<p> Danish novelist Peter Hoeg turns to rebellious orphans
</p>
<p>By Paul Gray
</p>
<p> The publishing sleeper of 1993 proved to be, rather surprisingly,
a translation from the Danish. Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of
Snow enchanted reviewers and book buyers alike with its suspense--a wise woman detective tries to track down a child's murderer--and its eerie rendering of the landscapes and atmosphere
of Greenland. This intense but accessible philosophical thriller
spurred considerable interest in what Hoeg, 37, would do for
an encore.
</p>
<p> The first answer is that he has done something quite different
and not nearly as engaging. Borderliners (Farrar, Straus & Giroux;
277 pages; $22) opens with a question that may seem, to most
readers, groan inducing: "What is time?" The query comes from
a narrator whose name is Peter (a detail he drops a third of
the way through his story). Now a grown man, he looks back on
himself at age 14, an orphan who, after a brief lifetime in
various institutions, has unexpectedly been sent to Biehl's
Academy, a prestigious school on the outskirts of Copenhagen.
</p>
<p> Peter recognizes Biehl's as an improvement over the previous
places to which he was assigned. There is adequate food, heat
in the buildings, and 26 teachers responsible for only 240 students.
But there are occasional cuffings for rule infractions or poor
lesson performance, plus the dictatorship of clocks and bells:
"It was not just the classes and assembly that began on the
dot. There was also a study period and the meals and the chores
and voluntary sports and lights-out and when you had to get
up if you were to manage a proper wash..."
</p>
<p> Unhappy with this regimen, Peter finds a covert ally in Katarina,
a girl two classes ahead of him who has lost both her parents
over the past year and grown understandably rebellious as a
result. And then Peter is given responsibility for August, a
new arrival who has murdered both his parents. "He is chaos,"
Katarina says, wondering why August has been admitted. "If their
plan is order, why have they taken him?"
</p>
<p> Peter and Katarina set out to discover what purpose really lies
behind the discipline under which they are forced to live. He
gains what he thinks is a crucial insight when he hears Biehl
mention Darwinism, the survival of the fittest, and then add
that "we alleviate its consequences." Peter realizes that his
classmates, saved and damned, have not grasped Biehl's comment:
"Understanding is something one does best when one is on the
borderline."
</p>
<p> It becomes clear to Peter and Katarina, and perhaps to August,
although it is hard to tell, given his autistic demeanor, that
their condition as castoffs, as people on the borderline of
normal, makes them particularly wise, so they must fight the
mentors who "could single out those who were on the borderline,
who could not finish the tests on time, and help them up."
</p>
<p> Their joint rebellion produces some narrative fireworks but
also a few nagging questions in the aftermath. August and Katarina
suffer unhappy fates for their refusal to be drawn into any
plan that would include them in what passes for a regular life:
he dies, she vanishes. Peter fares better, if a strong penchant
for pomposity can be considered an improvement. He is now married
and has a daughter (he calls them "the woman" and "the child")
and writes things like "The life of every person contains something
of significance" and "Nature is a blessing, an opportunity for
growth that has been bestowed on all living things."
</p>
<p> For all its avant-garde mannerisms, Borderliners seems shackled
to the time it records, the early 1970s, when anarchy and madness
were heralded as liberating and the only crazy people were the
ones running things. It would take a better novel to make that
