This is the first volume of a trilogy which marks the high point of outspokenness and originality of one of Norway's most controversial modern writers. Jens Bjorneboe was an author and polemicist of fierce energy and deep conviction, who throughout his career provoked and upset the establishment by his unrelenting attacks on its most sacred cows: a repressive school system, a hypocritical Christianity, an inhumane prison system, power-seeking politicians, corrupt police and depraved moral guardians - all concentrated in his particular bete noire: the authoritarian personality. With this trilogy, Bjorneboe turned his attention to a more general problem: the evil inherent in the human race itself. Why, his narrators ask despairingly, does man behave so inhumanely to his fellow creatures? The first volume is set in a middle-European principality, where the narrator is a servant of justice, employed to brush gowns and fill inkwells, and to be daily witness to injustice masquerading as a court of law. The experience sets him off on an odyssey through human experience and his own past, asking what went wrong with mankind.

Powderhouse is a novel which is set in an asylum for the criminally insane, where the narrator functions as a kind of porter, observing and commenting on the foibles of inmates and keepers alike. The patients are a motley collection, and their treatment is unorthodox to say the least; part of their treatment consists of composing and delivering a series of lectures on subjects dear to their hearts, such as the history of witchhunting and the most humane methods of execution. The doctors themselves have their own troubled history; and the narrator finds rich material amongst both for his study of the follies and evil of which mankind is capable. Yet he is not just a gloomy philosopher, but also a sensualist, and the novel is relieved by passages of lyrical beauty as he enjoys the velvety summer nights, the taste of black bread and white wine, and the gentle caresses of his lover. This is the first English translation of this novel from 1969 by the controversial Norwegian author Jens Bjorneboe, a man whose irreverent provocations of the sacred cows of his society several times landed him in a court of law. Powderhouse forms the second volume of a trilogy dedicated to exploring "The history of bestiality," following Moment of Freedom (1966), though it stands on its own with a different setting and narrator from the other two.

This volume marks the apex and the culmination of the provocative Norwegian author Jens Bjorneboe's investigations into the nature of evil. Here the study moves to a broader canvas than in earlier works; the enquiring narrator explores not just European history, but the crimes committed by Europeans against the rest of humanity in the name of expansion and conquest. Cortez' destruction of the Aztec empire and Pisarro's of the Incas were crimes of genocide comparable with Hitler's against the Jews, and Columbus' glorious discovery of America becomes simply an act of colonialism: "The Indians had discovered America long before I came." His realization of European culpability and anticipation of the blood-bath that will ensue when the Third World claims its rightful share of the world's riches lead the narrator into a long plunge into the tunnel of depression, from which he emerges in a cathartic realization that human beings have not only an unfathomable capacity for evil, but also an immeasurable capacity for good; man is the destroyer of all things, but also the renewer of all things. The 25 years which have passed since this novel was first published have not diminished its relevance and its urgency.

Set at the end of last century, The Sharks is a thrilling tale of mutiny and shipwreck, which bears comparison with Melville's Moby Dick or Conrad's Typhoon in its suspense and its evocation of the fascination of the sea. It is also the story of mankind's voyage into the twentieth century, suspended between the empty skies and the bottomless depths, dreadfully aware of its potential for self destruction but clinging to a belief in the preservation of a fragile humanity. The narrator, Peder Jensen, is both competent second mate and unworldly philosopher, whose brain 'lacks walls, a floor and a roof'; through his eyes we follow the dismantling of the rigid power structure on board as a community begins to emerge.This novel from 1974 is the last one by Norwegian author Jens Bjorneboe (1920-1976), one of Norway's most original, outspoken and controversial modern writers.