The Danish writer​ Olga Ravn has recently published two short novels, one set in the future and one in the past. Both concern insular societies whose members turn on one another with fatal consequences. The Employees takes place on the Six-Thousand Ship, floating through interstellar space with a crew of humans and humanoids working together on an unclarified mission for an unspecified but interminable length of time. The Wax Child is based on historical witch trials and executions in North Jutland between 1596 and 1621. The two novels are studies in language: the depersonalised jargon of social science and the incantatory vernacular of a medieval burg. One is anti-lyric and the other ultra-lyrical. (A bow to the English translator of both books, Martin Aitken, for his masterful pivot.)

The Employees is structured as a series of ‘statements’ – is this an investigation, an evaluation, an incident report? – collected by the ‘committee’ that interviewed the crew of the Six-Thousand Ship during a period leading up to a mutiny. The statements are numbered from 004 to 179, with random gaps in the sequence. Cadets are numbered, not named, and only by indirection can we gather who might be speaking: a human or a humanoid, male or female, old or young.

There’s the cant: ‘local workflows’, ‘impacts’, ‘reduction or enhancement of performance’, ‘task-related understanding’, ‘acquisition of new knowledge and skills’, ‘assess’, ‘allocate’, ‘production’. There’s the passive voice (‘The following statements were collected over a period of eighteen months’) and the nebulous first person plural, the judicial ‘moreover’ and ‘thereby’. This frames the narrative. The statements in the voices of the employees usually sound like human beings; that is, unlike the automatons produced by legal training and speech codes. And yet, there are humanoids among them, and it’s not easy to tell them apart. ‘I don’t like to go in there.’ ‘When did the dreams begin?’ ‘It’s easy talking to you.’ ‘Why should I work with someone I don’t like?’

At first it seems that The Employees is an allegory about professionalisation: the collapse of our most intimate selves into our work identities and the objectification that results. ‘My human co-worker sometimes talks about not wanting to work, and then he’ll say something quite odd and rather silly. What is it he says, now? There’s more to a person than the work they do, or a person is more than just their work? Something like that. But what else could a person be?’ ‘I’m starting to feel disloyal towards the organisation and it pains me because there’s no place for me other than inside the organisation.’ Then again, though the humanoids were made for work they say things like this: ‘I’ve been told there are problems with my emotional reaction pattern.’ ‘You can’t cry, you’re not programmed to cry, it must be an error in the update.’ ‘I know I’m living,’ one insists, exhibiting a poetic defiance that echoes Caliban:

I live, the way numbers live, and the stars; the way tanned hide ripped from the belly of an animal lives, and nylon rope; the way any object lives, in communion with others. I’m like one of those objects. You made me, you gave me language, and now I see your failings and deficiencies. I see your inadequate plans.

There are subtle arguments for and against ‘those who were born and those who were made’. But Ravn makes it clear from the start that no argument is equal to our sheer emotional susceptibility to made things: we are anthropomorphising all the time, instinctively. The nineteen ‘objects’ that the crew has amassed from its visit to the planet New Discovery are minimally described and unnamed. They resemble avant-garde installations or the sort of non-figurative artworks that adorn corporate lobbies. (Ravn has said the objects were inspired by the sculptures of the Danish artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund.) The works cause emotional disturbances, good and bad. ‘They’ve got a language that breaks me down when I go in. The language is that they’re many, that they’re not one, that one of them is the reiteration of all of them.’ ‘I know you say I’m not a prisoner here, but the objects have told me otherwise.’ ‘It’s hard for me to understand that the objects in the rooms haven’t got feelings, even though you’ve told me this is the case.’ Humans cherish the objects. They even fall in love with humanoids. They can also be placated with holograms of the children they’ve lost on Earth.

That doesn’t negate the reality of human emotions. ‘I still don’t understand how I can live here without a sky,’ one says. Another recalls:

The first smell that disappeared was the smell of outside, of the weather, you could say. Of fresh air. Now that I’ve acquired some small knowledge of it, I can say: the smell of gravity. The last smell that disappeared was the smell of vanilla. That, and the fragrance of my child when I would bend over the pram to pick him up.

The humans are ‘drawn by each other’s unhappiness, it pulls us down towards each other … Remember when it rained at the beach … Remember bananas with cream topping? Remember being at the hospital? Remember fresh strawberries? And concerts?’ A humanoid reports: ‘When we talk she nearly always tells me she misses Earth. She’s not proud of the fact, because she does want to be a good employee, I assure you.’ Work becomes a way of displacing excess emotion: ‘But now after a while I can say it’s eased things and that the child hologram has now without a doubt helped stabilise me as an employee here, and I can see that it’s been beneficial to my work effort.’ Ravn makes us see ourselves as not only emotionally susceptible, but labile. It seems we can project our fantasies onto anything, adjust our expectations to anything. Feelings change, but the one thing that doesn’t change is that we are driven by our feelings.

This underlying flaw in our programming also propels the plot of The Wax Child. Like a humanoid, our narrator was made, not born. It’s a doll moulded from beeswax by Christenze Kruckow, whom the doll refers to not as its mother but its ‘mistress’. (Kruckow is based on the Danish noblewoman of the same name, who was executed for witchcraft in 1621.) Because it is neither living nor dead, the doll is an abandoned oracle speaking from under the soil where time has deposited it, retelling the events of centuries ago, beginning with a birth, a birth that is immediately a death.

