September 23, 2019
IT LOOKS LIKE HALLDóR LAXNESS splurged most of the Nobel dosh on Gljúfrasteinn, his white, blockist 1950s home halfway up a mist-smudged vale outside Reykjavik. From the outside it reminds me of a 1970s squash club in the Home Counties. A river tumbles by and on through the mostly treeless autumn. Parked in the drive is a cream Jag identical to the one Dad had. I buy my ticket from a friendly knitter with a cushy job and walk over to the house proper, where I put on my audio guide as directed. My digital spirit guide tells me about the paintings, the modernist lamps and clocks, the low Swedish furniture, a German piano, parquet floors, cherry-wood fittings, leather upholstery. Gljúfrasteinn is a bubble in time, as is right and proper for a writer’s museum. Climbing the stairs, I consider the prospect of a Crispin Hershey Museum. The obvious location is the old family home in Pembridge Place, where I lived both as a boy and as a father. The snag is, the dear old place was gutted by builders, the week after I handed over the keys, subdivided into six flats and sold to Russian, Chinese, and Saudi investors. Reacquisition, reunification, and restoration would be a multilingual and ruinously expensive prospect, so my current address on East Heath Lane, Hampstead, is the likeliest candidate—assuming Hyena Hal can persuade Bleecker Yard’s and Erebus’s lawyers not to whisk it away, of course. I imagine reverent visitors stroking my varnished handrails and whispering in awed tones, “My God, that’s the laptop he wrote his triumphant Iceland novel on!” The gift shop could be squeezed into the downstairs bog: Crispin Hershey key fobs, Desiccated Embryo mouse mats, and glow-in-the-dark figurines. People buy such bollocks at museums. They don’t know what else to do once they’re there.
Upstairs, the digital guide mentions in passing that Mr. and Mrs. Laxness occupied different bedrooms. So I see. Strikes a sodding chord. Laxness’s typewriter sits on his desk—or, more accurately, his wife’s typewriter, as she typed up his handwritten manuscripts. I wrote my debut novel on a typewriter, but Wanda in Oils was composed on a secondhand Brittan PC handed down by Dad as a birthday present, and it’s been ever-lighter, ever-trustier laptops ever since. For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap. Our analog ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, meters of ink ribbon, and pints of Tippex. Poor sods.
On the other hand, if digital technology is so superior a midwife of the novel, where are this century’s masterpieces? I enter a small library where Laxness seems to have kept his overflow, and bend my neck to graze upon the titles. Plenty of hardbacks in Icelandic, Danish, I guess, German, English … and sodding hell—Desiccated Embryos!
Hang on, this is the 2001 edition …
… and Laxness died in 1998. Right.
Well, a kind gesture of the Hidden Folk.
GOING DOWNSTAIRS, I make way for a dozen teenagers trooping up. Where do Juno and Ana?s go on their school trips in Montreal? Not knowing saddens me. What a long-distance, part-time father I am. These twenty-first-century children of Iceland are plugged into headsets but still exude that Nordic confidence and sense of wellbeing, even the two African Icelanders and a girl in a Muslim headdress. All have a 2 in front of their birth year and need barely scroll down an inch when finding it on an online form. They carry a fragrance of hair conditioner and fabric conditioner. Their consciences are as undented as cars in a dealership showroom, and all are bound for the world’s center stage, where they’ll challenge, outperform, and patronize us old farts at our retirement parties, as we did when we looked that beautiful. Their teacher brings up the rear and smiles his thanks at me, and as he passes, a rather fine mirror is revealed on the Laxness stairway. From its deep square well of grays peers out a haggard look-alike of Anthony Hershey. Look at that. My metamorphosis into Dad is complete. Did some evil spirit at ásbyrgi suck out the last of my youth? My hair’s thinner, my skin’s tired, my eyes bloodshot; my neck’s going all saggy and turkey-like … I summon a Tagore quote, for consolation: “Youth is a horse, and maturity a charioteer.” Dad’s aging lips twitch into a sneer and speak: “I see no charioteer. I see a sociology lecturer at a third-rate university who just learned that his department’s being axed because nobody except future sociology lecturers studies sociology anymore. You’re a joke, boy. Do you hear me? A joke.”
My prime of life is going, going, gone …
TRUDGING DOWN TO the Mitsubishi waiting in Gljúfrasteinn’s small car park, I check the time on my phone—and find a message from Carmen Salvat. It is not the message I might have wished to receive.
hello crispin pIs can we talk? x yr friend C
I huff. My soul still aches from being dumped, but I’m handling it. I don’t want to have to unhandle it, or un-unhandle it. We ingest our emotions, and grief for a lost relationship is not what I want to ingest. Carmen’s “yr friend” is code for “We won’t be getting back together” and “hello” instead of “hi” is the textual equivalent of a chilly air-kiss rather than a cheek-to-cheek contact kiss:
maybe not for a while, if that’s ok. It still hurts and I’m bored of the pain. No offense meant and mind yourself. C.
