Saga Land

 

Saga Land sat on my bookshelf for a few years in a loose queue, and then  I read it all at once, effortlessly and with pleasure. Richard Fidler has teamed up with Icelandic-Australian Kári Gíslason to co-write a narrative that moves between personal story (Gíslason’s search for family and connection to Iceland), mythology (sagas retold with a light touch) and travelogue (shared journeys together across the island). 

The chapters are told in the alternate voices of the two authors. Fidler’s voice is empathetic and curious, interweaving retellings of the narrative with connections to the present and Gíslason’s journey from Fidler’s perspective. Gíslason has more at stake in the events of the narrative. He recalls childhood in Iceland, Britain and Australia, and recounts the search for his biological father, both in the past as a young man, and now in the present through his step-brothers and step-sisters, and the famous Iceland genealogical records. The story develops these themes with narrative art, so that we get to know Gíslason’s ancestor, Snorri Sturluson, as a man and storyteller himself. Slowly we understand more profoundly the significance attached to the quest to know oneself through the past (and the more immediate question of one's parentage).

In the European winter of 2012, ten years ago now, I visited Iceland for a few days on a writing research trip of my own. My novel The Copyart Murders includes a young Icelandic character who has come to France to find her biological father, an artist of some repute, who up until this point has kept her presence in his life as a secret. I wandered around Reykjavík on the first morning in absolute awe: walking from my B&B into the city along the lake in pitch dark at 9 A.M. with snow around, and seeing the sun rise over the harbour an hour later, only for it to sink again around 2 P.M. It was a clear day and impossible not to take a beautiful photograph, wherever you pointed your camera. I have been fascinated by Viking culture for many years, beginning with my very first essay at university in a history course called ‘European Empires Overseas’ with that wonderfully skilled global historian, Professor David Christian. 

So Saga Land resonated with me on many levels. From the writer perspective, I was relieved to see how I had portrayed my own character’s life with a single mother in the 1970s as quite true-to-life, as we see from Gíslason’s tale. I enjoyed that other aspect of the travelogue: a vicarious visit to places I have seen, and places I would like to see one day. The Australian angle on Iceland has its benefits, too. With nearly thirty percent of Australians now born overseas, the feeling of living in one place and thinking about another is common, and I think profoundly important in how we develop as a nation. I’ve always had a foot in more than one camps, and the young person’s desire to be on the road has never quite faded away. 

A land of sagas, a volcanic island of axe and pen. I'd like to know more, and I'd love to visit again.