Northern Lights

The TV screen at home has been bright, albeit with plenty of darkness in the tales told, over the past few months. I nearly ugly-cried at the last episode of Our Friends in the North, which wouldn't have mattered since J is currently in Dublin. There was a Guardian article stressing how topical it still is - about corruption, greed, Tory heartlessness and a Labour party that sometimes looks like the opposition - so I thought it was time I watched.

The special genius is to have created an epic in only nine episodes, taking us from 1964 (the four main characters pictured above) to 1995 (below): like Fawlty Towers, its leanness is part of its power as time goes by (though of course I knew the perfect comedy from the start, whereas this is new to me). And what rich characters. How I love Gina McKee, who always reminds me of our English teacher at school sighing 'lovely lady, lovely lady' over Desdemona - only Desdemona can be played with real toughness, and the resilience/occasional fury of McKee as Mary is so impressive to watch. Christopher Eccleston plays the inexpressible mid-life crisis so well that you almost hate him before time puts things right. Mark Stone as the loser who still seems to be able to make money also has you hating him through much of the first half; then there's the nuanced relationship with wife no. 2 (Tracey Wilkinson, so good and very sympathetic in the final episode). The richest acting of all comes from Daniel Craig as Geordie - such a tale of a naturally talented and good person who keeps going off the rails. Interesting that people could see Bond in him here; though the beautiful eyes are there throughout all his changes of hair. 

Occasionally there's a bit of stagey melodrama, but other roles are so well taken by a gallery of British actors of an older generation - Freda Dowie, Peter Vaughan, Alun Armstrong, David Bradley, Tony Haygarth, Peter Jeffrey, David Threlfall. An immortal classic which constantly has one gasping at the resonances with now; the only thing missing is the climate question.

Which very definitely informs two Nordic series. I regretted not having known about the Icelandic thriller Trapped earlier, but when I found out it was directed by Baltasar Kormákur of Reykjavik 101 fame (and a superb Peer Gynt in Barbican's Pit for which the Icelanders involved, quite a few of them to be seen in Trapped, learned their roles in English), I hastened to catch it. The first series is the best; to my mind there's a progressive falling-off in 2 and 3 (the last to be found on Netflix as Entrapped - glad someone told me). Even so, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson  as grizzled, melancholy giant Andri offers another piece of finely nuanced acting, and I loved his sidekicks, the incorruptible Hinrika (Ilmur Kristjánsdóttir) and  Ásgeir (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson). 

Wasn't sure Norway's Ragnarok would be for me - I avoid dramas set in a fantasy world entirely, like Game of Thrones - but the interweaving of present-day reality and Norse saga is so well done and maintained (right through to the very last episode where - not I hope a spoiler - the 'was it a dream?' question is sensitively and movingly handled). 

The parallels with the myths were all the more surprising because up to now I had been more dependent on Wagner's version, and so much in the Eddas (though I did read both for my Ring classes) is very different. Three cheers, then, for the lucid, often witty and direct retelling by Neil Gaiman.

This will inform my autumn term Opera in Depth Zoom classes on Das Rheingold starting on 9 October, as will my impressions of Barrie Kosky's first Ring instalment at the Royal Opera. I'll do a publicity drive anon, but meanwhile the flyer is below (click to enlarge).

Two men and their sheep

Now this is just perfection, and I'm worried that news about it hasn't reached a wide readership (certainly The Arts Desk didn't carry a review, which will have to wait now until DVD release). 'I bet you could identify with that,' a friend remarked ironically yesterday when I told him we'd been to see Rams (Hrútar), Grímur Hákonarson's film about two Icelandic brothers who haven't spoke to each other for 40 years and find themselves caught up in a scrapie crisis affecting both their herds. 'Well, the funny thing is that we did, totally,' I responded, going on to say that what connects us with country folk in remote north Iceland is, on this evidence, far stronger than what's different. It also reminds me of what James Rebanks writes in A Shepherd's Life about the traditional Lake District farmers' relationships with their sheep (minds out of the gutter, please).