After pressing send I wish I’d taken more care to sound less petulant and/or self-pitying. Suddenly the river’s annoyingly clattery: How did Laxness get any work done, for buggery’s sake? The gathering clouds are lead-lined gray, not Zen gray. The aging day’s intersecting meanings form a crossword that defeats me, not inspires me, like it used to. I’m not as good a writer as Halldór Laxness. I’m not even as good a writer as the younger Crispin Hershey. I’m just as shit and uncommitted a dad as Dad, only his films will survive longer than my overregarded novels. My clothes are crumpled. My lecture’s at seven-thirty. My heart is still crusty with emotional scabs, and I don’t want them pulled off by a Spanish ex-partner.
No. We can’t talk. I switch off my phone.
“THE NAME OF my lecture is On Never Not Thinking About Iceland.” It’s a decent turnout at the House of Literature, but half of the two hundred attendees are here because the Bonny Prince Billy concert was sold out, and a portion of the silver-haired contingent showed up because they love Dad’s films. The only faces I know are Holly’s, Aoife’s, and Aoife’s boyfriend ?rvar’s, sending me friendly vibes from the front row. “This car crash of a title,” I continue, “is derived from an apocryphal remark of W. H. Auden’s, spoken here in Reykjavik, for all I know on this very podium, to your parents or grandparents. Auden said that while he hadn’t lived his life thinking about Iceland hourly or even daily, ‘There was never a time when I wasn’t thinking about Iceland.’ What a delicious, cryptic statement. ‘Never not thinking about Iceland’? Why not just say, ‘Always thinking about Iceland’? Because, of course, double negatives are truth smugglers, are censor outwitters. This evening I’d like to hold Auden’s double negative”—I raise my left hand, palm up—“alongside this double-headed fact about writing,” right hand, palm up. “Namely, that in order to write, you need a pen and a place, or a study and a typewriter, or a laptop and a Starbucks—it doesn’t matter, because the pen and the place are symbols. Symbols for means and tradition. A poet uses a pen to write but, of course, the poet doesn’t make the pen. He or she buys, borrows, inherits, steals, or otherwise acquires the pen from elsewhere. Similarly, a poet inhabits a poetic tradition to write within, but no poet can single-handedly create that tradition. Even if a poet sets out to invent a new poetics, he or she can only react against what’s already there. There’s no Johnny Rotten without the Bee Gees.” Not a flicker from my Icelandic audience; maybe the Sex Pistols never made it this far north. Holly smiles for me, and I worry at how thin and drawn she’s looking. “Returning to Auden,” I continue, “and his ‘never not.’ What I take from his remark is this: If you’re writing fiction or poetry in a European language, that pen in your hand was, once upon a time, a goose quill held by an Icelander. Like it or not, know it or not, it doesn’t matter. If you seek to represent the beauty, truth, and pain of the world in prose, if you seek to deepen character via dialogue and action, if you seek to unite the personal, the past, and the political in fiction, then you’re in pursuit of the same aims sought by the authors of the Icelandic sagas, right here, seven, eight, nine hundred years ago. I assert that the author of Njal’s Saga deploys the very same narrative tricks used later by Dante and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Molière, Victor Hugo and Dickens, Halldór Laxness and Virginia Woolf, Alice Munro and Ewan Rice. What tricks? Psychological complexity, character development, the killer line to end a scene, villains blotched with virtue, heroic characters speckled with villainy, foreshadow and backflash, artful misdirection. Now, I’m not saying that writers in antiquity were ignorant of all of these tricks but,” here I put my balls and Auden’s on the block, “in the sagas of Iceland, for the first time in Western culture, we find proto-novelists at work. Half a millennium avant le parole, the sagas are the world’s first novels.”
Either the audience is listening, or else they’re merely snoozing with eyes open. I turn over my notes.
