which in shipping offices the world over are referred to as ‘self-inflicted’ — and which were unfortunately not unknown on board our own lovely white bark.) But it’s not Psyche or the sublimated Venus we shall discuss here; it is the violent, brutal, and mighty Neptune, lord of abysses and deeps, author of the passions.

We shall look a bit more closely at how mythology, the clear childhood dreams of humanity, describes him. Who says that our reason sees further into the abyss?

The sea is all around them, or as it is called poseidon

 

The Sharks is a book that captures a world that, when the book is set, maybe was dying.  Sailing around the world on a ship, the book follows the voyage of the Neptune from Manila Via Marseille to Rio De Janeiro.  The book is told by one of the ship’s crew, Peder Jensen, the second officer, as they sail in 1899, with a new century dawning and the crew splitting before the narrator’s eyes. The book is told through episodic perspectives of various members of the crew, from the Mate to the carpenter to the symbolic sharks that always follow the ship.  A crew member whose brother was killed by the captain, a chinaman the cook who likes and loves his knives maybe too much. A cannibal.  This all adds to the pressure pot that is a ship too old for its time, maybe, so when there is a mutiny, and they end up shipwrecked, it has all been simmering through Peder’s eyes.

All seamen who have sailed in tropical waters hate and despise and curse the lovely brutes. Lovely? — Yes. Seen from above or from the side they are unsurpassed in their beauty. It is only from the front that the shark is ugly; but then it’s as hideous as all hell’s devils together – with its stupid, idiotic little pig eyes and its loathsome gape of a vastness almost contrary to nature, crammed with the sharp, serrate teeth which grow and grow and fall out and are continually renewed from within. All its life the shark endlessly produces new teeth, over and over again, in a few hours — as if the whole meaning of existence were to bring forth teeth, which in time will be spat out and sink to the bottom. Where it has been possible to explore the sea bed in shark-rich waters, the banks have proved to consist in great part of such worn-out sharks’ teeth.

The sharks following them in the water have a double meaning

Bjørneboe had a real thing, it seems, about good and evil in his books, so there are a lot of things here, like the sharks and the various origins of the characters, that also have a lot to do with the perception of good and evil. There are also nods to classic books like Moby-Dick; a couple of the characters, like the captain, share traits with Melville’s characters. But there are also nods to other ship tales like the Bounty: a crew pushed to the edge, a mutiny.  It also bridges some of the gaps in Conrad’s early years with tales like The Children of the Sea (I won’t use the old title!) or the autobiographical Shadow Line, both set on sailing boats like this, but earlier.  In his Typhoon, set a few years after this on a steamship, the book is not just a boat but a boat on the cusp of a new century, a new world, a new way of sailing, even.  A great intro to a writer I’d like to get to know a little better.  Have you read this book or any other by Jens Bjørneboe, or a favourite ship-based book?