I need no persuading about the quiet tenacity and dignity of those people who inhabit one of the weirdest, most wonderful countries in the world, not least their strong social connections: even in this isolated community, the contest for the best ram includes poetry and singing along to the accordion, as well as convivial Sunday lunches together, and there's always an accident and emergency unit in the nearby hospital (in Akuyeri?) to rescue the drunken brother who's passed out yet again in the snow when his sibling, having scooped him up in his tractor claw, dumps him right outside the entrance.

It's the sheer humanity of the film, even when it involves family feuding, which shines through at every point. Much of it is conveyed through the tragic face of  Sigurður Sigurjónsson's Gummi, placed in a series of bleak but beautiful compositions - at home, in the fields, in the sheep shed, in relation to brother Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson), on the left in the poster up top.

As the plot's twists were fresh to me, I won't spoil them for others. Let's just say that so much human life is here in one Icelandic valley, with laughter and tears in close succession - as well as a dramatic moment that made me shriek, to the amusement of the few other people in the cinema - and the story is told with the mythic power that also informs comparable African gems like Yaaba, Tilai and Timbuktu, though the emotional complexity here is perhaps stronger.Still, the outlines of Rams wouldn't be out of place in one of the old Icelandic sagas. What is it? Tragicomedy? I'd prefer the term 'human comedy', since it's all plausible even at its most bizarre.

The music, mostly for accordion and organ, is well-placed and suitably austere. Of course, the daft thing is that at BAFTAs and Oscars, had it been lucky or simply noticed, this film would have been jammed in the foreign language category - what little I could bear to watch of the BAFTA winner, Wild Tales, made me want to vomit, violence without a context, so we switched off the DVD after the second 'tale' - whereas it should be there in the best film category, period; but don't get me started on the stupidity of these awards ceremonies. Rams has no kind of fault or flaw in my reckoning (J thought perhaps some of the images could have been sharper, but I wasn't sure that was a drawback). Total masterpiece, in other words. See it.

Seltjarnarnes: to the lighthouse

It was light by 10am in Reykjavík but only a tourist or two seemed to be up and about on Sunday morning. I was determined to excurt in my only extended time free of the many admirably mixed events in the Dark Music Days Festival - report imminent on The Arts Desk - but had been thwarted in a desire to see the tectonic plates at Þingvellir, the site of the old Icelandic parliament which we hadn't visited in the summer of 2011: road possibly too icy, taxi too expensive. Fortunately the wonderful Hilla, aka a gem among fellow critics, Hilary Finch, who's been coming to Iceland for 30 years now, had a few recommendations, one of which was a bus to the peninsula at Seltjarnarnes.

I wanted to walk, and the extremely helpful, friendly folk at my waterfront hotel furnished a big map which would enable me to do so. Daftly, this excursion isn't in the usually dependable Rough Guide; in fact the Ness, with the lighthouse at Grótta on its northernmost tip, isn't in their city plan at all, even though Seltjarnarnes is a suburb of Reykjavík.

So I struck out for the harbour, so very different from its summertime incarnation. The wind was furious; I was glad of the reindeer-patterned hat and gloves J had bought in Oslo the previous week, even though the ear-flaps wouldn't stay down. I walked out to the jetty, with views across to Harpa and the city skyline, with what looked - and continued throughout the day to look - like a sunset or sunrise behind it.

The whalewatching kiosk was open, but would there be any takers? It seemed unlikely. Nor were any of the bars open, so I just started walking. There's a proper path for walkers, cyclists and joggers, though the impression was one of ribbon-development desolation on the left, with uniformly ugly new housing. You just have to avert your gaze and look out at the beaches, the Atlantic and the snow-capped cliffs beyond.

Soon the city is just a series of silhouettes on the far horizon,

the apartment blocks become low-level houses and signs of the seafaring past, the wrecks and the shacks, punctuate the route.

At last you're on the peninsula, with 360 degree views of nothing but sea and mountains. To my left there were fresh, even more sunsetty views - at 1pm - of the Reykjanes peninsula and the ridges beyond.

Tides mean care in crossing to the old lighthouse at Grótta

but I was clearly fine. I stepped down on to the beach, alone with the local birdlife (the area is closed to the public in the nesting season).

