The Children of Day

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.

Odd Men Out. The glimmer of sight left to the novel's hero makes him an outsider in the reverse-snob clannishness of the totally blind; yet he cherishes his tentative friendships. There is Little Jens, a cripple locked in creaky thongs and trusses, who has a gentle faith that all the sightless are under God's special bless ing. There is Adolf, who endlessly rubs his eyes so that he can "see" the spray of flames that constitutes his last childhood memory of the sighted world. Author Bjarnhof sensitively captures the circular, repetitive agony of a blind man's brooding. As he makes poignantly clear, the blind feel like nature's odd men out. As a former inmate says of the sighted: "They've kept us alive, but they don't want to bother with us; we're too troublesome. They don't know what to do with us, but they're scared of God, so they daren't quite let us die.'' Yet Bjarnhof's blind also know that they must somehow cross die invisible color line back to the world of the seeing, or else lapse into the shufflers' parade toward "nothingness."

Nine Strokes. Music is the hero's passport to the country of the sighted. An instructor catches him playing the organ by ear, enrolls him in music classes, and the budding musician makes new friendships with Copenhagen's musicians and painters (Bjarnhof himself has toured as a cellist). When sight finally fails him completely at the telltale light switch, he has the spunk and serenity to bear it. He likens the morning's church chimes to "nine prayer strokes. Three for the night that's past. Three for the day that's coming. Three for mankind, the children of day and light."

Author Bjarnhof writes a sparely sculptured prose of singular beauty and keeps just the right emotional distance from his theme so that what the reader suffers is never sentimental pathos but the moving burden of bearing the unbearable. The wonder and purgative power of The Good Light is that men like Karl Bjarnhof's hero, pushed to the extremity of the human spirit, do not curse God and die, but like Little Jens, bless life and live.

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