The Importance Of Being Independent

As you may have seen from my recent posts and comments, I am on a bit of an Iceland kick at the moment, and if you are that way inclined, sooner or later you are going to end up reading a book by the country’s undisputed number one writer – Nobel Prize Winner Halldór Laxness.  I’d never tried any of his novels before, but I was determined to see if his work was as good as many say it is – and luckily my local library was able to get me a copy of his most famous novel…

*****

Independent People (translated by J.A. Thompson) is a 544-page epic, cramming two decades of life on the harsh lands of the Icelandic interior into a superb novel.  It’s the story of Bjartur, an agricultural worker, who after eighteen years of hard service to the local farmer has been able to set himself free and buy some land to start his own small croft.  Our newly independent man is in for a tough life, battling not only the elements (and in Iceland that would be bad enough on its own), but also the unforgiving land, the greed of richer farmers and, of course, the supernatural.  This is Iceland after all…

If anyone can manage this though, then Bjartur of Summerhouses is that man.  A taciturn being of Viking stock, he is determined to make a go of things and stand up straight, regardless of what the weather and the local spirits throw at him.  In a wonderful introduction to the novel, Laxness takes us through the history of the croft, telling us all about the evil murderess Gunnvor and her refusal to take death quietly.  Then Bjartur comes striding onto his land…

“No,” he said defiantly…
And as he passed Gunnvor’s cairn on the ridge, he spat, and ground out vindictively: “Damn the stone you’ll ever get from me you old bitch, ” and refused to give her a stone. p.18 (Harvill Press, 2001)

He then proceeds to climb a hill to survey his domain:

“Standing on the highest point of the knoll, like a Viking pioneer who has found his high-seat posts, he looked about him, then made water…” p.19

In the shadow of Gunnvor’s cairn, Bjartur proceeds to mark his land – territorial pissings indeed…

In the coming years, Bjartur will need to show all this strength of purpose to survive.  In a land where Easter is often celebrated in snow, getting the sheep (the key to his survival) through the winter in one piece is a mammoth task.  Luckily, as the years pass, he is helped in this task by his family, eventually being joined by four children, three sons and one daughter, Asta Solillja.  However, as the children grow towards maturity, some of them are shown to have inherited their father’s strength of character and stubbornness – and not all of them want to live a life of Bjartur’s making…

Independent People is a wonderful book, a mini-saga written (and translated) in clear prose, a marvellous tale of an environment which appears almost alien to comfortable 21st-century city dwellers.  As much as the book is about Bjartur and his family, it also foregrounds Iceland itself.  The country’s interior is another of the book’s characters (one of its more important ones) and is almost Hardyesque in its importance to the story.  As well as living off the proceeds of his work and the land’s generosity, Bjartur feels a more intangible connection to the place he lives in:

“But the high heath had also a value for this man other than the practical and the economic.  It was his spiritual mother, his church, his better world, as the ocean must inevitably be to the seafarer.  When he walked alone over the moors on the clear, frosty days of late autumn, when he ran his eyes over the desert’s pathless range, and felt the cold clean breeze of the mountains on his face, then he too would prove the substance of patriotic song.”  pp.102/3

Easy as it is to get carried away with romantic pastoral fantasies though, the reality is that life in Independent People is hard.  Iceland is an isolated wilderness, primitive in comparison to the rest of early-twentieth-century Europe, and the awful weather conditions, combined with an absence of electricity, running water and home comforts, meant that just keeping yourself warm and healthy was a major task.  Without giving too much away, death was just as much of a certainty as cold winters and wet feet.

The country was also a colony at the time, to be exploited by rich Danish merchants, and part of the interest in Independent People is seeing how things begin to change over the course of the years.  The richer farmers form a co-operative society which challenges the primacy of the banks, and eventually the native people begin to take more responsibility for their own affairs, culminating in the first steps to independence for the country in 1918.  It’s fascinating to see how Iceland’s rise to independence is aided by the slaughter elsewhere in World War I – the country is able to export its lamb and mutton for astronomical prices, using Europe’s misfortune to improve its economy.  Not for nothing do the farmers call it “The Blessed War’…

One thing does not change though, and that is Bjartur’s insistence on the need to be independent.  Having laboured for eighteen years to finally escape servitude, he isn’t likely to give up his freedom in a hurry.  As he tells his wife: 

“Independence is the most important thing of all in life.  I say for my part that a man lives in vain until he is independent.  People who aren’t independent aren’t people.”  p.41

And that, perhaps, is what it all boils down to: is it better to life in servitude and comfort, or freedom and poverty?  For Bjartur, it’s a question that only has one possible answer.