Eiders male and female were bobbing and making their peculiar cooing/sighing noises (I took a little film, but the sound can't be heard against the tearing of the wind). This isn't the sharpest of closeups (there's a better eider shot - mamma and babies - here) but you can see the markings well enough.

From what I can make out, Grótta is mentioned in mid-16th century accounts. A colossal storm changed the landscape dramatically in 1788. A lighthouse was built here in 1895, dismantled, rebuilt after the Second World War and soon abandoned. I understand it and the adjacent building are used as local schoolrooms. What fun to have all the marine life of the Ness at your feet.

This all felt especially desolate. I was liable to be spooked out because I was reading the latest thriller of the masterly Yrsa Sigurdardóttir, I Remember You, about a couple and their friend who go to a deserted village in the West Fjords to renovate an old house, with disastrous consequences. We'd also been talking the previous evening about angelica used in soups, when I remembered that one of the characters in the book gathers it. I think this is a dried-out remnant of angelica flower.

I did a quick circuit of Grótta,

rejoined the mainland and walked south west along the edge of the frozen inland lake, the Bakkatjörn,

gaining views across to the conical Keilir which you see very clearly en route to Reykjavík from the airport.

Whooper swans - the lazy ones who decided not to overwinter in places like Welney in Norfolk - were gaggled around the frozen lake's south-eastern corner.

And now the low-lying suburban houses reappeared and, with no sign of a bus for at least half an hour, I retraced my steps as briskly as I could back to the city centre. Which on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps because the weekend package tourists have left, was more or less deserted. I walked past the Tjörnin, where the swan and duck feeding frenzy was continuing as usual

past my favourite part of town

and up to Skólavörðustígur, the street that climbs to the cathedral. I'd had my eye on a fish place the previous day when I sat in Babalú opposite, the quirky cafe recommended by Hilla, waiting in vain to be served (the boy playing chess with his mother at the next table turned out, I think, to be the son of the waiter, who appeared after 20 minutes, by which time I had to leave for a lunchtime concert; no problem, I'd enjoyed sitting there).

The Fish Cafe's freshest cod melted in the mouth; its accompanying salad was amazingly good. And Iceland is no longer the money-sink for tourists it was when we first visited: this was lower than London prices. So to a late-afternoon nap in the hotel, then on to three more concerts to open my ears and eyes on the closing evening of the festival. I had had my vision.

On which note - vision, or not, the film Blue referenced here - 19 February can't end without my commemorating Derek Jarman's death 20 years ago today (I'm sure the gay owner of Babalú, who came to Reykjavík to marry his Icelandic boyfriend, would join me). This is more of a holding notice until I gather my thoughts together, and perhaps see the films of his I've so far missed (The Last of England and Caravaggio, chiefly). Peter Tatchell reminded me. He's written an eloquent tribute in the Huffington Post UK, which serves us nicely for now.

Happy endings

Very well, Hans Sachs and Fairy Edna may have nothing else in common, but they do both help an outsider and a merchant's daughter in difficulties towards a wedding. And to be honest, the panto in Wimbledon spoke more often to my depths - or my shallows, though what's as profound as Homeric laughter? - than the Royal Opera's Meistersinger revival (the final scene of which is pictured above by Clive Barda). There were passing pleasures, all the same, in the second of the two comedies which rounded off a year rich in events.

I tried to unpluck the best from its varied tapestry in my Arts Desk 2011 choice, but even then I found I'd missed a few (how could I not have squeezed in Kazushi Ono's CBSO Mahler Resurrection Symphony?) I needn't repeat the results here except for the crème de la crème: in terms of Gesamtkunstwerk, it was a tough choice between Christopher Alden's production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Sasha Regan's riotous but also very moving all male G&S Iolanthe, full of attractive strangers and responding well to Wilton's Music Hall magic (and there's another special event I left out - Alina Ibragimova's recital-happening at Wilton's in colloboration with the Brothers Quay. I think Sussie Ahlburg's photo was taken at the concert's first, Manchester venue, but never mind).


