ICE-COLD BEAUTY
10th-century Iceland provides a bleak and compelling setting for a deadly feud
I’m dealing with this strange blending of lots and lots of myth and folklore with lots of stuff we believe to be true. It gives me a certain flexibility, I suppose.
H5
Smile of the Wolf Tim Leach House of Anansi Press
“The feud began in winter when a dead man rose from the earth.”
An opening sentence like that is a definite attention-grabber. But we mustn’t allow ourselves to be misled here. Writer Tim Leach has more than ghosts on his mind when it comes to his new novel, Smile of the Wolf.
An unsettling reality lurks in its wintry shadows from the beginning. Hence, a few pages on, there’s nothing supernatural about those images of a snow-covered landscape streaked with freshly spilled human blood.
To be sure, there is an eerie, otherworldly quality to the book. That’s not surprising, given its strange but seductive setting of 10th-century Iceland. Furthermore, if the novel attracts fans of Game of Thrones, its 34-year-old author wouldn’t complain.
“There’s an overlap to a certain degree,” Leach says from his home in Sheffield, England. “I was a big fantasy reader as a kid, and something like Game of Thrones is having fun in its exploration of the messy realities of power and deeply complicated characters often doing deeply immoral things. So certainly those things interest me.”
Such ingredients exist in Smile of the Wolf. But it comes from an author who has been carving out his own identity as a fresh new voice in historical fiction, a novelist whose supple blending of both myth and historical truth conveys the reality of a living, breathing, intensely human culture.
Leach looked to the legends of ancient Greece and the histories of Herodotus for his first novel, The Last King of Lydia, which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize when it came out in 2013. He remained in the sixth century BC with its successor, The King and the Slave. But with Smile of the Wolf — named book of the year by the London Sunday Times when it came out in the U.K. last summer — Leach has found new inspiration in the Icelandic Sagas.
These prose narratives, dating back to the ninth century, are dwarfed by the popularity of Norse mythology, but Leach sees them as belonging in a class of their own as “strange, tragic, starkly beautiful stories” set in an isolated culture.
After two books dealing with the ancient world, Leach had a yearning to explore elsewhere. He remembered that his father used to tell him stories from the Sagas, and when Leach went back to them as an adult, he was hooked.
There are no mythic gods towering over these narratives, but Leach still finds them compelling. “They do have fantastic elements in them — sorcerers and prophets, for example. But they’re obsessed with blood feuds between families, with codes of honour and acts of revenge going backwards and forwards in this kind of frontier existence.”
The novel begins on a bleak midwinter night with the appearance of a ghost and moves quickly on to the all-too-human killing of a man by two friends — one an itinerant poet named Kjaran who trades songs for food and shelter, the other a ferocious warrior named Gunnar. This is happening in a world in which it’s no crime to kill in a fair fight — provided that it is revealed and a blood price paid to the victim’s family. But Kjaran and Gunnar conceal their action and this leads to a spiralling blood feud.
“Concealing the killing was the great crime back then,” Leach says. “If you killed someone with justification, you had to declare it immediately. But to conceal a murder was deeply taboo and could get you into a lot of trouble and could get you into a lot of trouble.”
The two friends are unleashing the wrath of a system that lacks anything approaching formal governance and is protected by a bloody code of conduct. So one of them is outlawed, a ready target for killing without consequence, while the other becomes the prey of an avenging family.
Leach finds parallels here with darker elements in the mythology of the 19th-century American West. Indeed when he visited Iceland with his father during the writing of this novel and experienced its harsh yet beautiful landscape, he sensed a frontier sensibility dating back centuries
“The Sagas make a lot of reference to specific landscape features and you can still see them and experience this thrill,” he says. “There are these signposts to various little farms, all bearing the names of the first farms that were there more than a thousand years ago.” He had no difficulty transporting himself in his imagination back to an era where “from the top of a valley you might look across and see the hut of the murderer of your father. And always there’s the extraordinary beauty of it.”
Beauty: That’s an important word for Leach in talking about a literature that in its own way meets the definition of “revenge tragedy” as readily as does Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
“The beauty in them comes from what they say about the bonds of friendship, but the sadness comes from this endless cycle of violence, of an honour culture that traps characters with no escape in affirming a code of behaviour that leads to cycles of retribution.”
The beauty also comes from a landscape where the sun doesn’t set in summer and winter is an endless night — in Leach’s opinion a “fascinating arena” for the writer.
While the screenwriters for The Favourite and Mary Queen of Scots are in hot water for taking liberties with their material, Leach is cheerfully admitting he can get away with a lot more with his brand of historical fiction.
“I’m dealing with unreliable source texts, which is a tremendous gift for a novelist,” he says. “I’m often asked if it’s more frightening to write about something so far back in history, and I reply that I would find it much more precarious to write about something in the 19th century because the available documentary evidence is so much stronger. So I’m dealing with this strange blending of lots and lots of myth and folklore with lots of stuff we believe to be true. It gives me a certain flexibility, I suppose. And it helps me avoid the history police to a certain extent.”