Books: The Children of Day

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THE GOOD LIGHT (272 pp.)—Karl Bjarnhof—Knopf ($4).

In the closing pages of this novel, the nameless hero stands at the entrance of his room, compulsively clicking the light switch on and off. To his dread, he knows the light is working; yet no glimmer cuts the dense black fog before his eyes; he has gone completely blind. Danish Author Karl Bjarnhof, 61, has an un nerving intimacy with this scene and subject, for, at the age of 19, he lost his sight. The Good Light continues the fictionalized autobiography Bjarnhof began with his remarkable The Stars Grow Pale (TIME, April 28, 1958), taking his hero from boyhood into adolescence. The new book defies the law of sequels by being every whit as good as the first.

The first book was family-centered. Father belonged to the working class but rarely worked; mother pasted paper bags together to earn a living. Narrowly pious and just poor enough for pride, the parents regarded the boy's failing sight as a kind of social stigma, rather like being born out of wedlock. To such a boy the Copenhagen Blind Institute seems a worthwhile escape hatch.

Endless Walkathon. Would-be philanthropic heavens too often become pluperfect hells. Just into his teens, the hero in The Good Light still has partial vision, but the first thing that assails him at the Blind Institute is the smell — paint, sour beer, and wet floor mops. The food is stale bread, dry cheese and gruel that the sightless inmates wolf down like animals. When the boy says good morning to his schoolmates, no one turns a head. He has entered a world in which nothing exists until it is touched.

When the boys are not in class, they link arms in twos and threes and shuffle through the yards and corridors in a kind of endless walkathon. Always there are the unseen eyes of the attendants, and only the best of them rattle their keys to let the boys know they are coming. The keepers' special concern: sex, natural and unnatural. In a brilliant set piece that has the spectral, hallucinatory quality of a Poe short story, Author Bjarnhof tells of a boy who made contact with the well-guarded girls' wing of the institute. Like ghosts, he and his Juliet would glide along the sleep-drugged passageways to make their bed of love on a sweaty mat in the institute gym — until the night the light was on, with an attendant watching.