Thought I ought to do a quick coast back over the 2011 blog, too, for other signifiers. Nothing new about the most entertaining book I read all year, Simon Winder's Germania - others rail against its flippancy, but he makes no bones about it - or the most revelatory author, Halldor Laxness, though after Under the Glacier and Independent People, I'm getting stuck with the disconsolate whimsy of World Light. Nothing new either about all seven series of The West Wing, after which everything on telly comes across as flat and unprofitable (dipping into BBC drama, it always seems well acted but poorly scripted. And could you believe the direness of Ab Fab? I couldn't).


The places I fell in love with, either for the first time or again, are too numerous to mention, but I'll try - from Darwin's Down House, the treasures within Cologne's churches and the unpickled German small-town perfection of Göttingen to the wilds of Connemara and the Burren in Ireland, the monastery of Tioumliline, the medina of Meknes and the beautifully-sited Roman town of Volubilis (pictured above again, why not? )in Morocco and - of course, the highlight - the top of Iceland's Snæfellsjökull and its lavafields/slopes running down to a blue, blue sea. Of course the whole place would tell a different story in wind and rain, but that's not how we saw it.


Here's hoping that we do head back to Iceland's south coast in 2012. And may your year be as adventurous as you want it to be.

An independent Icelander

Bjartur of Summerhouses is the unlikely hero of Halldor Laxness’s most famous novel, Independent People. He's not a bad man, but a difficult and stubborn one, who loses in one way or another two wives and a surrogate daughter through bloody-mindedness. Is his story one of a farmer surviving doggedly in the face of a mythic curse he affects not to believe in, or the age-old – and, alas, still topical – struggle-in-vain of a have-not against the bunch of smug have-it-alls who, Laxness insisted, still ruled the Icelandic roost in the mid 1930s?


Independent People is rich and ambiguous enough to hold both these elements in play, and so much more. I'm hardly surprised after the more off-piste singularity of Under the Glacier. This earlier masterpiece's staggering humanity makes you care for the self-sufficient sod who blinds himself to the possibility of wider sympathy until the end of the novel. It’s a typically understated victory when he finally looks at his daughter’s younger child and utters ‘Heavens, what a helpless-looking object…Yes, mankind is rather a pitiful sight when you come to look at it as it is in actual fact’. And Bjartur has persistently refused to look ‘actual fact’ in the face as he clings on to his croft and his livestock in a remote Icelandic valley.


Yet for all that he’s a worthy object of our sympathies. I never quite warmed to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show, because the heroine can be such a cold character; the author meant her to be so, but somehow failed to involve us into the bargain. Bjartur has his attractive sides, all paradoxical. He’s a gruff plain-speaker and a poet, an old-fashioned one obsessed with rhymes rather than content, who nevertheless keeps alive in a snowdrift by reciting all the epics he knows, ranging from the heroic to the erotic. And he loves his sheep more than anything else, which of course leads to tragic results for both other people and a poor cow who makes a memorable appearance half way through the novel.


The other characters’ consciousnesses zoom in and out of the picture, often with such incomparable vividness that you wish you saw more of them. Perhaps my favourite chapter comes at the beginning of the second part, where the seemingly endless time between waking and dawn on a winter’s day for an imaginative young boy is so evocatively conjured. Laxness could have written an entire novel through this character’s eyes alone had he wanted. But Nonni and his spiritual sister, Asta Sollilja, for all that we see into their souls, disappear from the canvas for whole swathes. And the elder brother Gvartur comes into focus at a late stage, just when you think Laxness has no interest in him.

Unfolding a terrific yarn over time, this masterpiece doesn’t always communicate its ironic side effectively, though that may be something to do with J A Thompson’s translation. The irony can be overwhelming from the moment Laxness takes us through the profitability of the First World War’s slaughter for the Icelanders, and on to the snares of the banks and the co-operatives which made ‘interest-slaves’ of so many in the 1920s and 30s. But this is still fascinating, for it proves that little has changed either in Iceland – prophecies of 2008 are rife – or here. The scene where Bjartur meets a protester in town and belatedly realizes they’re brothers under the skin, the dispossessed against authority, could have been written today.


