SILVERAPAN

THE SILVER MONKEY, SUMMARY

This is a book about how powerful feelings and unfinished business can make someone transcend the boundaries of time – but is it really possible for time to slip out of synch? According to 17 year-old Kalle’s best friend Andy, that’s exactly what can happen; time can go backwards, and a person’s whole life can be compressed into just one day. Kalle disagrees – but is there something in Andy’s theories?
Kalle is no fan of school, and so a three week work experience placement is arranged for him at the city theatre (Stadsteatern) in Stockholm. School isn’t his only problem: his parents are becoming more and more distant from each other, and when Kalle begins to spend time at the theatre, where his father, Ludvig, works as a lighting technician, he gradually realises that Ludvig is having an affair with Lollo, who is in charge of props, and inevitably his parents split up. Kalle also has to put up with little sister Lovisa, generally known as The Monster!
The theatre is a place of mystery, pretence and intrigue, and Kalle watches the growing tension between the three main actors in the current production: the unpleasant and controlling Hanna Klein-Wolf, the weak but attractive Edvard Jansson, and the quieter and more balanced Nora Eriksson. All is not well; who is trying to sabotage the play? Can someone really be trying to get rid of Hanna Klein-Wolf? Does Edvard have an ulterior motive in his courtship of Hanna?
And most intriguing of all, who is M, the girl Kalle meets in the theatre, but who tells him nothing concrete about herself? He recognises her as a kindred spirit and spends as much time as possible in her company, but she invariably slips away into the darkness, leaving him none the wiser about where or how to find her. She always carries a small silver monkey with green eyes; the monkey has a vital role to play as events unfold. Kalle also gets to know Rikke, who works in the make-up department; she seems to like him, but all his attention is focused on M. As the mystery surrounding Edvard, Hanna and Nora reaches its climax, M disappears completely. Kalle does his best to find her, but there is no trace until one day over a year later, when he suddenly catches sight of her. But – this is a 25 year-old woman, not a 15 year-old girl! Kalle begins to unravel the clues and comes to the conclusion that perhaps Andy was right after all – maybe time can slip out of synch.
This is a fast moving novel with strong characters; the teenagers in particular are easy to identify with as they face the challenges of adolescence with humour and resilience. The mystery element of the story is well constructed, and the tension builds steadily to the final pages. Family and relationships are central to the narrative, but with the added intrigue of the mysterious ‘M’. Gunila Ambjörnsson writes with insight and humour, and she successfully conveys the ghostly atmosphere of a theatre where nothing is certain, but anything is possible. A most enjoyable read.

Marlaine Delargy
15/11/04

THE SILVER MONKEY, FIRST CHAPTER

September 2004

‘But that’s impossible!’
It just can’t be, and yet it’s her walking along there, it must be. He’s been standing there for quite a while now, waiting for Rikke who’s on a course, inhaling the smell of autumn. There’s a faint aroma of earth and dead leaves. He isn’t thinking about anything in particular as the sun goes down, and all of a sudden there she is: M. The same brown hair, the same dark blue eyes, the same way of walking. Even if he never really saw her just walking, it occurs to him, just disappearing rapidly down corridors or into lifts, or lying on her stomach up in the theatre attic above the flies, watching what was happening on the stage down below. He’d looked for her; she had a lot of explaining to do when everything happened, but in vain; it was as if she’d never existed. And yet there she is now, coming out of the doorway of a low yellow building.
She hesitates on the steps, loops the strap of her bag over her shoulder and walks through the archway towards him.
It’s as if Kalle’s feet are nailed to the ground. He raises his hand to wave, but not a sound comes out of his mouth. A second later she glances at him; the next minute she’s passed him and is walking quickly down towards the ferry.
Then Rikke is there.
‘What’s the matter with you? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’
She gives him a hug, he gets her hair in his mouth and pulls away.
‘That was her!’ he says, pointing.
He watches the ferry dock. He watches M being swallowed up by it. His heart is pounding, but he doesn’t move.
‘That was her!’ he says again.
Rikke doesn’t need to ask who he means.
‘That woman? That can’t be her,’ she says.
‘How do you know?’ he says crossly.
His voice is thick with excitement, but it doesn’t bother him, not right now.
‘You never saw her. You weren’t even convinced she existed. There she is, anyway!’ he says, pointing again.
‘Her?’ says Rikke. ‘That’s the teacher from our feminist self-defence class. She’s twenty-five,’ she adds. ‘At least.’
He watches the ferry cast off and half vanish into the autumn mist. Like a ghost ship, he thinks, although he knows it’s just an ordinary ferry. In a few minutes it’ll dock at South Hammarby Quay. Is that where she lives? Has she moved? Then he thinks, twenty-five, how can she be twenty-five? Although she did look it, he could see that, that’s what’s so confusing. That she’s older than him now. And that she didn’t recognise him.
If it actually was her? M.
When he knew her she was fifteen.
A year ago. Last spring:

‘Just imagine, time can get out of step.’
He remembers them sitting in Robert’s Coffee on Sergels Torg last year, him and Andy, it was in March, the 4th or maybe the 5th, he can’t remember exactly, but it was the day he started his work experience placement at the city theatre. It was freezing cold, early spring, with a biting wind; Kalle was warming his hands on his latte cup as he gazed absently through the window at bundled up people hunched against the icy winds, scurrying as quickly as they could across the geometric patterns on the square.
And then, all of a sudden, Andy said:
‘Just imagine, time can be sort of pushed out of joint. Kind of get out of step.’
Kalle had snorted, hadn’t listened all that carefully, Andy was just being Andy.
‘It can in Einstein’s Dreams’ said Andy. ‘It’s a book. This is it,’ he said, when he got no answer, and waved a well-thumbed paperback under Kalle’s nose. ‘Einstein - you do know who Einstein is, don’t you?’
Of course he knew. Einstein was some sort of genius. Kalle was in the technical stream in school and should have been interested in Einstein. He couldn’t exactly say he was, though.
‘This book isn’t all theoretical stuff,’ said Andy encouragingly, ‘it’s fiction, you ought to be able to manage that.’
He read from the back cover.
“Time can go backwards; it can allow a rotten peach to be picked out of the rubbish bin and placed on the table, turn pink, and be returned to the tree. Time can condense a man’s life into a single day, time can be a nightingale everyone wants to catch . . . “
‘Maybe in Einstein’s Dreams,’ said Kalle. ‘Not in mine.’
‘You should let your thoughts fly!’ said Andy severely. ‘That’s the meaning of life.’
That was the spring Andy got all bogged down in the business of time.
‘Time isn’t something solid,’ he said now. ‘Just think of it as a stream of water.’
‘Time is water?’
Kalle raised his eyebrows.
‘A stream of water that’s pushed backwards when the wind blows across it,’ Andy said patiently. ‘It’s a comparison, an image to help you understand it better. Have you no imagination?’
‘No,’ said Kalle.
But Andy wasn’t about to be put off.
‘Just imagine, just try to imagine that for some reason time gets out of step, some kind of cosmic disturbance maybe – what might happen then?’
Snowflakes whirled silently through the air. The sky was grey. Kalle’s brain was empty. Not a thought. Nothing flying at all.
‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘It can’t happen. Time can’t just get out of step.’
‘How do you know?’ said Andy. ´

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