What Kingdom is Danish writer Fine Gråbøl’s debut novel, originally published in 2021 and now translated by Martin Aitken. Based on her own experiences of mental illness, it is set in a temporary psychiatric care unit for young people, part of a process of adjustment the narrator describes:
“You go from hospital to residential facility, from female care workers to male, from nursing to social education, from centralised laundry and night lights to conflict-ready bodies and communal activities; you adjust.”
“I liked the rooms at the hospital better,” she tells us, “there was hardly anything in them.” This need for emptiness is emphasised by Gråbøl’s description of her surroundings which seem to have a life of their own:
“Above me the ceiling hangs suspended like a fluid-filled membrane…”
She tells us that she limits the contents of her room as “furniture’s noisy just being there” and has “a tendency to rise up out of their state of thingness and assume personalities.” The novel is relayed to the reader in short chapters with a distinct focus, such as the routine of the institution, one of the other inmates, or a particular event. In this way we get to know the other characters: Waheed who plays music through the night; Marie who threatens a staff member with a butter knife; Lasse whose “room is dark, it could hardly be darker”; Hector from Peru where “they treated his psychoses with exorcism.” Such treatment is presented without comment, as is the narrator’s encounter with electro-convulsive therapy. Her attitude towards mental disorders is cynical:
“The grammar of the ill is gendered, but also matter of economics; the curable versus the chronic, benefit rates and supplementary payments, diagnoses and deductibles.”
The overall effect of the short chapters is to create a sense of stasis. When the narrator says, “I take the elevator down to the third floor,” it has no connection in time to previous or following events. This not only mimics the sense of being institutionalised but also the narrator’s inability to sleep. Though her voice is often detached, at times her pain breaks through, as when she self-harms:
“I’ve torn myself open, we try to sweep the bits of me together, but the wind whirls up dust when anyone goes through the doors.”
The novel’s second section, Containment (“They call containment of the emotional register treatment”) begins with what seems to be a suicide attempt on the narrator’s part:
“It’s getting harder to recognise myself outside my room.”
She is with the staff member she trusts most, Thomas, but later she will learn he is leaving, creating another crisis. However, the novel is neither a ‘descent into madness’ nor the slow path to recovery; it more realistically portrays the narrative-free experience of mental illness. In the final section, Secrets, there is a sense of transformation: Marie dyes her hair, Lasse gives himself a buzz cut; the narrator puts on make-up; they begin to leave the institution. This may suggest hope, but such is tension instilled by the narrative voice that the reader will struggle to accept this. This is a novel which portrays mental illness from the inside in a series of frozen moments. It also questions our approach to those who are institutionalised:
“Why doesn’t anyone wonder about the line between trauma and treatment? Why doesn’t anyone wonder about the relationship between compulsion and compliance? Why doesn’t anyone wonder about the relationship between submission and help?”
Beautifully written (and translated), What Kingdom is a novel that challenges the reader to enter a world that most will not experience, presenting it to us with openness and compassion.
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