Freezing Point, by Anders Bodelsen

Danish writer Anders Bodelsen (1937 - 2021) considers the high price of living indefinitely.

It’s 1973. Magazine editor Bruno discovers while shaving a weird lump on his neck, causing him to bleed. He visits specialist Doctor Ackerman and is assured it’s nothing to worry about, but some tests will have to be performed nonetheless. What was presumed to be a benign condition, turns out to be terminal cancer. Bruno hasn’t long to live. But extraordinary leaps in science present Bruno with a terrible choice. Doctor Ackerman offers a radical new procedure. He could be part of an early medical experiment where his body would be “frozen down” and then brought up again decades later when a cure was found. 

Bruno is torn over what to do. He has just started a new relationship with a dancer named Jenny. With limited time to think out his options, he impulsively decides to be frozen down. 

Twenty-two years later he is revived, but finds changes have been made to his body without permission. He has been sterilised and certain organs have been swapped out for synthetic ones. Society has been divided into two classes - “now-life” and “all-life”. Now-life mortgage their organs and live like “hippies”, not having to work. All-lifers work long and hard hours to afford all the medical interventions needed to keep them alive, ostensibly forever.

Bruno hopes to meet his girlfriend Jenny in this brave new world. He persistently asks for a meeting and the hospital authorities keep putting it off, as Jenny has also had some medical interventions. Eventually the reunion occurs. Bruno is  shocked by what Jenny has become. 

Anders Bodelsen was a Danish writer of experimental thrillers. Freezing Point was first published in 1969. It’s a tightly written story that looks at the ethics of medical interventions to prolong life indefinitely. As a sideline, the book also questions the economics of prolonged life. In the imagined society of 1995 and 2022 (the book jumps first 22 years into the future, then 27 years) all resources are directed towards extreme medicine. People who opt to live a natural lifespan sell their organs, while those who wish to live eternally must pay in endless (and by extension, eternal) work.  The novel also plays with ideas of narrative, as editor Bruno muses on different modes of storytelling. In a dehumanised future world, it seems that fiction may have died, as Bruno tries in vain to obtain magazines or books to read.

A gripping and ghoulish thriller offering the reader plenty of ethical conundrums to wrestle with. 
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Freezing Point, by Anders Bodelsen. Translated by Sophie Mackintosh. Faber Fiction $24.99

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