After the facts

Sally Magnusson had to learn to let her imagination take over when tackling her debut novel based on real events in Iceland in the 17th century. It paid off, writes David Robinson

In Iceland, everyone knows all about the Tyrkjaranid, the Turkish Raid, the way we know about Culloden, say, or Bannockburn. They know that the Turks weren’t really Turks, but pirates from Morocco and Algiers, and that in 1627 they sailed to Iceland, and carried off at least 400 people – one percent of Iceland’s population at the time – to North Africa, where they were sold as slaves.

So when Sally Magnusson read the first English translation of Ólafur Egilsson’s diaries, published in 2008, the year after her father Magnus died, her journalistic antennae started to quiver. Egilsson was a pastor of the Westman Islands, off the south coast of Iceland, where the pirates landed, killed 34 of its old and infirm inhabitants, and abducted 242 of the rest. The story was barely known outside Iceland, yet would surely, she realised, intrigue anybody. They, like her, would be keen to find out what these captives, from the coldest, poorest part of Christendom, made of their new masters in the heat, dust, cruelty and luxury of the Muslim Mediterranean. Did they keep their faith as they waited to be ransomed and yearn, year after year, to return to their windswept island in the north Atlantic? Or did they adapt, learn new ways, new languages and a new religion?

After the success of Where Memories Go, Magnusson’s loving and moving 2014 memoir about losing her mother Mamie to Alzheimer’s, her publisher asked her what book she’d like to write next. Easy, she said, going on to explain about the Turkish Raid, and how Egilsson had been freed from slavery in Algiers to seek a ransom for the Icelanders from the King of Denmark, how he had made the hazardous journey across Europe to Copenhagen only to find his plea rejected, after which he returned to the Westman Islands in despair.

“But what grabbed my imagination about Ólafur’s memoirs,” she says, “were just a couple of sentences about his wife giving birth on the pirate ship taking him to Algiers, and then the horrendous experience of the slave market there, where the very first male to be picked by the pasha was his own 11-year-old son. Although none of this was written from a woman’s point of view, as a wife and mother, that was what was fascinating to me.”

How could she find out more about this woman, Ólafur’s wife Asta? The Icelandic sources didn’t seem to have anything else to say, and in any case

“I had been completely in thrall to the historical framework of the story rather than the story itself ”

were written in barely penetrable medieval Icelandic. On the Algerian side, anything in Arabic would be an even more firmly closed book. Short of becoming an academic and devoting the rest of her life to learning languages and transcribing endless documents, Magnusson didn’t see how she could get any further into Asta’s story. Maybe it would be best written as a novel, her publisher told her.

Here, I think, we come to a watershed moment. Because everything Sally Magnusson’s parents have done, whether as history or journalism, and everything she herself has written and reported on, for newspapers and television, has always been rooted in the who, what, where, why and how of real life. “When I started trying to write fiction,” she says, “there was this journalist gauleiter’s voice in my head saying all the time ‘How can you possibly know that?’ ‘How do you know that’s true?’” At first, she says, the only way she felt capable of even attempting to write fiction was by trying to provide herself with as complete a framework of facts as possible. So she went to the Westman Islands to find more of them.

She got lucky. At a small museum on the island about the Turkish raid she met a woman who had not only written her university dissertation on it but (“only in Iceland could this happen”) was related to Ólafur Egilsson himself. From her, Magnusson found out that, after being held captive in Algiers for nine years, Asta did indeed come back to the island, where she lived with Ólafur for a couple of years until his death. Further details about their family also emerged.

“I’d now got the bare bones of Asta’s life. I now knew that she was one of the 27 who returned to Iceland from the 400 taken. But there was this huge gap – those nine years in Algiers. I was intrigued by what it must been like for her: a new religion, a new climate, a new everything – and, my suggestion is, new people to love as well.

“But the crux of the story is, for me, that she went back. She returned to a marriage after almost ten years with someone who was much older than her, back in a cold, dark, incredibly poor country after she had known heat, silk, vegetables, even just being able to dry your washing. Could a marriage be picked up in those circumstances – or is it doomed to failure?”

In January 2015, Magnusson went to on a research trip to Algiers to try to piece together the southern strand of the story. This wasn’t easy – the 21st century city is vastly different from what it would have been like 400 years ago – but she still returned with a deeper sense of what Asta’s life there must have been like.

Yet when Magnusson sent off the completed novel that summer, deep down she knew – even before her publisher told her she needed to get inside the minds of the characters far more – that she hadn’t done the story justice.

A few weeks later, she was at a literary event in Princeton, where she was interviewing novelists James Robertson and Sarah Perry (before her historical novel The Essex Serpent became a best-seller) and bemoaning the fact that she’d have to start writing Asta’s story all over again. “James said: ‘Sorry, but how many drafts do you say you’ve done?’ When I said ‘Just the one’ he and Sarah fell about laughing. Maybe when you’ve done five, he said, you can start complaining, but not until then.

“This was a turning point because I realised that I had been completely in thrall to the historical framework of the story rather than the story itself. When I went back home and started writing, I thought I’m really going to have to let go. It’s like that time when you first ride a bike and you are wobbling around for a bit, maybe letting your feet touch the ground occasionally, but at some stage you learn to have the confidence to put them on the pedals.”

You can see quite clearly from her remarkably accomplished debut novel, The Sealwoman’s Gift, which is published in February, how completely Magnusson has learnt that lesson of trusting in her imagination. The true story behind the novel is almost preposterously epic, yet she brings it to life by inhabiting the minds of her characters as completely as her publisher could have ever wished. So successfully does she do this that the real shock is reaching the end of the novel and then finding out from the afterword how much of it all is true.

She is, she says, already working on another novel, although she will not be drawn on its contents beyond saying that it, too, will be historical fiction, although this time it will be a story set in Scotland. Anyone who reads The Sealwoman’s Gift will be looking forward to it already. ■

The Sealwoman’s Gift by Sally Magnusson is published on 8 February by Two Roads, price £16.99