A young boy sits on the remote Atlantic island of Sankt Helena, almost two thousand kilometers west of Angola. He is sitting in a tree, his head tied with a leather strap, and looking at the sky through a hole cut into the branches. During the day he counts the birds he sees, at night he notes the constellation of the stars, but he can neither count nor write. Edmond Halley, the famous astronomer and scientist, had come to the island for research in 1677 in his early twenties. In the novel “Die Himmelskugel” by Olli Jalonen, he and his friend and assistant Clarke stayed with the little boy's mother, on the dead wood plain above Jamestown, the main town on the island, which was then used by the British East India Company to keep their ships to be supplied with fresh supplies.He had set up an observatory nearby to catalog the stars of the southern hemisphere - that, in turn, is backed up history.
Fridtjof Küchemann
Editor in the features section.
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In the novel, the young Angus is supposed to use a curious but child-friendly method to register the birds during the day, distinguishing between whirring, fluttering and whirring; at night he pricks the stars as he sees them in the sky with a cactus spike in a thinly cut aloe leaf. Years later in London, Halley will call his scientific assignment for the young Angus a human experiment, nothing more than a task that was intended for learning - to prove that no one is so stupid and cannot grow. Not even the half-orphan whom his companion Clarke contemptuously calls a yam boy. The researcher says that the extension of this contract for years, during which Halley sent new sheets of paper from London to St. Helena, to which Angus was supposed to transfer his observations, was no more than fun for him.
It was never a joke for Angus, it was a duty that he performed with childlike simplicity and seriousness over the years. He just didn't stop growing in the sense of Halley. In “Die Himmelskugel”, his third novel translated into German, the Finnish writer Olli Jalonen lets his Angus tell about this growth - indirectly. Actually, the boy is interested in his research and other observations in his life with his mother, older sister and soon also with two babies who are born after Halley and Clarke have left the island again. He tells of the island pastor who agrees to teach Angus to read and write, who comes to visit more and more often, soon stays overnight and finally persuades Angus' mother to officially become the housekeeper,unspoken as moving his beloved with the family to him in Kapellental, where all neighbors are hostile to her.
He doesn't understand, but he sees
Olli Jalonen has found a language for Angus that combines childlike naivety with keen observation.
Just following the boy's mental development through his own descriptions is breathtaking.
It is no less what Angus experiences on the way from the deadwood plains on Saint Helena until he finally stands alone with Edmond Halley on a February night at the age of fourteen on Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales.