[ book tip by Tea Hvala ] Johanna Sinisalo: Not Before Sundown (Peter Owen Ltd, London, 2003)

Translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas.

Since its release in 2000, Johanna Sinisalo's novel Not Before Sundown has received international acclaim. By November 2008, it had been translated into twelve languages and received several awards, including the 2000 Finlandia Award for best novel and the international James Tiptree Jr. Award for best gender-exploring science fiction in 2004. While Finnish audiences have known Johanna Sinisalo as a fantasy and science fiction writer of stories, television scenarios and comics since the late eighties, international readers have only recently been introduced to her intriguing speculations on what it means to be human - and other than human.

Sinisalo's relativisation of human / animal dichotomy in Not Before Sundown (released as Troll – A Love Story in 2004 for the American market) is highly interesting and controversial. Thematically, it can be compared to such masterpieces as Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) or Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber (2000) even though Sinisalo's speculation is not as consistent, at least not for those readers who seek science fiction for its imaginative and political strength.

The plot is centered around a young, gay Finnish photographer of 'angelic beauty', Mikael or Angel, who finds a small, humanoid creature in the courtyard of his apartment block. It is a young troll, known from Finnish mythology as a demonic wild beast or hybrid like the werewolf. In the Finnland of this novel, the creature was officially classified in 1907 as an endangered mammal species and named Felipithicus trollius. Mikael names the cub Pessi and takes him home. Despite his genuine interest in this feral yet adorably cute creature, the first-person narrator does not hide the fact that he has closed the animal into his apartment largely because he is lonely and in need of new aesthetic stimuli. Living in a highly competitive and consumption-orientated society in which all his interactions with other people are reduced to (financial, material, emotional, sexual) transactions, Mikael's care for the wounded and helpless troll cub seems to be the perfect compensation – and the reason why, at this point in the story, the reader is likely to support Mikael's moving, if ethically arguable, decision.

Mikael's attempt to domesticate the troll is paralleled by a sub-plot. His neighbour, Palomita, is a victim of trafficking (a 'mail-bride'): she was sold to a possessive and violent Finnish businessman who exploits her for domestic work and sexual services. She rebels by befriending Mikael who becomes a small window on the outside world for her. Her situation politicizes Sinisalo's understanding of what is implied in the human/animal dichotomy since Palomita is also kept as a pet. Her and Pessi's positions mirror each other throughout the novel: while she is acquiring other techniques of opposition (for instance, she fantasizes about Mikael when she is forced to have sex with her master) and gradually gains strength (in the final chapters she decides to escape), the cute cub is transforming into a threatening and eventually murderous male troll.

When Mikael realizes that keeping a wild animal indoors is not only illegal but also unethical, he decides to free the troll. He finds out that it is too late – Finnish winter has become too harsh for the domesticated animal that is now used to room temperature and has, moreover, become attached to its 'father' or 'alpha male', the urban substitute for the troll pack leader. The transgression of the human/animal divide is mutual: Mikael becomes attached to Pessi and finds 'his' smell sexually arousing. What he doesn't notice is the extent to which he has suddenly become attractive to his friends. Ever since he has acquired troll's scent, everyone desires him. Angel is no longer able to control his sexual urge and (ab)uses his friends and lovers in sexual (and other) ways in order to find medicines and food for Pessi. At this point, the novel seems to suggest that both animal and Mikael's same-sex sexuality are driven exclusively by pheromones. While this clearly serves Sinisalo's anti-deterministic attempt to relativise the human/animal dichotomy, the 'side-effect' is a both deterministic and stereotypical view on male homosexuality. Since Mikael is initially portrayed as a very sensitive, caring man, the reader might at this point begin to wonder what is Sinisalo's view on masculinity. After all, Mikael's Other is not any wild beast: it is the animal in which Finnish mythology has 'stored' everything that was rejected and forbidden by Catholicism and Protestantism.

Mikael's research about trolls relies on 'authentic' internet and library sources. He collects information from folklore, nature journals, newspapers, research diaries, encyclopedias, etc. These 'quotes' are presented in very short chapters that alternate between Mikael's first-person accounts and those of several other characters: Palomita, his friends and lovers. Sinisalo's cut-and-paste technique is employed with great skill: 'scientific' sources are mixed with Mikael's comments and personal observations so brilliantly that this science fiction novel reads as realistic literature based on 'verifiable' sources until the very end.

Johanna Sinisalo has also successfully subverted some of the science fiction genre conventions. Usually, monstrous, hybrid, and other strange beings in science fiction acquire features of humanity only when they encounter an intelligent human entrepreneur (the narrator) who is willing to accept their 'otherness'. However, the human narrator is rarely changed or 'othered' in this encounter. In Not Before Sundown, the troll is initially humanized and becomes a demonic creature only after his master (or the reader's entrepreneur) has become monstrous himself. After Pessi murders one of Mikael's lovers, they both flee into the woods - violence expels them from the reign of human ethics and society. If Mikael's humanity was defined by his respect of the social contract and his condemnation of violence, then Sinisalo's re-installation of the human/animal or culture/nature dichotomy positions him (and Pessi) on the animal side. While animal is, in this new context, still a subordinate and less valued category than human, the novel suggests that human is no different. In the last pages, the reader is exposed to the fact that adult trolls in the woods have learned violence from men: they have stolen arms and seem to be preparing to defend their territory against mens' further intrusion. In this new dichotomous constellation, it comes as no surprise that Mikael is accepted into the society of trolls - they too seem to perceive him as an animal.

Not Before Sundown quite successfully deconstructs - and reconstruct - the the human/animal dichotomy. However, Sinisalo's treatment of sexuality is highly problematic because it reduces male same-sex relations to a 'mindless fuck' in which there is no place for ethics and fantasies. In Foucault's words, no place for 'sexual intelligence'. It also subscribes to the popular idea that sex is not a socially conditioned activity but rather a natural and constraint-free 'refuge' from society. Furthermore, it can be read as a sociobiologist legitimation of physical violence as a 'natural' male characteristic.

Apart from the very significant sub-plot about Palomita's sexual slavery, the novel does not address sexual difference and yet it has been awarded for its 'gender-exploring' qualities. In my view, rather than dealing with 'gender' in the Anglo-American sense, this novel speaks about 'gender' as it was understood in French before feminism's critique: as le genre humain or humanity reduced to male population. Sinisalo's exploration of masculinity in relation to violence and the ways in which violence is sanctioned in society is provocative to the extent that it is based on controversial social theories: her book seems to argue that without Rousseau's social contract, men become Hobbes's wolves – or for that matter trolls – to one another. But if trolls are learning human techniques of territorial and armed defense, Johanna Sinisalo perhaps also suggests that her novel is mistakenly perceived as a work of social or science fiction that necessarily reflects reality. In fact, when read as an aesthetic rather than political representation of social reality, Not Before Sundown is without doubt a stylistically consistent and praise-worthy novel.

[ book info ] Sinisalo, Johanna: Not Before Sundown. (Book language: Finnish) Peter Owen Ltd, London, 2003 . ISBN: 978-0720611717.
by Petra Durst-Benning