And, yes, it hit me with some force yesterday, listening to a debate about the worldwide demonstrations on the World Service, that we really are at a make-or-break junction in history. The opponents were putting their views across about the sometimes unbelievably courageous folk of the Arab Spring as contrasted with the Occupy movement in the relatively privileged west. A very prim young man argued that the protesters in the Middle East were fighting for democratic institutions which we’ve had for hundreds of years, and which he thought the Occupy group simply wanted to dismantle. Not dismantle, said his brilliant opponent, an Arab professor at an American university, modify. The system’s broken, it needs changing; Republicans and Democrats are in total deadlock; after the last crisis the bankers all went on as before, but they no longer can.

I’d agree with that. And I thought it was all crystallized brilliantly by another pro-democracy speaker from the University of Hawaii, who said the common link between these very different fights going on in different parts of the world was the discrepancy between expectation and reality. It really is as simple as that. We have indeed created a lost generation of educated young people, many of whom will be lucky when they come out of university to get a job stacking shelves. They should be glad of that, said the prim young man. They deserve better, said the Arab and Hawaiian academics; we’ve never had a greater capacity, through technology and innovation, to deliver work for all, and we don’t know how to make it function any more. I agree with them on that too, of course. Interesting times indeed: adapt and/or change, since going under isn’t an option for humanity.


The Icelandic landscape photos are mine; image of some 9000 G006 demonstrators at Austurvollur was taken in Week 6 of Iceland's Kitchenware-Revolution protests in October 2008.

Sub-glacial fiction

Iceland's Snæfellsjökull, still haunting my dreams since we saw it loom so large in fair if cold weather, is your ultimate powerful fictional backdrop. I'm sure it must have produced more novels than the two I've come across, as recommended by Hilary Finch: a disposable but human detective story by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, My Soul to Take, and an undisputable mini-masterpiece, Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness's Under the Glacier.

How to describe Laxness's metaphysical comedy? Susan Sontag does a better job of it than I can in the introduction to the Vintage edition, laying out categories of novel that defy the 'artificial norm' of 'so-called real life' - 'Science fiction. Tale, fable, allegory. Philosophical novel. Dream novel. Visionary novel. Literature of fantasy. Wisdom lit. Spoof. Sexual turn-on' - before adding that Under the Glacier (in Icelandic the title is the less sellable 'Religion Under the Glacier') is the only novel she knows which fits into all those categories.


There's a church, of course, but unlike the beautifully kept one at Hellnar, it's been boarded up and a new home owned by a mysterious magnate who only appears past the novel's halfway mark has been jammed right up against it. The protagonist, emissary of the Bishop of Reykjavik who abbreviates himself 'Embi'and starts out, in Sontag's words, as 'the generic Naive Young Man', has to investigate a pastor who seems to have given up his religious duties to fix Primus stoves, a mysterious absent wife called Ua - the noise, the 'resurrected' woman later tells us, eider ducks make - as well as a casket and a possible corpse up on the glacier, which every local acknowledges to be the centre of the universe.


From mordantly witty 'reporting', the novel unfolds to include all sorts of weird interviewees and New Agers - even in 1968, it seems, hippies were finding their way to Snæfellsjökull in search of spiritual enlightenment - within a dissolution of time and space which, Sontag rightly points out, allies it with Ibsen's more supernatural works and Strindberg's A Dream Play. I love its musical refrains: the wry references to Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, the local poet's ode to Palisander wood, the mittens Ua knits for Peruvian fishermen, the shrunken-head ritual - well, that will give you enough of a taste of how weird it all is. But I can't convey the style, which seems to me brilliantly rendered by none other than Magnus Magnusson.


Sigurðardóttir - or rather plain 'Yrsa' as I should call her in Icelandic form - is surprisingly reluctant in her often nailbiting thriller, or perhaps unable, to convey much of a sense of place, beyond the first murder on a foggy basalt beach. One thing I do know: the above cover is completely wrong, since the action, apart from the creepy prologue, takes place in June, in other words in a capricious Icelandic early summer; no snow, despite the elegiac gravestone disquisitions.


