Kerstin Ekman, Forest of Hours

Kerstin Ekman's The Forest Of Hours is the tale of a troll that, in the process of saving a giant trapped beneath a fallen tree, finds himself imbricated in the world of humans. As a supernatural being, his life span is quite long -- something like 500 years. We find him as a young creature in the northern Swedish Skule Forest, sometime in the Middle Ages. As he talks with children and then adults, he begins to learn their habits and practices, and eventually begins to "pass" for human. Wearing this disguise, as it were, he engages is the full range of human endeavors, from religion and science to sex and murder.

Skord starts out barely able to put two thoughts together, and ends up an (occasionally) famous doctor and chymist (sic). While at the outset he is able to effortlessly send his soul into the body of passing animals, by the end he has lived long enough to enter the Enlightenment, and in so doing outlives the age of magical thinking. He becomes a product of his surroundings to the point that he repudiates, in effect, his own being.

The novel's great strength is its evocation of the landscape of the forest, described with unusual precision. We do not read of "trees" and "undergrowth," but of aspens and white moss. This clarity of location becomes the setting for sweeping historical scope; it is the only constant in the novel. One passage serves to demonstrate the precision of the prose and also to give a sense of the tone of the novel. After a bloody scene, in which the protagonist has joined a band of outlaws, we read:

The light rose over the crest of the hill, the frost still lay on the moss and tiny droplets of ice hung like buds in the bright green bilberry plants There were bodies and clothes and bundles holding stained pewter and salt-encrusted hams; there were knives and straps and clasps, hair, blood, guts, liver -- there was no one at all, and no one was riding through the forest.

This starts out sounding like a tacky Halmark poem, and then the camera moves, as it were, and reveals the scene of horror, all the more effective for the soft setup.

Ultimately, like so many books about monsters and other such beings, this is a book about the nature of humanity. Skord's "passing" as human allows him to serve as an outsider within. He becomes, though, more and more human in his thoughts and goals, as a product of his adoptive context. The overlap of issues of race and of humanity come together when Skord comes across an old acquaintance named Gugo, a native of the Caribbean now working as a servant in Sweden. Skord soliloquizes to Gugo while the latter is unconscious. He seems to be speaking at first of Gugo's race, but then we realize he is talking, of course, about his own potential humanity which, in effect, undermines our own:

May I ask what makes you so sure that you are a human being -- quite apart from this rather superficial resemblace that makes you hang around human beings rather than a herd of pigs? You find swine distasteful. They grunt, they potter about. They guzzle rotten potatoes and bits of dead bodies..

I have seen people do that.

Are people human?

As like each other as leaves are.

Look at the leaves. Can you not in the blink of an eye eliminate their similarities? See the networks of nerves, spreading and curling and twisting? Not a single one has the same pattern as the next. Spots, rust. Dots, warts; jagged edges, shifting colours. Dry rustling. Long, drifting waves. Spreading and shrinking. Leaves.

Are they leaves?

I don't know.