“So much for the pen. Now for the place. From the vantage point of continental Europeans, Iceland is, of course, a mostly treeless, mostly cold oval rock where a third of a million souls eke out a living. Within my own lifetime Iceland has made the front pages exactly four times: the Cod Wars of the 1970s; the setting for Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s arms-control talks; an early casualty of the 2008 crash; and as the source of a volcanic ash cloud that disabled European aviation in 2010. Blocs, however, whether geometric or political, are defined by their outer edges. Just as Orientalism seduces the imagination of a certain type of Westerner, to a certain type of southerner, Iceland exerts a gravitational force far in excess of its landmass and cultural import. Pytheas, the Greek cartographer who lived around 300 B.C. in a sunbaked land on the far side of the ancient world, he felt this gravity, and put you on his map: Ultima Thule. The Irish Christian hermits who cast themselves onto the sea in coracles, they felt this pull. Tenth-century refugees from the civil war in Norway, they felt it too. It was their grandsons who wrote the sagas. Sir Joseph Banks, enough Victorian scholars to sink a longship, Jules Verne, even Hermann G?ring’s brother, who was spotted by Auden and MacNeice here in 1937, they all felt the pull of the north, of your north, and all of them, I believe, like Auden—were never not thinking about Iceland.”
The UFO-shaped lights of the House of Literature blink on.
“Writers don’t write in a void. We work in a physical space, a room, ideally in a house like Laxness’s Gljúfrasteinn, but we also write within an imaginative space. Amid boxes, crates, shelves, and cabinets full of … junk, treasure, both cultural—nursery rhymes, mythologies, histories, what Tolkien called ‘the compost heap’; and also personal stuff—childhood TV, homegrown cosmologies, stories we hear first from our parents, or later from our children—and, crucially, maps. Mental maps. Maps with edges. And for Auden, for so many of us, it’s the edges of the maps that fascinate …”
HOLLY’S BEEN RENTING her apartment since June, but she’ll be moving back to Rye in a couple of weeks so it’s minimally furnished, uncluttered, and neat, all walnut floors and cream walls, with a fine view of Reykjavik’s jumbled roofs, sloping down to the inky bay. Streetlights punctuate the northern twilight as color drains away, and a trio of cruise liners glitters in the harbor, like three floating Las Vegases. Over the bay, a long, whale-shaped mountain dominates the skyline, or would, if the clouds weren’t so low. ?rvar says it’s called Mount Esja, but admits he’s never climbed it because it’s right there, on the doorstep. I biff away an intense wish to live here, intense, perhaps, because of its utter lack of realism: I don’t think I’d survive a single winter of these three-hour days. Holly, Aoife, ?rvar, and I eat a veggie moussaka and polish off a couple of bottles of wine. They ask me about my week on the road. Aoife talks about her summer’s dig on a tenth-century settlement near Eglisstaeir, and nudges the amiable but quiet ?rvar into discussing his work on the genetic database that has mapped the entire Icelandic population: “Eighty-plus women were found to have Native American DNA,” he tells me. “This proves pretty conclusively that the Vinland Sagas are based on historical truth, not just wishful thinking. Lots of Irish DNA on the women’s side, too.” Aoife describes an app that can tell every living Icelander if and how closely related they are to every other living Icelander. “They’ve needed it for years,” she pats ?rvar’s hand on the table, “to avoid those awkward, morning-after in-Thor’s-name-did-I-just-shag-my-cousin? moments. Right, ?rvar?” The poor lad half blushes and mumbles about a gig starting somewhere. Everyone in Reykjavik under thirty years old, Aoife says, is in at least one band. They get up to go, and as I’m leaving first thing in the morning they both wish me bon voyage. I get a niece’s hug from Aoife and a firm handshake from ?rvar, who only now remembers that he brought Desiccated Embryos for me to sign. While ?rvar laces up his boots, I try to think of something witty to mark the occasion, but nothing witty arrives.
To ?rvar, from Crispin, with best regards.
I’ve striven to be witty since Wanda in Oils.
Letting it go feels so sodding liberating.
? ? ?
I STIR, STIR, stir until the mint leaves are bright green minnows in a whirlpool. “The nail in the coffin of Carmen and me,” I tell Holly, “was Venice. If I never see the place again, I’ll die happy.”
Holly looks puzzled. “I found it rather romantic.”
“That’s the trouble. All that beauty: in-sodding-sufferable. Ewan Rice calls Venice the Capital of Divorce—and set one of his best books there. About divorce. Venice is humanity at its ripped-off, ripping-off worst … I made this smart-arse remark about a rip-off umbrella Carmen bought—really, the sort of thing I say twenty times a day—but instead of batting it away, she had this look … like, ‘Remind me, why am I spending the last of my youth on this whingeing old man?’ She walked off across Saint Mark’s Square. Alone, of course.”
