Still, I’m glad this novel introduced me to a part of history I knew nothing about. I enjoyed the themes and the icy setting, the unsettling midnight sun and gloom of winter but unfortunately I found some of the writing unconvincing, the characterisations too modern. It is clear that the purge is all about power, setting women against each other, and consolidating and reinforcing that of the king, and by extension all men. The religious characters in the novel get a glazed look in their eyes when they talk about witchcraft, as if they themselves are possessed. To that end, the novel investigates how a patriarchal society combined with fundamentalist religion leads to the murder of women.
It is “concerned… with the conditions that make such things possible”. Millwood Hargrave’s debut adult novel is based on the real religious crackdown that followed the passage of Danish-Norwegian King Christian IV’s 1617 sorcery decree. Accusations are hurled, the village women are divided, flesh is burned, devilry purged. Maren is drawn inexplicably to Absalom’s new wife Ursa, a naive city-slicker who has no idea what she has married into. These fractures are inflamed further by the arrival of the Scotsman Absalom Cornet, sent by the king as part of a crackdown on witchcraft. Inevitably they seek out those who are different, the Samí nomads, such as Diina, Maren’s sister-in-law, who the villagers turn to for medicine and spells. They go fishing and – unthinkably – don trousers.īut in their grief, the women become fractious, seek blame.
Maren, 20, her father, brother and fiancee drowned, is bothered by sinister dreams of a whales. Their wives, daughters and betrotheds are left behind in the icy mid-winter dark. Christmas Eve, 1617, an extraordinary storm – almost supernatural – emerges from the Arctic Ocean and, “like a finger snap”, claims the lives of 40 fishermen of the island of Vardø in Arctic Norway.
0 kommentar(er)
