Sick, twisted and realistic

"Children's Island" is a Swedish novel by P.C. Jersild. I've only read the Swedish original, so I can't vouch for the American translation. This review, for all its worth, is therefore based on the original version.

I read "Children's Island" already as a kid. I shouldn't have. It's not a children's story. Rather, it's a sick, twisted and bizarre novel for adults. Even the contents are very "adult". My father mistook the novel for a children's story, probably because of its appealing and childish cover (different from the American cover pictured here). In fact, many of Jersild's novels are macabre, and border the surrealistic. There is also a streak of perverted sexuality running through the stories. "Children's Island" is no exception.

The main character of the novel, Reine, is a 10 year old kid. He runs away from home, and meets a string of absurd characters, most of them adults. For a while, he gets a job at a kind of undertakers' firm, run by an old refugee from the Soviet Union. He gets in trouble with his mother's lover, a real bum named Stig Utler who apparently hates kids. Later, Reine joins a hypocritical, left-wing theatre company, who talk a lot about "solidarity" and "anti-fascism" while actually being fiercely competitive. Reine also encounters a strange subculture known as "raggare", often seen as menacing when the novel was written (today, they are usually considered harmless and quite cool). The "raggare" are criminal and cultish, vandalize an amusement park and carry out a strange ritual during which they demolish Reine's bike. Reine then meets a bald-headed young woman and her old lover, who turns out to be crazy, and attempts to torture Reine in a gynaecologists' chair! During the final part of the story, our childhood hero meets a group of criminal boys at a boat in the Baltic Sea. They consider the clean-cut Reine to be "upper class" and steals his toy monkey (he eventually gets it back).

As for Reine himself, he is obsessed with perverse sexuality and frequently delusional. His private thoughts are more like those of a disturbed teenager or adult than those of a child. Reine comes across as a quite unsympathetic character, a kind of petty little sociopath who hates his parents, wants to become world dictator and believes that he is the only person in the universe. He is convinced that UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold is his real father. Despite being so young, Reine is also quite street smart and something of a survival artist. And no, he's definitely not upper class!

"Children's Island" was first published in 1976. The plot is set in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, during the summer of 1975. When I re-read the novel this week, I was struck by the fact that many places described in the novel still look exactly the same, 35 years later! Sweden seems to have been caught in a time warp. Does nothing ever change around here? Despite the absurd character of much of the storyline, "Children's Island" nevertheless gives a very realistic impression (at least to Swedish readers). I haven't bothered checking all of the places, but I know that the flower shop mentioned in the novel still exists (or at least there is a flower shop at exactly the same spot). Incidentally, Children's Island is also a real place, although not an actual island. It's a summer camp area north of Stockholm. (Poor Reine never reaches it.)

I'm not sure what the point of "Children's Island" really is. Is Reine Jersild's alter ego? Is he a symbol of wayward children? Is the story a critique of adult-children relationships in the post-Woodstock West? The novel ends with Reine apparently going back to school and his grey, everyday existence, making you wonder whether his odyssey through Stockholm was some kind of dream.

Honestly, I didn't get this one. But then, Jersild's other oeuvres are even stranger!

Stay tuned...