Time Never Stops : Rebellion at a Danish boarding school shows how progress often comes at the expense of humanity : BORDERLINERS, <i> by Peter Hoeg (Farrar Straus & Giroux: $22; 277 pp.)</i>

Ostensibly, the villain of Peter Hoeg’s novel about the rebellion of three tormented children at a progressive Danish boarding school is the tyrannically self-righteous headmaster. “Borderliners,” though, is more a philosophic allegory than a story; and its real villain is linear time--time, that is, as an inflexible progress that the powerful misuse to constrain the circular talents and zigzag impulses of human nature.

Hoeg’s second book to be translated into English makes an austere contrast to his “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” a novel of suspense about a turbulent Greenland woman who investigates the death of a child and comes up against a vast political-economic-scientific conspiracy. “Smilla” offered a churning narrative excitement, and a vivid and affecting protagonist. In the dryer “Borderliners,” the characters are drawn finely but much more abstractly. At bottom, both are novels of moral and social argument but in “Borderliners” the bottom eddies right up to the top.

Hoeg’s pervasive theme in both books is the abuse of children by the means that civilization--especially, perhaps, an enlightened Scandinavian civilization--has used to advance itself. More generally, his children stand for humanity’s instinctive and unspoiled possibilities; by making them the victims, Hoeg is able to distill the passionate rage that gives energy to his writing.

What gives distinctiveness to the rage is the supercooled bleakness with which it is conveyed; the unmodulated grays, the darkness without a penumbra, the light without warmth and the distances that separate the characters even when they are embracing--or brutalizing--each other. Peter, the 14-year-old narrator-protagonist, and the 16-year-old Katarina share a bench and a kiss in the school shed they’ve managed to escape to; it is a blinding consummation, but more celestial than material. Biehl, the headmaster, shamefully slaps students who break the rules of his Utopian establishment; the pain is not in the blow but in the seconds preceding and following it. It is in the abasement.

Biehl’s school is set up, in cooperation with the state authorities, as a model educational experiment, “a workshop of the sun,” as he lyrically puts it. With 26 teachers and 200 students, the pedagogical attention is overwhelming; big brothers and sisters continually watch everyone. It is entirely dedicated to the notion of progress; specifically, measurable scientific progress. It is a temple to linear time--year by year not only do the students learn more but they are also advanced to higher floors in the school building--and it is ruled by the bell that signals where everyone is to be, and when.

Laboratory conditions, isolation from the sloppiness of the outside world, and a sterile totalitarianism. Discipline is by restrictions and verbal suasion, in principle, but Biehl has not been able to exclude the germs of human weakness; not even his own. He slaps occasionally, once in a while he hits, and once or twice he has beaten. He keeps a coded record, a secret confessional.

Part of the rigor is justified by a utopian aim: the eventual integration of all students, from the gifted and cooperative to those who have been placed in centers for the disturbed and the delinquent. As a preliminary experiment, three such children are introduced; and they are the three who serve as the novel’s protagonists and the vehicles of Hoeg’s passionate anti-utopian thesis. Peter is an orphan who has shuttled between reform schools of greater and lesser rigor. Katarina comes from a more privileged class, but her mother has died of cancer and her father, unable to cope, has hanged himself. And finally, an extreme case has been admitted: August, a violently abused child who has killed both his parents.

Peter tries to conform; to be expelled would be to perish. Katarina questions, and her questioning soon enlists him in a compact to explore and try to understand the system that oppresses them. To test out the constraints, Katarina makes herself deliberately unpunctual. Peter steals school records. Their hesitant experiments take on urgency when August is put under Peter’s care. The child’s violence--at one point he breaks Peter’s finger--and his agony--he sneaks out to the chemistry lab at night to inhale gas so he can sleep--are one single denunciation. Peter and Katarina would escape, but they cannot abandon August: their burning resolve, forged against the institution’s chilly experiments, is that a child must never be abandoned.

They rebel, instead, in an act of sabotage that involves a complex disruption of the inviolate schedule--at one point Peter switches the mechanism that regulates the bells--and that ends in tragic disaster. Peter will survive; August won’t; Katarina’s fate is uncertain. Eventually Peter will get himself adopted by a nurturing family, will grow up, get married and have a child. Human love saves him where social and scientific notions of progress have all but destroyed him.

“Borderliners” moves back and forth between a part-magical story of childhood rebellion--there are suggestions of such classics as Alain-Fournier’s “The Wanderer” and Cocteau’s “Les Enfants Terribles”--and a wide-ranging series of speculations by Peter, now an adult and speaking retrospectively. The former is suggestive but often schematic. Neither Peter nor Katarina is particularly distinct as a character--August, the child psychotic, is much more affecting--and Biehl and the teachers are little more than sketches of different kinds of baleful authority.

The speculative asides are awkwardly integrated. They parallel the story and certainly explicate it, but they rarely manage to haunt or enhance it. They have their own strength, however. Though some passages drag on wordily and though Hoeg has a tendency to hammer repetitively at points he has already made, his ideas are, in fact, at the heart of the book, and some have an alluring edge.

There is his discussion of linear versus circular time, for example. If the former is essential to a great part of our practical and intellectual life, he quarrels with what he considers its abuse. He associates such abuse with mathematical and scientific notions of progress; what he objects to is their spread to other fields; notably those of social science and education.

Sometimes the argument is dry; nor does it, in itself, have notable originality. Sometimes, though, an image will transfigure it. Take spider webs. Rarely, Hoeg writes, are they more than two feet across. A spider could not handle more information than a two-foot web brings in. It would destroy its nature. Too much information, too much perfecting, can destroy human nature as well, he argues. Again, it is not the argument that particularly stands up. But Hoeg on spider webs and the dew that hangs on them between two trees on an early morning manages to enhance the notion of limits, and how necessary they are to humanity, in ways beyond argument. He does for spider webs and us what he uncannily did for snow and us in “Smilla.”