May the Norse be with you!
Finally a great Norwegian SciFi novel, to join the ranks of the many exceptionally good Norwegian SciFi novels.
May the Norse be with you!, by Kjell Magne Bondevik, Space Norsk!, 787 pp, 900kr, January 2019
As readers of the BRB are so painfully aware, the under-representation of Norwegians in popular world culture is the most important issue in modern life and politics. While Americans, Russians, and Chinese eat more than their share of international attention, the true heroes of global development and culture get left in the cold. Did an American, Russian or Chinese ever invent the paper clip? No, they did not! But try to find that fact represented on popular television.
As such, it is with a mixture of relief and delight that I hold in my hands Kjell Magne Bondevik's first novel, May the Norse be with you! (the exclamation mark is an integral part of the title). Who could not identify with the lovable hero, Mell K. Vikebond, a daring young leader from the faraway North Star on his quest to save the universe from the hegemonic United Stars? With his mixture of derring-do and humility, he truly lives up to the novel's promise of "excitement and tension."
The action begins with a coruscating prologue in which a daring fleet of explorers from the plucky North Star discover the planets that later coalesce to form the United Stars, although this discovery remains cruelly unacknowledged by the Emperors of the United Stars.
Time passes, and the reader is suddenly catapulted into a desolate North Star landscape: formerly the greatest planet in any galaxy, the North Star has been reduced to a parody of its earlier glory, with the desperate inhabitants surviving on a diet of boiled animal heads and dry fish.
Even in such dire straits, the population retains its essentially peace-loving, diplomatic, deeply spiritual nature, the sober Yin to counterbalance the novel's rampaging Yang: the gluttonous and avaricious United Stars Empire. Ultimately, only Mell K. can redeem the universe from the steadily-encroaching powers of darkness.
All of the above makes for a thrilling unputdownable read, but the cleverest part of the novel is when the reader is led to see, halfway through the novel, that the entire plot is in fact a metaphor for real international affairs! I won't spoil the fun by revealing who the "United Stars" are in our own mundane earthly politics, but let's just say that once I saw the connection I couldn't help but be reaffirmed in all my views about the international order. This wonderful novel, then, is 100% successful on two different levels: as a parable for why the Norwegian Way is the only right-thinking approach to international affairs, and as a rip-roaring yarn of interplanetary adventure.
Godkjent indeed! Young Bondevik undoubtedly has a star-studded future ahead of him.