That’s how it went sometimes: Anne Bille, the wife of a nobleman who runs the estate of Nakkebølle, gives birth to fifteen infants in the space of twelve years, and all of them die. The unmarried Christenze, one of her ladies-in-waiting, is accused of cursing Anne’s marriage bed. As a noblewoman herself, though of a lower order, Christenze is defended from the charge (the servant girl who implicates her, Ousse, is tortured and killed). She flees with the wax child to Aalborg where she starts her life over with a female companion, Maren. Eventually rumours catch up with her there, and one by one her friends are tried and burned at the stake. Christenze dies last, by the more merciful sword, thanks to her rank.

From the start, magical thinking dominates. There is no real distinction between a ‘witch’ like Christenze, who sticks fingernail parings into the feet of the wax doll to cast spells, and the midwife who brings the ‘skin girdle’ to a birth: ‘It would be said then that she who received the pain of the travailing woman held the skin girdle. And the women of the household took turns to hold the skin girdle on Anne Bille’s behalf.’ The men are in on it too. When Anne’s husband scoffs at her screams, the women give him the skin girdle to hold, and then laugh at him when he shrieks and collapses. A strange sympathy runs through the community, and the Wax Child is the apotheosis of it: ‘And I was in the king’s ear, and I was in the king’s mouth, and I was in the king’s loose tooth and in the quicksilver of his liver, and did hear. A scratching of the pen across the paper as he wrote a royal letter to his deputy.’

Orality is the main conduit of this sympathy, and the Wax Child’s poetic devices – anaphora, visionary lyricism, circularity – are a mystery even to the doll itself: ‘My wax mouth cannot be opened. And yet I speak. How is it possible?’ ‘No one listens to a thing I say. Although I speak all the time.’ ‘The humans are mouths which are opened far too often and run dry too quickly. Hundreds of years I have lain here and heard you chatter; you humans like so much talk, from the moment you are born until you die you are engaged in babble.’

This babble, of course, causes infinite trouble. Ravn interpolates spells translated from medieval grimoires that treat language itself as a magical act:

If you want a wife to disclose to her man everything in sleep, write then the wife’s name on a scrap of fresh linen and place this together with the liver of a cockerel underneath her pillow without her knowing …

To win a trial, say these words as you tie a knot: I shall tie a knot so firm. I shall tie his tooth and tongue, his hand and foot and innermost heart … Yes, his speech and language too, and quite as firm as the Devil stands in Hell. My words shall grow like grass in rain … I sow my words here on the meadow green …

If you want not to feel anything during torture, write down these lines on a scrap of paper and then swallow it …

One says, Now by my words the pain will shrink. Now by my nine words the pain will shrink as my words do likewise. From nine to eight, from eight to seven, from seven to six, from six to five …

One may also be accused of having ‘written upon confessional wafers and given them to sick people to eat’. And when sorcery is in the air, even cats and swine speak.

The source of words is feelings. Ravn immerses us in a world in which empirical reasoning and physical evidence have no purchase. As much as one might enjoy, squirmingly, reading about these Jutlanders’ way of life – the skin girdle of the birthing room, the intricacies of spinning flax or cleaning and gutting herring, the ubiquity of missing teeth and eyes or fleas – one feels the horror of a lack of recourse when other people’s phantasms are taken for fact. ‘I’ve heard she can steal folk’s good fortune.’ ‘The woman is more easily tempted by Satan, for she is weaker than the man in both body and soul.’ The charges against the women aren’t merely absurd, they arise from a semiotic system we can barely comprehend:

Do you believe a sick person can be healed by crawling through the roots of a full-grown willow?

I don’t know.

Do you believe a bottle of wine that has been buried in the ground to be a more effective medicine than other wine?

I really could not say.

Do you believe a person may be cured of a sickness by eating paper cuttings on a slice of bread?

I have no idea.

Is this poetry – a derangement of the senses? If so, the novel is an argument against it, showing us a world in which almost nobody has agency, where prayers and maledictions are futile stabs at asserting one’s will.

It’s this primitive poetry that gives The Wax Child its claustrophobia, intensified by drone-like repetitions. But the claustrophobia is an index of something else too: the very intimacy of these adversaries, accuser and accused, isolated on a cold and dank peninsula. One of the main accusers, the pastor Klyne, visits the women in prison to offer spiritual consolation; he and his wife, Elisabeth, Christenze’s former friend, accompany her in the carriage from Aalborg to the prison at Copenhagen Castle. As the close-knit women say, ‘We are all of us afraid of not meeting in Paradise.’

Likewise with the paranoia on the Six-Thousand Ship. As tensions rise between humans and humanoids, the humanoids start sitting by themselves at mealtimes. The humans ask: ‘Do you think they talk behind our backs?’ ‘My feeling is you’re keeping information from us … the negotiations have completely broken down.’ A hitherto harmonious work environment inexplicably sours: there’s something of formulaic television satire in the premise – until someone gets murdered, and the ship is terminated by the mysterious ‘committee’. ‘I’ll be happy to oversee implementation of a remote shutdown programme and facilitate re-uploading of those members of the crew who will benefit most significantly from a minor memory loss.’ This is the language of the concentration camp commandant, from which there is no escape, any more than Christenze could escape the edict of the king of Denmark. Some words really do have more power.

In the end, we’re left with the mystery of sympathy: between friends, between enemies, between life and non-life, between objects. Some of Ravn’s surviving humanoids walk out of the ship onto a planet to lie down on earth, grass and flowers, in solidarity with the humans who have been irradiated. And her Wax Child intones: ‘How do I know this? The dead fly in the windowsill told me, the grass-pollen as it puffed into the air told me, a brass candlestick told me, a speck of grit. Everything remembers and speaks to those who will listen.’