beer good
Well-Known Member
Vilhelm Moberg, Ride This Night! (Rid i natt!, 1941)
Spring, 1650. The thirty years' war has been over for just over a year after wiping out an entire generation of men who were sent to Germany to fight. On a small farm in Småland in the woods of southern Sweden, a widow and her newly grown son are trying to eke out a living; but even in the best of times it's a hard life, and the crops failed last year. The entire village is starving, the clothes hang empty off their backs. Which leads to problems when the local (and German) nobleman buys up the taxation rights from young Queen Christina and declares that if the farmers cannot pay in cash or kind, he'll simply a) take their farms, and b) make them work on his fields instead. The farmers protest; this isn't the continent, they say. We don't have serfdom here, we own this land, we've worked these farms as free men since heathen days. But the nobleman's henchmen (he himself never bothers to show up, of course) have guns and swords, the farmers fail to organise in time, and their alderman decides that it's better to live than die fighting. And all agree to give up their freedom - all but one, the widow's young son, who takes his gun and runs into the woods, as rumours of rebellion start to spread throughout the land...
Ride This Night! has an exclamation point in its title; it's a book that kicks off right away and then stays page-turningly urgent throughout, its prose archaically terse and grim. While the plot is centered around a few characters - the alderman, his daughter, the young partisan, the local self-styled Robin Hood, the hangman - who all get their fair due of character development, through it all runs a current of desperation and righteous indignation. Which obviously has to do with the time it was written in. There's a reason (though it's historically correct) why the nobleman is a German, why his henchmen tend to dress in black; in 1941, when Ride This Night! was written, Poland, Norway and Denmark had been occupied by Nazi Germany. Finland was unoccupied but beaten by the Soviet Union, the Baltic states annexed, and Sweden sat there in the middle of a conflict they really wanted to stay out of. And so they did what they could to placate everyone. Hitler wants to use Swedish railways to transport soldiers to Norway? Sure! Hitler wants to buy steel? But of course! And let's not complain too loudly about what's happening around us, let's just do whatever is easiest to stay out of trouble right now even if it means having to sleep badly. Like the alderman tells his farmers to do in Moberg's novel; keep your heads down, do this now even if your conscience objects, and surely things will get better eventually.
In a way, that's both the book's strength and its weakness. 70 years on, we've seen the metaphorical Nazi bad guys in everything from historical novels to sci-fi movies, and while Moberg keeps the story firmly anchored in the 17th century, the parallels are occasionally a bit too obvious - as are some of the speeches by the characters, which sometimes almost approach Red Dawn pathos (OK, obviously it never gets that bad, and it's subverted by the superb ending anyway). While it's clear where Moberg's sympathies lie - the book is a furious rally cry against complacency - he never lets any one character become a hero; he knows that simply declaring war on vastly superior powers is suicide, and the alderman's cowardice never makes less than perfect sense even if it eats him up from inside. And for the most part, he keeps the allegory just vague enough to still be relevant even after 1945. It's easy to not worry when the world grows dark around you; to simply sit back, not do your bit, wait for it to get better. And Moberg's novel calls not first and foremost for armed resistance, but for awareness, refusing to stand by and look away from injustice. And through it all, it keeps pounding the same refrain: A fiery cross is moving, the message spreads from village to village, don't let it stop, don't refuse to do your bit, ride yourself or send someone to ride for you, but keep it going, don't hesitate a second. Ride, ride this night.
- Anna Marly, La Complainte du Partisan, transl. Leonard Cohen
Spring, 1650. The thirty years' war has been over for just over a year after wiping out an entire generation of men who were sent to Germany to fight. On a small farm in Småland in the woods of southern Sweden, a widow and her newly grown son are trying to eke out a living; but even in the best of times it's a hard life, and the crops failed last year. The entire village is starving, the clothes hang empty off their backs. Which leads to problems when the local (and German) nobleman buys up the taxation rights from young Queen Christina and declares that if the farmers cannot pay in cash or kind, he'll simply a) take their farms, and b) make them work on his fields instead. The farmers protest; this isn't the continent, they say. We don't have serfdom here, we own this land, we've worked these farms as free men since heathen days. But the nobleman's henchmen (he himself never bothers to show up, of course) have guns and swords, the farmers fail to organise in time, and their alderman decides that it's better to live than die fighting. And all agree to give up their freedom - all but one, the widow's young son, who takes his gun and runs into the woods, as rumours of rebellion start to spread throughout the land...
Ride This Night! has an exclamation point in its title; it's a book that kicks off right away and then stays page-turningly urgent throughout, its prose archaically terse and grim. While the plot is centered around a few characters - the alderman, his daughter, the young partisan, the local self-styled Robin Hood, the hangman - who all get their fair due of character development, through it all runs a current of desperation and righteous indignation. Which obviously has to do with the time it was written in. There's a reason (though it's historically correct) why the nobleman is a German, why his henchmen tend to dress in black; in 1941, when Ride This Night! was written, Poland, Norway and Denmark had been occupied by Nazi Germany. Finland was unoccupied but beaten by the Soviet Union, the Baltic states annexed, and Sweden sat there in the middle of a conflict they really wanted to stay out of. And so they did what they could to placate everyone. Hitler wants to use Swedish railways to transport soldiers to Norway? Sure! Hitler wants to buy steel? But of course! And let's not complain too loudly about what's happening around us, let's just do whatever is easiest to stay out of trouble right now even if it means having to sleep badly. Like the alderman tells his farmers to do in Moberg's novel; keep your heads down, do this now even if your conscience objects, and surely things will get better eventually.
In a way, that's both the book's strength and its weakness. 70 years on, we've seen the metaphorical Nazi bad guys in everything from historical novels to sci-fi movies, and while Moberg keeps the story firmly anchored in the 17th century, the parallels are occasionally a bit too obvious - as are some of the speeches by the characters, which sometimes almost approach Red Dawn pathos (OK, obviously it never gets that bad, and it's subverted by the superb ending anyway). While it's clear where Moberg's sympathies lie - the book is a furious rally cry against complacency - he never lets any one character become a hero; he knows that simply declaring war on vastly superior powers is suicide, and the alderman's cowardice never makes less than perfect sense even if it eats him up from inside. And for the most part, he keeps the allegory just vague enough to still be relevant even after 1945. It's easy to not worry when the world grows dark around you; to simply sit back, not do your bit, wait for it to get better. And Moberg's novel calls not first and foremost for armed resistance, but for awareness, refusing to stand by and look away from injustice. And through it all, it keeps pounding the same refrain: A fiery cross is moving, the message spreads from village to village, don't let it stop, don't refuse to do your bit, ride yourself or send someone to ride for you, but keep it going, don't hesitate a second. Ride, ride this night.