“Gert Nygårdshaug’s Chimera: A Norwegian Novel”

Norwegian Gert Nygårdshaug started writing poetry and detective novels very well known in his country. But it’s Mengele Zoo in the early 90s, the first volume of a trilogy that made him known beyond Norway, this very radical trilogy featured a young Amazonian who settles his accounts with the biggest polluters on the planet. A novel that clearly raised the question of the legitimacy of ecoterrorism. Released in Norway at the end of the 1980s, this eco-thriller was even voted the best Norwegian book of all time.

30 years later, Gert Nygårdshaug has not abandoned its ecological fiber. With Chimera, he imagines in the near future, a team of scientists of different nationalities, who are studying, in the heart of the Congo forest, the effects of climate change on animal and plant species. But it is also an unknown virus, hitherto formidable, likely to wipe out a large majority of the planet’s population, that they will discover. Virus they call Chimera. But where some see it as an unprecedented threat, others see a glimmer of hope for the planet, on the theme: here is a virus that will solve the problem of the galloping demography of humans, a real danger for them, for the world. ‘humanity.

A captivating novel

The novel is captivating, precise, with a lot of documentation, a gallery of portraits of endearing or disconcerting scientists. We enter a tropical forest with its species, its plants. It reads like a classic thriller or an adventure novel, with the added bonus of a reflection on the planet’s ability to digest all the distractions of our societies.

Reflection barely biased by the author’s commitment to Gert Nygårdshaug, iIt’s not just global warming that threatens us, and the sixth extinction and the constraints exerted by man on all environments announce a catastrophic future. Sometimes borderline, taking up the most radical ecological theses, obviously, Gert Nygårdshaug does not have a great esteem for the sapiens, nor confidence in its capacities to overcome the crises which are announced. But he still has a lot of poetry and an unfailing know-how as a novelist.