This novel, set in nineteenth century Denmark, is a bildungsroman. The eponymous hero, Per, was born into a rural Jutland family, whose men had, for generations, taken the cloth. His father was a hard and cold pastor, who was feared and ridiculed by his own congregation in equal measure. Per was the black sheep in the family. As a boy, he was more fun-loving, than god-fearing. At night, he liked to sneak out of the parsonage to go sledding and to flirt with girls. “An unappeasable hatred of his family awakened in his hitherto carefree soul, a defiant and bellicose feeling of abandonment that would become the heart and driving force of his future life.” Per was shunned by his parents and siblings alike and eventually packed off to Copenhagen to study engineering. Science and progress had become the buzz words of the age. Since Denmark’s defeat in the war to Prussia, its leading lights preached industrialization and modernization. To the enlightened, even Copenhagen seemed like a European backwater.
Per is caught up more than most in the fever of the age. “His life’s motto, “I Will,” would now be tested. It would be all or nothing.” He wants to become a man of substance and influence. He derides the religious-tempered and aesthetes alike. Despite his blooming atheism, Per felt in his bones that he was destined for something special. “For he knew now he was born to become, in his domain, the morning horn-herald, the path breaker in this sluggish society of thick-blooded sons of pastors and sextons.” Per has romantic dalliances with all that Copenhagen has to offer, eventually settling down and becoming betrothed to a Jewish heiress from an illustrious banking family. She is a like-minded soul: modern, passionate, and headstrong. “They talked together about the future, envisioned the coming century that, eventually, would give mankind back its spiritual freedom, reawaken the courage to act and the instinct for adventure, erect altars to strong and great deeds on the ruins of the church.” Armed with a letter of credit from his perspective father-in-law, Per travels the Continent to further his budding engineering schemes. However, his relationship with his father’s Church keeps lingering in his life. He cannot escape his past. The pull of the Danish countryside again proves alluring when he meets in Rome the wife of the Master of the Hunt in his native Jutland. “Nature folk were, essentially, the happiest. With a curtsy before a pair of sticks nailed together to form a cross, they solved all the riddles of life and death and let the fiddles wail on.” Eventually, having absconded to the country, Per meets two rural parish priests with divergent world views, who both, nonetheless, once again tug on his heartstrings and threaten to pull him back into the Christian fold. “How poor was the worth of such a cheaply bought cheerfulness in comparison with the faith or the doubt that had cost blood and battles…. The citizens who sat comfortably protected by their own lack of passion…. had never felt a titanic urge to struggle with the gods.” Eventually, Per makes his own personal peace with himself. “When, in spite of all the good fortune that had come his way, he wasn’t happy, it was because he had not wanted to be happy in the general sense of the word…. It was in solitude his soul felt at home, and in affliction and pain.”
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