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In the Danish author’s uncannily prescient novel, first published in 1969, the year is 1973 and Bruno works as a fiction editor for a popular weekly magazine; his talent for generating story ideas makes him indispensable to his authors. Invited for dinner at the home of one of them, Bruno finds himself seated next to a woman named Jenny, a struggling ballet dancer with a gloomy aspect and no sense of humour. Bruno is drawn to her nonetheless, and finds himself inventing stories about her. The following day, he is admitted to hospital to undergo tests: a small lump on the side of his neck has raised some concerns. Bruno cannot help feeling the two events are somehow connected.
It comes as little surprise to Bruno when he learns he has cancer. The doctor in charge of his case, Josef Ackerman, offers a choice: he can either undergo the gruelling and fallible radiotherapy currently prescribed for his disease, or he can become a pioneer in a new, radically experimental treatment programme in which patients are “frozen down”, remaining in a state of suspended animation until such time as medical science has advanced sufficiently to offer a cure.
We know already that Bruno will opt for the latter – there would be no story if he did not. And when he is awoken 22 years later in 1995, we are unsurprised to discover that the future in which he finds himself is no paradise. True, Bruno’s cancer has been cured, and if he is chronologically speaking a middle-aged man, in biological terms he remains a sprightly 33. Indeed, while Bruno has been “down”, the idea that someone might have two ages has become relatively commonplace. But so has a system in which the near-immortality achieved through “all-life” – now the world’s most pressing social and political flashpoint – must be worked and paid for, while those who opt for “now-life” and the natural death that comes with it are forced to mortgage their vital organs to maintain the affluent lifestyles offered as a reward for not taking the treatment. This brave new society is beginning to disintegrate under the pressure of supply and demand.
At first glance, such dystopian trappings might seem overfamiliar. Like Orwell’s Winston Smith, Bruno is both a prisoner of the nightmare and its idealistic proving ground; Ackerman is likewise doomed to become a victim of the system he helped to create in which doctors, together with the tech corporations that employ them, wield the most power. Mass surveillance is universal, and as the new regime becomes increasingly repressive, so previous modes of being are rendered literally unthinkable through the outlawing of the language that might be used to express them. “The old language gradually became full of meaningless words,” Ackerman explains to Bruno in what would seem to be a direct reference to Orwell’s Newspeak. “Boring words, which just upset people.” Yet this caustic and surprisingly tender novel is considerably more than yet another whimsical variant on Nineteen Eighty‑Four.
Anders Bodelsen, who was part of the Danish new wave, uses the armature of science fiction to frame urgent questions about the present: the invasive nature of capitalism, our attitude to ageing and above all the difference between “life” and “eternity”. There is a strain of dark humour running through the novel that makes it enjoyably entertaining in spite of the grim reality being portrayed, while Bruno’s reflections on the losses suffered through the pursuit of an impossible goal embody genuine pathos.
“A man who is going to die is given two alternatives: that he should live for a while and write his story; or die, wake up again, and hope there would be even better stories to be told.” Freezing Point maintains a running meta-commentary from Bruno on the art of fiction, and this subtly experimental novel, in which an apparently simple language advances complex conceits, has more than a flavour of Kafka about it. Powerfully recurring symbols – skating on thin ice, Jenny’s affinity with the mechanical doll in the ballet Coppélia, the lyrics of the Beatles song Hey Jude – add to the dreamlike atmosphere and sense of deja vu.
Most poignant of all is the fact that this novel – like Bruno – has itself been resurrected decades into its own future. Some references are jarring, even problematic; the realm of its present seems to us now like an alien, analogue, depleted world. It is also a simpler one, more refreshingly tactile and – in spite of its cold war anxieties – less threatening. The pressurised, claustrophobic reality Bruno wakes up to feels uncannily like our own. Freezing Point is a surprising and original novel of ideas: thought-provoking, inventive, even frightening. It is also a sustained and beautiful piece of imaginative writing, thoroughly deserving of its second chance at life.
