Down and out in Benidorm

Øivind Hånes' tale of angst fails to hit home

Nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Award

Øivind Hånes
Pirolene i Benidorm ('The Golden Orioles in Benidorm')
Gyldendal N

By Gabriella Håkansson

It was an odd choice to nominate Øivind Hånes' novel Pirolene i Benidorm ('The Golden Orioles in Benidorm') for the Nordic Council Literature Prize.

Without a doubt, all the bizarre features of Gordon, the main character, are one of the strengths of this novel: he is a passionate birdwatcher, he builds miniature models of nuclear power stations, he invents a robotic dance and he lives on processed cheese that he eats straight from the tube. As a figure in literature, he is very definitely an anomaly in Nordic prose, a genre that likes to write about depressed, alienated characters if they are self-destructive or passive, but rarely permits their anguish to take more eccentric forms. The occasional exception can be found in novels by Stig Sæterbakken and Jan Henrik Swan, who deal with obsessed collectors and insane toilet kings, but then these two writers are very different from Øivind Hånes; unfortunately, one of the more crippling shortcomings of Pirolene i Benidorm is the absence of both psychological resonance and linguistic temperament.

The story of the mentally deep-frozen Gordon, who goes to Benidorm to sell the family time-share unit and meets sex slave Tatjana, feels oddly superficial. It is as if the eccentricities are just stuck on. The language of the novel, or more specifically, the style, does not match the characters at all. While alienation is one of the main themes of the novel, it is the narrator's voice that actually feels alienated. I find that I keep listening for the lonely despair and passionate obsession that the book is about, but I hear nothing. The voice simply does not hit home.

Could it be because the structure of the novel is too sketchy? The first two-thirds consist   of cuts between two parallel narratives: Gordon's childhood and his stay in Benidorm. In the opening scene, we meet Gordon at age eleven and his bad-boy classmate Tony. Gordon shoots a thrush with an airgun in order to impress Tony. He is successful. Gordon is allowed to hang out with Tony, but the episode with the bird creates an indelible trauma. Gordon has always been passionate about birds. Now he feels as if he has shot himself.

The next time we meet Gordon, he is an alienated zombie drifting round Benidorm. Something inside him really died when he shot the thrush. Nothing in life feels real anymore.

The skyscrapers were giant robots gone astray; gigantic, intractable machines of unknown origin that had simply been left behind somewhere out in eternity.

People disgust Gordon.

He shuddered and had a strange idea that these were figures without past or future; they were open holes gaping in despair toward a globe that was forever spinning away from them.

In one way, the novel is slightly reminiscent of The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen. In the story, a small boy gets a shard of a mirror in his eye and lives a non-life in the ice palace of the Snow Queen until a girl he knew as a child comes and removes the piece of mirror a decade later. But instead of the childhood friend, in this novel it is a young sex slave from Kaliningrad who thaws Gordon out, and if the initial two-thirds of the novel felt vague and unclear, this is where the plot suddenly speeds up -- not that it is any help. The theme of an older man who must save a young woman (and thereby save himself) feels so -- how can I put this -- worn out? No, while Øivind Hånes' novel is different and original in many ways, on the whole -- and considered as a candidate for the most prestigious literary award in the Nordic countries -- it is far too fragmented and superficial.

Gabriella Håkansson is a writer and literary critic.

Translated by English Centre/ Monica Sonck