Gränsen/Margrete Lamond

Gränsen Maria Nilsson Thore Bonnier Carlsén 2021

Gränsen

Margrete Lamond (c)

Nono is not as contented as her friends are when it comes to playing obediently within the boundaries. Nono is more interested in what lies beyond. She is the child who questions restrictions and longs to explore outside the square.

When a thick red line appears around the edge of the playground where Nono lives, across which the children are absolutely forbidden to venture, Nono is the only one among her playmates to notice it. Not only does Nono notice, she is soon so obsessed that she abandons her friends to test this forbidding boundary separating the permitted from the prohibited. At first Nono ponders the potential risks of crossing the line. Is ‘forbidden’ the same as

‘dangerous’? Does ‘danger’ mean you will shrink, encounter poisonous candy, be devoured by a monster, or disappear in a puff of smoke? Unable to answer her own questions, Nono reaches tentatively across the line with a stick, her hair, her foot. And suddenly she is on the other side. Where, of course, nothing happens. Reassured, Nono scampers deep into forbidden territory. She encounters no monsters, only the delight of freedom and the joy of discovering a wealth of shiny pebbles that she gathers up with glee, wandering further and further, gathering more and more, and envisioning the admiration her friends will feel once Nono shows off her treasures. Thinking about her friends gets Nono thinking about home, and that’s when she discovers the real danger: she has ventured too far. Nono’s trophy of enviable pebbles means nothing to her now, compared with her longing to be safely back on the right side of the red line. She runs home in a panic, scattering her treasured pebbles as she goes. Everything is calm when she returns.

Her friends have not even noticed Nono was gone. So when Nono discovers a pebble in her pocket, a single precious souvenir of her adventure, she knows she can’t tell her admiring friends where she found it. Some mysteries, declares the final page, should never be revealed. The visual heroes of Gränsen are Nono’s facial expressions and Thore’s red line. Thore excels in layering multiple thoughts and emotions into a minimum of marks. Unlike an emoji, which tells us only one thing – happy, sad, confused, alarmed – Thore shows us a character with multiple emotions, several of which are sometimes in conflict at the same time. We see that Nono is both bold and afraid, fully aware of her naughtiness but determined not to stop as she reaches a tentative toe across the red line. We see her feel a mix of wariness, triumph, astonishment when she first crosses to the other side. On the final spread she brims with pride as she displays her hard-won treasure, at the same time as being guiltily aware of her naughtiness, and of peeking complicitly at the retreating and diminished red line. The same complexity finds its way into the red line itself. It is an impersonal stripe on the page, but Thore finds ways to imbue it variously with sternness, mischief and, in the end, complicity. Paul Klee spoke of drawing as ‘taking a line for a walk’, and this is what Thore does in Gränsen. The red line is initially a distant stern presence, barely visible across the bottom corner of the page. Then it crosses grimly from one side of the spread to the other, before mirroring Nono’s conflicting feelings of obedience and subversion by squirming across the page in loops and coils. By the time Nono makes her dash for freedom, the line is retreating towards top left. Significantly, the line travels diagonally from upper right to lower left throughout, aside for the two spreads where it twists and tangles. Only on the last spread, reduced as it is to a ribbon, does it switch diagonals, tilting towards the right instead of towards the left, and seeming, in its diminished form, to be sharing a complicit understanding with Nono. Within Nono’s circumscribed world – and within the world of this book – Nono is the boundary-breaking exception. But boundary-testing children are not so rare. At some stage, even the most obedient child will question constraints on their freedom. Both subversive and cautionary, Gränsen invites readers to test limits, question rules and push boundaries, but the invitation comes with a caution: treasures can easily turn burdensome when too much freedom makes us lose our bearings, and unfamiliar spaces can be risky, uncomfortable and even a little scary if boundaries are pushed too far. And yet, suggests this delightfully rebellious book, boundaries, once crossed, start to look less uncrossable.

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