Iceland's Bell [Paperback]

For a good portion of this month, after our return from holidaying in Iceland, I have decided to get into reading Laxness' literary works on an earlier Iceland as retold using themes from the Sagas. Having only read one of his novels before, I want to test out this writer's ability to create an informative and colorful narrative that taps the national pulse of history of a culture coming to grips with its incessant demand for respect and justice. In "The Bell", Laxness, an accomplished story-teller and Nobel Prize winner, produces a very engaging adventure that captures the daily moil and toil of bitter Icelanders as they seek revenge for wrongs done them in the past. The time is the early seventeenth century, and the nation is being ruled by a corrupt and ruthless overclass of Danes who are bleeding it dry by persecuting citizenry and reducing them to poverty. The justice system, based originally on the democratic principles of the Althing of Thingvellir, has become so corrupt and perverse that seemingly innocent men and women are going to their death or losing their property on trumped up charges. One of the maligned characters in the story is a farmer named Jon Hreggvidsson who is arrested and flogged for allegedly making sexual innuendos about the Danish king. He is probably guilty as charged but the authorities need to make an example of his kind to keep local dissent in check. Things will only get worse as he is eventually arrested for murdering the king's hangman. Only by a stroke of good fortune does Jon manage to escape being beheaded and flees to Europe to appeal to the Danish court. As the story evolves, we learn that his road to redemption is going to be a long and painful ordeal and, in the end, not a very satisfactory one, given the fact that the collective memory of the nation is long and exacting. Meanwhile other Icelanders rise up to answer the bell of public discontent over their own sense of wrong: the looting and destruction of national documents that define Icelandic culture; the forced marriages of virgins to Danish nobles; the unlawful expropriation of land; and the shutting down of local fishing through limiting the sale of cordage. This novel is consumed with a lot of Icelandic self-pity, with the only true winners being those who chose to cut a deal with the devil, the Danes, who are allowed free reign of the island because no Icelander seems to know how to apply the existing laws fairly. The nationalistic message here is that until Iceland takes charge of running its own affairs effectively, outsiders will never take it seriously. The irony here is that Icelanders, according to Laxness, are not virtuous by any stretch of the imagination. It is a case that the time has come for Icelanders to establish a sense of justice that works for them.

In a black bog on a black autumn night in the black land called Iceland.

I became interested in this book (and this author) after a trip I made to Iceland in January 2004.

ICELAND'S BELL takes place in late 17th century Iceland which certainly wasn't, by any means, a "good" time for this island nation. Laxness's descriptions of his homeland paint a very bleak and cruel backdrop for his story. The people of Iceland are starving while the government is composed of corrupt and greedy Danes. Politics plays a big part in this novel and those politics can be very complex.

The story of ICELAND'S BELL centers on Arni Arnaeus (based on a real character), a man whose passion is the collection and preservation of medieval Icelandic manuscripts, most of which have something to do with Iceland's famous sagas. Something that's amazing are the places in which Arni finds the manuscripts, e.g., between wall slats to keep the snow out and what heat can be generated, in.

ICELAND'S BELL is also the story of Jon Hreggvidsson, a man who may have committed a murder "in a black bog on a black autumn night." Jon is a totally different kind of man than is Arni, yet their lives intersect and intertwine and both men are deeply affected by Snaefridur, a woman so beautiful she's known as "Iceland's Sun."

ICELAND'S BELL is certainly a marvelous novel, but it's definitely not for those readers who like their literature on the "light" side or who only choose books on the bestseller list. This novel is bleak, tragic and quite erudite. There are many references to the Icelandic sagas and the characters often use Latin, Danish and German words and phrases. There are many explanatory notes, but I think readers will enjoy the book more if they don't have to refer to them so often.

The prose in ICELAND'S BELL is darkly poetic, richly magnificent and very elegant (Laxness is a Nobel Prize winner) and it flows beautifully. The characters are also beautifully drawn and fully fleshed out.

I really can't recommend ICELAND'S BELL highly enough, but only to those readers who like very, very literary fiction. Also, don't expect to see a portrait of modern day Iceland. ICELAND'S BELL paints a very different picture of Iceland than the thriving, growing country we recognize today.

Halldor Laxness is probably one of the most obscure Nobel Literature Prize winners a native reader of English can encounter. He lived into his nineties, and his writing spanned much of the 20th Century. Like many of Laxness's books, Iceland's Bell has not been available in English until very recently, and it is a shame that it has not.

Rather than summarizing the plot, I will simply note that Iceland's Bell dates from the period immediately following World War II, during which Iceland finally obtained her independence after centuries of rule by other Scandinavian countries (first Norway and then, after 1380, Denmark). Although Iceland's Bell is set in the 1600s, the tone of the stinging criticism of Iceland's colonial rulers uttered by several of the novel's characters is like the two-headed Byzantine eagle, looking forward and back at the same time. The general sentiment of the novel is that Iceland's people have been, under colonial rule, more like prisoners of the unforgiving land than true inheritors of that land, strangely haunted by their unique cultural heritage while not completely aware of its breadth and depth -- the ongoing search for written remnants of Icelandic saga and ballads and the transport and sale of those remnants away from Iceland and Icelanders is criticized, as is the Danish monopoly on Iceland's whale-oil trade and the periodic looting of priceless metallic artifacts (which are treated as mere raw material to fuel the Danish crown's incessant warfare). One gets the impression that Laxness is fighting a rearguard action against all colonialism in the way that he describes the capricious interference of the Danish crown into the indigenous affairs of Iceland's own executive and judicial systems, prompted by some misguided sense of "we must save those poor Icelanders from themselves" ("White Man's Burden" redux?).

I didn't know much about Iceland, in the "macro" sense, before reading Iceland's Bell. I probably still can't claim that I do, in spite of all the authentic touches employed in this translation (such as retaining the original Icelandic spelling of the names of most places on the island). But I have been left with the impression of a people who are quite like my own Irish kinsmen -- stubbornly proud of their heritage even as they recover from the effects of a predatory colonial regime. Not even adding six extra letters to the "normal" alphabet can make the characters I have read in "Iceland's Bell" seem like strangers to me.