Yrsa does have a warm and witty way with characters, and it's refreshing to have an amiable, slightly prudish and only mildly dysfunctional heroine with a level-headed boyfriend. And here the swipes at new spiritualism are unequivocally incredulous. Was there an implied point-scoring against the slightly alternative hotel at Hellnar which was fully booked when we tried to get a room? Hilary thinks possibly so. On, now, to the Auden/MacNeice Letters from Iceland, which I bought in a handsome first edition for the diplo-mate's birthday: perfect late night reading-aloud material. Then a pile of other Laxnesses, which I've ordered up.

Quick church walk report, before I eventually get round to downloading the pictures and writing it up: 16 churches and 19 miles covered on Saturday in humid, windy and intermittently sunny weather, with a spectacular sunset to round it off. More anon.

Around Reykholt: hot and cold running water

Plenty of both in Iceland - heck, they even have hypocaustically heated pavements - and the heating bill costs are low, if nothing else is. Well, I've seen a Big Geyser and a bubbling lake (affectionately known as Frying-Pan) in New Zealand's Waimangu national park, but I was still fascinated and a little scared by the hot springs at Deildartunguhver, while Hraunfossar waterfalls offered something new, water emerging into turquoise pools from under the Hallmundarhraun lavafield.

Should have given you a bit of a glossary before, by the way, since all place names in Iceland are logical: 'hraun' means lava - there's even a toffee-crisp style chocolate bar so called - while 'hver' is a hot spring, 'foss' a waterfall and - as you may have gathered many entries back - the inescapable 'jökull' means 'glacier' (I was surprised to find it's a boy's name, too).


Deildartunguhver's statistics are unvarying but spectacular: water pouring forth close to 100°C (97, to be precise) at 180 litres a second, which easily tops comparable springs in the southern States. The modest fencing won't protect you against sudden scalding spurts, so you have to keep a further few feet back. I think we need some sound and movement on this, though I can't convey the sulphurous smell and the heat.



Deildartunguhver (there, now I've broken it into syllables and made sense of it I really like typing the name) is also the only place in Iceland, we're told on the information boards, where the deer or hard fern, Blechnum spicant, is to be found. This isn't it, but the shades of green are impressive, surely, and a bit of a relief to the adjoining slime.



Tomatoes grow in the nearby naturally-heated greenhouses - we saw some for sale when we drove up to invade the natural scene - and pipes carry the water to heat Borgarnes and Akranes, travelling a total distance of 64km (they follow you along the otherwise more picturesque road back to town).


Unforgivably, if you happen to be a fan of Snorri Sturluson and his epics, we had to keep an eye on the clock and bypass the unprepossessing looking settlement of Reykholt, where the chieftain-bard lived and, in the end, was hacked to death. Our hostess at the Harpa Concert Hall, vivacious Steinunn, impressed upon us that our omission might have been a bit of a shame. She used to run the music festival here, and told us the acoustics inside the church are excellent. She also told me a funny story connected to the Norwegians' co-operation in the festival (for they, too, claim Snorri as their own). A local farmer bears a remarkable resemblance to the King of Norway, who happened to be visiting. Participants were asked to bow to the King, which of course the republican Icelanders are not at all used to doing. Steinunn, who was accompanying the soloist, came on with her - and their heads collided as they bowed in different directions, Steinunn to the king and the soloist to the lookalike farmer...


Be that as it may, we were pushed for time, all because of the need to be in Reykjavik by 3pm (which turned out quite unnecessary, but that's another story). So onward we went into more remote, open country, following the course of the river Hvítá up towards the glaciers from which it comes. And there's Hraunfossar, certainly one of the natural wonders of the world, albeit a small-scale one.


Upstream is the more violently rushing Barnafoss where legend tells of two children who drowned crossing a natural stone bridge (apparently not this one, but what the point of the story is, with the mother cursing it, I'm not sure).


And so the Hvítá joins it all together, as you can see by following its course along the lavafield down to the west


and up towards the great glaciers and the enthralling inland of Iceland.


Which we would have seen, going on to Húsafell and the rougher roads, had there been time enough. Will simply have to make it on an essential return trip. On this occasion, however, the schedule of the human world called, so off we went to the genial civilization of Reykjavik.