The Exception

The Danish writer Christian Jungersen's novel The Exception was a best seller in Europe, and it has the stripped-down prose and suspense elements one would expect in a popular genre novel. Less expected is Jungersen's fascination with the banalities of office politics. One couldn't imagine Jason Bourne, for example, in a slow burn over someone leaving the break room door open. Also unexpected are some rather long governmental reports on genocide and the nature of evil, but even these make for mostly interesting reading because Jungersen perfectly captures the dry yet urgent tone of the do-gooder bureaucrat.

The novel tells the story of four women who work in something called the D.C.I.G., or the Danish Center for Information on Genocide. Immersion in the details of mass murder would put anyone on edge, even when they work in a cozy office in the well-ordered capital of a small liberal state. This group of earnest and decent women seem to have been waiting for a reason to go at each other's throats, and when three of the four women receive threatening emails, the women appear outwardly calm, but inside they're completely unhinged. The director of the center reminds the women that advocacy groups like theirs receive threats all the time, but the women almost immediately begin to suspect each other. At first we're convinced they've lost their minds, that some Serbian thugs lurking in the dark streets of Copenhagen are much more likely suspects, but Jungersen's narrative discourse is insistent, and we come to suspect the women as well.

The narrative point of view shifts between the four women in free indirect style, so we know the women's suspicions are unfounded, and yet we also know that we're not getting the most personal thoughts of the characters. Getting caught in the same uncertainty and small-bore paranoia as the main characters can be irritating at times; one longs for an office skeptic, or at least for someone with a sense of humor. However, gradually Jungersen convinces us that the evil isn't some abstract and historically distant quality--surely the Nazis couldn't cast their spell on a Western democracy again--but something grounded in the everyday experience of presumably rational, educated people. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that Jungersen was suggesting that bourgeois identity itself is responsible for murderous impulses. That's how grim the novel's ethical sense turns out to be.

The turning point of the novel occurs when one of the women makes an informed and reasoned ethical choice (in the Kant's sense of the ethical, not Badiou's sense). However, the moment of moral clarity passes. The denouement follows soon afterward, and it's played out in the conventional thriller manner. At that point we learn the ultimate source of the evil, and it isn't entirely a surprise. The Exception isn't a riddle narrative like The Usual Suspects or Momento, so there's no pleasurable jolt of recognition, only a creepy and unsettling image of domestic tranquility in a small Copenhagen flat. In fact, in its grim, pessimistic way, the novel ends up as an amnesia narrative, with the truth lurking just below the surface of things. At the end, we're only ostensibly in a post-Srebrenica Europe. In a sense the final setting of the novel is Bonn, West Germany, circa 1957, when the Economic Miracle had showered high-quality consumer goods over the complacent and forgetful residents of the Bundesrepublik and everything seemed perfectly fine.