The Immigrant

By Bo Tao Michaëlis
We begin outside of Marrakech, Morocco. A boy named Zaki is excellent at guiding Western tourists up a famous waterfall near his village – just like his legendary father. All is idyllic. Then his father calls from Denmark.  The family pulls up roots and moves to this Scandinavian country that offers more modern opportunities than herding goats and guiding tourists.

This is how Olav Hergel’s new novel Indvandreren ('The Immigrant') begins – as a sort of Bildungsroman following Zaki’s encounter with this brave new world as a boy and, later, as a man. An encounter complicated by Denmark’s problematic and sceptical – some would say demonic – relationship with foreigners who want so badly to be Danish while holding onto their ethnic identity. The road from being a Moroccan peasant boy in a feudal kingdom to becoming a Danish student in the paranoia of late modernity is far from straight. Then comes death and crime and, finally, we meet a disillusioned Zaki back once again in Morocco. Whether he will ever return to the Denmark that humiliated him and treated him with suspicion and contempt is the novel’s unresolved ending.

The Immigrant is the second, self-standing novel in a series about journalist Rikke Lyngdal, whom we met for the first time in Olav Hergel’s 2006 debut novel, Flygtningen (The Refugee). In that book, we learned of her kidnapping by local terrorists while covering war-torn Iraq and the hunt for one of the terrorists in exile in Denmark. Here, in The Immigrant, we find her employed by a major newspaper, “The Morning Sun,” for which she covers immigrant problems, among other things. The killing of a doorman at a discotheque, claimed to have been carried out by immigrants, touches off a veritable media frenzy against them. Rikke takes on her sensation-hungry, opportunistic managing editor, and there are consequences.

Whereas The Refugee had as a theme “what do you do if a persecuted, illegal refugee knocks on your door,” the motif of The Immigrant is more in the direction of how official Denmark views newcomers from other cultures and regions than Europe. The novel has to do with prejudice as good material for newspapers and television. But also about the fact that some Danes try to oppose the public’s biased view of foreigners. The Immigrant is both a thrilling and entertaining novel and a painful editorial on the current political and ideological debate about the place of foreigners in a globalized but nevertheless still provincial Denmark. You can feel in his writing, intention, attitude and research that Olav Hergel has been trained as a journalist and a lawyer.

Translated by Russell Dees

Dansk version