SOURCE: "The New Century," in Modern Norwegian Literature, 1860-1918, Cambridge University Press, 1966, pp. 189-98.

Downs was an English author and educator who specialized in Scandinavian studies at Cambridge University. In the following excerpt, he discusses the moralist elements in Bojer's works.

[At 24, Bojer] published a mature, characteristic novel, A Procession (Et Folketog, 1896). Amid full and variegated pictures of a typical Norwegian constituency, half agricultural, half maritime, it centres on the disastrous career of the chairman of a District Council: on an admirable programme for alleviating the little man's problems and hardships, he gets elected to Parliament, to find himself not only checkmated by the party-machine, but simultaneously driven into irretrievable debt by the expenses of a politician's life. The presentation is straightforwardly realistic, unaffected by the tendencies towards the fantastic which the contemporary fiction of Thomas Krag, Hamsun and Kinck was exhibiting. It is also, discreetly and with...