Burial Rites

By Hannah Kent

execution. “They have strapped me to the saddle like a corpse being taken to the burial ground. In their eyes I am already a dead woman destined for the grave. My arms are tethered in front of me…the flies are bad. They crawl on my face and into my eyes, and I feel the tiny ticking of their legs and wings. These irons are too heavy for me to swat them away. They were built for a man, although they screw tight enough against my skin. I’ve been half-frozen for so long, it is as though the winter has set up home in my marrow. Endless days of dark indoors and hateful glances are enough to set a rime on anyone’s bones.” Good times.

As we discover in the course of the novel, Agnes is a woman who just can’t catch a break. She is bright and a hard worker but circumstances largely beyond her control (a mother who abandoned her, an absent father) have led her to this fate. She is accused—along with a young woman, the foolish Sigga, and her boyfriend Fridrick—of murdering Natan Ketilsson and another young man, Petur Jonsson, and then burning down Natan’s farm with the bodies inside. Her reception at Kornsa, one of the many farms she has worked on as a younger woman, is decidedly cold, but for Steina, the younger daughter of the household, Agnes holds a kind of fascination. “Has Steina ever had to decide whether to let a farmer up under her skirts and face the wrath of his wife, who will then force her to do the shitwork, or to deny him and find herself homeless in the snow and fog with all doors barred against her?”

Within a few months, Agnes is allowed to roam more freely on the farm, and proves herself to be a valuable and experienced worker, as well as a healer of sorts, who helps to calm Margret’s persistent lung condition. During the period Agnes spent with Natan Ketilsson, himself a medicine man of sorts, she has picked up some skills.

We also learn of the nature of Natan and his relationship with Agnes. She had become smitten with the handsome but roguish and selfish farmer who, although eventually living with Agnes, is having sex on a regular basis with the very young and pretty Sigga, who also shares the household—clearly a recipe for disaster. Enter Fridrick, an erstwhile “friend” of Natan, who has a reputation for casual brutality and a desire to find and steal both Natan’s reputed fortune, and his teenaged lover

Sigga.

While in custody with the family at Kornsa Agnes relates the story of her rather chequered past, first to the sympathetic young Reverend Toti, and eventually to Margret, who has realised that Agnes is far from the hardened murderess they had been led to believe. This view is not shared by District Commissioner Blondal, who makes it very clear that Agnes is dangerous and needs to be treated as the murderous floozy she is. It is also very clear that Blondal, like most others in the area, is biased against the doomed Agnes based on her background, and will do nothing he is not compelled to do that will make her life any easier.

Author Kent, who spent years researching the case, has interspersed the book with letters and documents concerning the eventual fate of all three accused: Agnes, Fridrick and Sigga. The most compelling chapters, however, are those told from the perspective of Agnes. Icelandic history has not been kind to Agnes, and part of Kent’s mission in penning her story is to show another, truer side to this woman who was generally vilified by the public as a vengeful, spurned woman. In this regard, the author has done an admirable job. Up until the end we are hoping that Agnes will be spared the beheading she faces, and we believe firmly in her innocence.

Winner of 10 literary awards and short-listed for 9 others, Kent’s followed up with a second book in 2016, The Good People, set in Ireland.

(P.S. Jennifer Lawrence is slated to play Agnes in the film version of Burial Rites!)