“Well,” Holly says neutrally, “we all have off days …”
“Bit of a Joycean epiphany, looking back. I don’t blame her. Either for finding me irritating or for dumping me. When she’s my age now, I’ll be sixty-sodding-eight, Holly! Love may be blind, but cohabitation comes with all the latest X-ray gizmos. So we spent the next day moseying around museums on our own, and when we said goodbye at Venice airport, the last thing she said was ‘Take care’; and when I got home, a Dear John was in my inbox. Couldn’t call it unexpected. Both of us have been through a messy divorce already, and one’s enough. We’ve agreed we’re still friends. We’ll exchange Christmas cards for a few years, refer to each other without rancor, and probably never meet again.”
Holly nods and makes an “I see” noise in her throat.
A late bus stops outside, its air brakes hissing.
I fail to mention this afternoon’s message to Holly.
My iPhone’s still switched off. Not now. Later.
“LOVELY SHOT, THAT.” There’s a framed photograph on a shelf behind Holly showing her as a young mum, with a small toothy Aoife dressed as the Cowardly Lion with freckles on her nose, and Ed Brubeck, younger than I remember, all smiling in a small back garden in the sun with pink and yellow tulips. “When was it taken?”
“2004. Aoife’s theatrical debut in The Wizard of Oz.” Holly sips her mint tea. “Ed and I mapped out The Radio People around then. The book was his idea, you know. We’d been in Brighton that weekend, for Sharon’s wedding, and he’d always been Mr. There Has to Be a Logical Explanation.”
“But after the room-number thing, he started believing?”
Holly makes an equivocal face. “He stopped disbelieving.”
“Did Ed ever know what a monster The Radio People turned into?”
Holly shakes her head. “I wrote the Gravesend bits quite quickly, but then I got promoted at the center. What with that, and raising Aoife, and Ed being away, I never got it finished until …” she chooses words with practiced care, “… Ed’s luck ran out in Syria.”
Now I’m appalled by my own self-pity about Zo? and Carmen. “You’re a bit of a hero, our Holly. Heroine, rather.”
“You soldier on. Aoife was ten. Falling to pieces wasn’t an option. My family’d lost Jacko so …” a sad little laugh, “… the Sykes clan does mourning and loss really bloody well. Taking up The Radio People and actually finishing it was therapy, sort of. I never imagined for a minute that anyone outside our family’d want to read it. Interviewers never believe me when I say that, but it’s the truth. The TV Book Club, the Prudence Hanson endorsement, the whole ‘The Psychic with the Childhood Scar’ thing, I wasn’t prepared for any of it, or the websites, the loonies, the begging letters, the people you lost touch with years ago for very good reasons. My first boyfriend—who really did not leave me with fond memories—got in touch to say he’s now Porsche’s main man in West London, and how about a test drive now my ship had come in? Uh, no. Then after the U.S. auction for The Radio People became a news item, all the fake Jackos crawled out from under the floorboards. My agent set the first one up via Skype. He was the right age, looked sort of like Jacko might look, and stared out of the screen, whispering, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God … It’s you.’ ”
I feel like smoking, but I munch a carrot stick instead. “How did he account for the three missing decades?”
“He said he was kidnapped by Soviet sailors who needed a cabin boy, then taken to Irkutsk to avoid a Cold War incident. Yeah, I know. Brendan’s bullshit detector was buzzing, so he shuftied me over and asked, ‘Recognize me, Jacko?’ The guy hesitated, then burst out, ‘Daddy!’ End of call. The last ‘Jacko’ we interviewed was Bangladeshi, but the imperialists at the British embassy in Dhaka refused to believe he was my brother. Would I send ten thousand pounds and sponsor his visa application? We called it a day after that. If Jacko’s alive, if he reads the book, if he wants to locate us, he’ll find a way.”
“Were you still working at the homeless center all this time?”
“I quit before I went to Cartagena. A shame—I loved the job, and I think I was good at it—but if you’re chairing a fund-raising meeting the same day a six-figure royalty payment slips into your bank account, you can’t pretend nothing’s changed. More ‘Jackos’ were trying their luck at the office, and my phone was hacked. I’m still involved with homeless charities at a patron level, but I had to get Aoife out of London to a nice sleepy backwater like Rye. So I thought. Did I ever tell you about the Great Illuminati Brawl?”
“You tell me less about your life than you think. The Illuminati: as in the lizard aliens who enslave humanity via beta-blocking mind waves beamed from their secret moonbase?”
“That’s them. One fine April morning, two groups of conspiracy theorists hide in my shrubbery. Christ knows how it started—a stray remark on Twitter, probably. So, the two groups realize they’re not alone, each group convinces itself that the other group are the Illuminati’s agents. With me so far? Stop smirking; they kicked the crap out of each other. The police were up in a jiffy. After that I had to put up a security fence and CCTV. Me, f’Chrissakes, holed up like an investment banker! But what choice did I have? Next time the loonies might not be hell-bent on defending me but attacking me. So while the contractor was in, I went out to Australia, which was when Aoife and I met you on Rottnest.” She pads over to draw the curtain on the night harbor. “Beware of asking people to question what’s real and what isn’t. They may reach conclusions you didn’t see coming.”
