BOOK REVIEW

A Dystopian Novel from the Cold War

The novel Tellus 89 was written in the early 1980s with the Cold War, the peace movement and the broad popular protests against nuclear weapons as a backdrop.

In 1982 I published «Tellus 89», a dystopian novel. On the back cover of «Tellus 89» the publisher wrote:

This is Øivind H. Solheim’s first novel after the debut with “Stupet” in 1978. Here the author presents a highly current material: arms race, peace movement and nuclear war. The book is a future novel that predicts that the mass-destructive disaster happens at the end of this decade.

On November 11, 1982, the weekly newspaper Dag og Tid published this book review of Tellus 89 by Reidar Jensen:

When the Atomic Bomb Fell on Bergen

“On a sunny summer day in the year 1989, the plane alarm goes off in Bergen. A small dot appears, high above Haakonsvern and the runways at Flesland. A man waiting for the bus to town looks up.

Then comes the insane, stinging light. The fireball that grows and grows, that melts everything. World War III is here, after the Americans and the Russians thundered together in Iran, and after Minsk and Hanover are bombed by other missiles. The party performance in the European War Theater has finally started.

This is the highlight of Øivind H. Solheim’s novel “Tellus 89”. I will willingly admit that I was skeptical when I opened this book — as I feared a fashionable, but rather helpless Norwegian science fiction narrative, based on a market which in the autumn of 1982 is probably quite large, and which, according to the skeptic inside me, is still quite large. unfortunately can be threatening to applaud any of doomsday performances and “life is too tight” books, only For Peace and Against Bomb.

But my skepticism was put to shame. This is a good, lively, well-written book. Low-key in tone, and with an penetrating seriousness that never makes the subject flat — something it could easily have been if the author had been tempted to hit the big drum more and make a kind of Norwegian nuclear thriller. But the book is still obsessively intriguing in its construction — and it plays on several levels.

The author is also powerful and the transition between the everyday story he tells, about the young student and later the academic in Bergen and his life, and the trembling, world-historical tragedy that is behind it all the time.

Politically, the book is credible, among other things because it fully depicts the differences between the former and the current nuclear strategists, and you eventually get a freeze inside you:

This is how the whole thing can go. This is exactly how the war can break out. And just like that, it can then come to go with Norway, little Norway which in a kind of naive thanks for the Marshall aid is willing to do anything for American bombers to be able to get free range, which is so innocent in the worldview as that we also give the Peace Prize to Menachem Begin himself, as if to avoid April 9, 1940 — well, just April 9, 1940 — is willing to place ourselves as a piece of cheese in the middle of the strategic rat trap. And it is not at all certain that we, as in the book, will ever get a newspaper called “Peace and Future” and which — far too late, it seems — can reveal some of the plans that the strategists have come up with here.

Solheim has portrayed all this in a convincing way. He is also convincing when he portrays the main character and his life from the early 70s until the late 80s, while he is getting married, trying to make a bourgeois career, divorcing, slipping into the left, being apolitical, ending in his job, gets married, has children, discusses men’s and women’s issues, checks girls, reports books, gets a house.

All this could and should be flat and fashionable and non-binding — nowadays anyone can be both for women’s equality and for disarmament, without having to risk very much or have to think especially many new thoughts — but thanks to his language, and his quiet seriousness, the author gets ashore here too, without getting wet on his feet.

For he writes a true, poetic and quiet Nynorsk, Solheim — here are both rainy western summers and dew in the grass, next to the bomb, alienation and icy cold between people, the cold and the fear that made the great disaster possible, and this cold and the emptiness we sense on every single page, in the depiction of what leads up to the year 1989 and the nuclear war.

Even the actually somewhat surprising ending is good, and is believable. And this is not a very small achievement, because here the right doomsday writers usually slip out completely. Solheim does not.

I read this book in one go, and I hope other readers do the same. Here, Det Norske Samlaget has found a really good author, from the undergrowth of writers in Norway!”

Øivind H. Solheim is a novel author and a nature photographer from Norway who loves writing fiction, poetry, essays, and articles helping others understand life, other humans, and themselves. He has published six novels, two non-fiction books, and a poetry book.

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Link to excerpts from Tellus 89: