Jens Christian Grondahl: An Altered Light

Reviewed by SIOBHAN HARVEY

In an age in which we worship youthful excess, Irene Beckman is not your conventional heroine. The protagonist of Danish writer Jens Christian Grondahl's gently gripping novel is the 56-year-old wife of a bank manager, a mother of two and a woman with a pampered and seemingly uneventful past.

Yet she is haunted by this advice: "If you don't say no to something, you have already said yes." It is only now, almost too late in life, that she realises that the cosseted security she has always known has acted like a self-imposed prison.

In not saying no to anything or anyone, she has entrapped herself: in a loveless marriage with husband Martin and in a stifled relationship with a mother, Vivian, she barely knows. The failures of her past also fold about her like a straitjacket: the unspoken death of her twin brother at birth; the years spent as an ignorant au pair in 1960s Paris while the city raged about her; the young lover she once took.

As the novel plays each painful realisation out, the media airs the horrors of the Balkan conflict, and those closest to her stand resolutely up to their own tragedies: her daughter ends a sour relationship, her infertile son and his wife inter-racially adopt twins.

These are gentle, despairing moments, reflections of the novel's ability to move you. They do not end there. Martin delivers desperate news at a family gathering; Vivian undergoes a life-threatening operation, leaving Irene a sealed envelope that details secrets about her father.

These events act as catalysts, transforming Irene into a phoenix, a contained yet powerful force that rises anew. Purposefully, she crosses Europe in search of her origins and, as an act of the most dangerous resistance, on a whim picks up an uncommunicative hitchhiker.

The resonances of this book are not found in works of literature, but are hidden in films by great European directors, particularly Krzysztof Kieslowski's sparkling The Double Life of Veronique.\ For Grondahl (who trained to be a film director) strives on the page to be the auteur he so nearly became, controlling the reader's vision, persuading their mind to a rich picture of events, adding humanity and hubris to staple plot ideas such as relationship difficulties.

It's this power of intervention that makes An Altered Light beautiful and fresh.

Text, $35.00

* Siobhan Harvey is an Auckland writer and tutor.