Heaven and Hell by Jon Kalman Stefansson
| Heaven and Hell by Jon Kalman Stefansson | |
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| Category: Literary Fiction | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Not quite the expected saga, but an intriguing and vividly crafted Icelandic tale of love and death. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 240 | Date: September 2010 |
| Publisher: MacLehose Press | |
| ISBN: 978-1906694531 | |
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Iceland, somewhen about a century ago. Five men and a young lad set out in their tiny oar- and sail-powered fishing boat, for cod. On board are people with the strength to take part in a solid twelve-hour shift - rowing four hours to the fishing banks, staying there stably for the lines, then hauling them in and rowing home. And that's not to factor in any temperament of the weather. Unfortunately it's not only knowledge of fishing these people have taken on board, for Icelandic men still like to dream of love, gaze nightly at the moon at the same time as their belles, and read stories of gods, romance and legend. It's a pity then these distractions will be fatal for one of the boy's five companions...
The first thing one notices about this book is the telling, which tries in its own way to be a legendary tale of some romance, and a kind of god itself. The highly stylised narration actually seems to be from some ghosts, using first person plural to say why this tale is being told. It's a rarefied, poetic telling, one that bursts into a form of authoritative definition ("the heart is...", "men are...") as much as it can absorb and present a wispier kind of flashback, or cutaway to those on land.
And once on land the longer of the two sections sees the boy venture out to resolve his issues surrounding his horror at the death, and possibly his own innocence and naivety about love at the same time.
For me the first section was the more compelling with the nature of these lives so finely wrought. We envy them nothing in their labours, save the simplistic emotions of success we might hope to share with them. Life then is conveyed supremely, from the rules of the fishermen to the emotional lives of those they leave behind. I had flashbacks of the Icelandic firewater brennivin every time it was mentioned, for all here smacks of realism.
For me part two was not so memorable. A tautness was lost, and the narration did not quite survive the switch from telling us about a way of life to making us meet too many landlubbing characters too quickly. They have slight quirks and so on that make them seem real - especially the dipsomaniac sea captain - but I had to work on logging who was whom, while thinking where both the boy (who by the way remains nameless throughout) and book were going. That was a thought process I should not have been given the time and space for.
But I have to mention the fact that any reader will be working with this novel. This has the style of the lengthy, unusually-punctuated sentences. They don't reach the excesses of some, but copious times you are bewildered by the number of clauses in the sentences. When this works it adds a depth to the narration, and the ghosts become a lot more chatty, and all the stronger entities for it. When it doesn't work they become merely stranger entities.
So it's their voice you hear at the book's opening and close, with a gamut of emotions in between. And they carry on their vocal cords an awful lot of the soul of rural, historical Iceland, meaning that for all the dubiously large switch in nature from part one to part two, and for all the effort needed to stick with every imbalanced, hanging clause, this has a soul, an interesting, earthy feel and singular approach that means it is still worth recommending to the reader of more literary fiction.
I must thank the kind Maclehose Press people for my review copy.
We don't know of much Iceland-based fiction to similarly recommend, but we did enjoy Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice) by Michael Ridpath. The mood of Mr Stefansson's book is probably more akin to Ice Land by Betsy Tobin.
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