Burial Rites

Fistfuls of sky
Hannah Kent's Burial Rites describes a long-imagined landscape of sagas and fictions that are so familiar that they feel like a part of my own narrative.

     Northern Iceland, 1829, is barren and bleak and the characters that inhabit the land feel small and hopeless against the inevitable bad weather whipping in from the arctic and the grueling poverty they must endure. There are few rewards materially or spiritually to living in this harsh, sub-arctic climate. Our protagonist, the raven-like Agnes, has grown up here. She has lived through thirty-three winters and knows the hardship of the land. Every rise and fall of the valley is familiar to her and it seems to be the closest thing she can call home. She was left as an orphan to its wind-rushed slopes. There is a sense that she is an incarnation of the land, abandoned and barren.

We're all shipwrecked. All beached in a peat bog of poverty.      

Kent's book is rich with layers of superstition and the conflicts between humanity and landscape and the ascendance of Christian belief over pagan tradition; they make an uneasy compromise in both situations.
     At some points this book is confessional and others it bears the marking of a ghost story. Agnes's past haunts us through the pages.

"Do you know what it means, to have a hollow palm? It means there is something secretive about us. This empty space can be filled with bad luck if we're not careful. If we expose the hollow to the world and all it's darkness, all it's misfortune."

The knowledge that she is not prepared to die and that there is no dignity in her death or any death is brutal and sparingly described. Kent does not give us Agnes' death, only the lead up to Friðrik's execution. She leaves us with Agnes' fear as she hears the axe fall for the other accused.

This is my life as it used to be: up to my elbows in the guts of things, working towards a kind of survival.

Agnes is positioned as the maligned outsider. She tells us how her mother left her at Kornsa farmstead with only a stone to her name and told her that if she put the stone under her tongue she could speak to the ravens. The young Agnes soon discovers that even the ravens will not answer her.
     Kent does not let her off the crime, the story is more interested in understanding why the crime happened rather than absolving. It would be a rough soul that did not follow Agnes's story with compassion but there are moments in the novel when the nagging feeling is that it's too much for one person to suffer. However, Kent never resorts to melodrama. Her prose is clear and song-like, rescuing Agnes's soul from the depression that the landscape is famous for inducing.
     Kent's writing is generous and the space between her words can be filled with our own fears. The setting feels genuine. Kent has done a great deal of research which is unsurprising from a novel that started life as a PhD thesis. She is a trustworthy guide through the ghost-filled valley.

"What's the name for the space between stars?"

"No such name"

"Make one up"

I thought about it. "The soul asylum."

"That's another way of saying heaven, Agnes"

On my edition of the book, the pages are ink stained along the side which often made me feel that death was always present, creeping inwards, ready to claim its victims, the very words and language between us and Agnes. The raven feathers on the dust jacket and the ink-black rim make you feel Agnes story is diffusing into the pages.

Quotations from Hannah Kent, Burial Rites, Picador