In the street two dogs bark furiously, then stop.
“If you don’t publish again, the loonies’ll move on.”
“This is true,” says Holly, looking evasive.
“Are you working on another book?”
Now she looks cornered. “Only a few stories.”
I feel envious and pleased. “That’s brilliant. Your publishers will be doing backflips down the corridors.”
“There’s no guarantee anyone’ll read it. They’re stories based on people I knew at the center. Not a psychic in sight.”
“Right now, The Collected Shopping Lists of Holly Sykes would go straight to number one on preorders alone.”
“Well, we’ll see. But that’s what I’ve been doing here all summer. Reykjavik’s a good place to work. Iceland’s like Ireland; being famous here’s nothing special.”
By chance our fingertips are almost touching. Holly notices at the same instant, and we pull our hands back onto our laps. I try to come up with a joke I can turn this micro-embarrassment into, but nothing springs to mind. “I’ll call you a taxi, Crisp. It’s gone midnight.”
“No way is it that late.” I check my phone: 00:10. “Sodding hell, it’s tomorrow already.”
“So it is! What time’s your flight to London?”
“Nine-thirty, but can I ask you two last things?”
“Anything,” she says. “Almost.”
“Am I still ‘the spiral, the spider, the one-eyed man’?”
“You want me to check?”
Like an atheist wanting to be prayed for, I nod.
As she did in Shanghai, Holly touches the spot on her forehead and lets her eyelids almost close. What a great face she has but … it shouldn’t be that gray, or stretched. My eyes wander to her pendant. It’s a labyrinth. Some symbolic mind-body-spirit thing, I guess. From Ed?
“Yes.” Holly opens her eyes. “Same as ever.”
A possible drunk laughs maniacally outside. “Will I ever know what that means? That’s not my second question.”
“Some day, yes. Let me know when you know.”
“I promise.” The second question’s harder because one answer to it scares me very much: “Holly, you’re not ill, are you?”
She reacts with surprise but not denial. She looks away.
“Oh, sod it.” I want to unask my question. “Forgive me, it’s not—”
“Cancer of the gall bladder.” Holly attempts a smile. “Trust me to choose a nice rare one, eh?”
I can’t even attempt a smile. “What’s the prognosis?”
Holly wears the expression of someone discussing a tiresome inconvenience. “Too late for surgery—it’s spread to my liver and … um, yeah, it’s all over the shop. My oncologist in London gives me a—a—a five to ten percent chance of being here this time next year.” Her voice croaks. “Not the odds I’d choose. With chemo and drugs the odds improve, up to twenty percent, maybe, but … do I want to spend a few extra months puking in bin-liners? That’s the other reason I’ve been here in Iceland all summer, shadowing poor Aoife, like, y’know, whatsisface from Macbeth.”
“Banquo. Aoife knows, then?”
Holly nods. “Brendan, Sharon, their kids, my mother, and ?rvar too—I’m hoping he’ll help Aoife when, y’know. When I can’t. But nobody else knows. ’Cept you. People get so maudlin. I have to spend what energy I’ve got cheering them up. I wasn’t going to tell you either but … you asked. Sorry to put a downer on a lovely evening.”
I see her, and see Crispin Hershey through her eyes, and perhaps she sees Holly Sykes through mine. Suddenly it’s later. Holly and I are standing by the table, hugging goodbye. It isn’t an erotic hug. Truly it isn’t, dear reader. I’d know.
It’s this: As long I’m holding her, nothing bad can happen.
? ? ?
THE TAXI DRIVER has earlobes full of metalwork and just says, “Okay,” when I tell him the name of my hotel. I wave goodbye until I can’t see Holly anymore. I’ve arranged to go to Rye before Christmas, so I’ll just ignore this unpleasant premonition that I’ll never see her again. The radio’s tuned to a classical-music station and I recognize Maria Callas singing “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma—Dad used it in the model-airplane scene in Battleship Hill. For a moment I forget where I am. I switch on my iPhone to text Holly, to thank her for the evening, and as I’m writing it, a message from Carmen gets relayed through. She sent it while I was delivering my lecture earlier. It has no text: it’s just an image of … a blizzard?
A blizzard at night through a windscreen?
I tilt my head and rotate the phone.
Mashed-up asteroids? No.
It’s an ultrasound scan.
Of Carmen’s womb.
With a tenant in it.