BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Call of the Cormorant by Donald S Murray, Saraband, £9.99. 10/10

Self-described as an “unreliable biography” of Icelandic artist Karl Kjerúlf Einarsson, Icelandic poet, artist, adventurer, charlatan and swindler, Donald S Murray’s novel weaves a story in much the same way Einarsson formed his own backstory – few facts expanded to fantastical proportions. Born in Iceland in 1897, in the decades before his death in Denmark in 1972, Einarsson referred to himself variously as Cormorant XII, Emperor of Atlantis and the Count of St Kilda, despite having no connection to the locations, real or imaginary. His story begins in the small town of Torshavn in the Faroe Islands, a stifling environment for the outlandish, imaginative young man, whose talents for observation and mimicry cast him as an outsider.

Read stories of science fiction and fantasy by his father, Karl learns to blend fiction and reality from a young age. An encounter with two fishermen from the Hebrides is a turning point for Karl and his older sister, Christianna, the novel’s other narrator, who realise there is more to the world than their windswept island. When Karl sees his father convince the fishermen that Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth is a genuine account of a real expedition, he notices how easy it is to fool and swindle people with a few lies and a touch of charisma. His trickery takes him to 1930s Berlin, where he designs increasingly propagandist film posters, until he’s recruited by the Nazis to broadcast propaganda to his old homeland – inane theories about Aryans being the descendants from Atlantis.

Christianna, on the other hand, is vehemently against the war, and deeply ashamed of her brother’s radio broadcasts. The quiet centre of the novel, her brief relationship with one of the Scottish fishermen, is cut short when he returns to the Hebrides.

Although in love with the far-off Scotsman, she remains in the Faroe Islands with a dependable, if passionless, husband. Murray’s complicated relationship with island life (he grew up in the Hebrides) shines most in Christianna, whose fondness for her islands is at odds with her secret longing for her own adventures exploring the world.

A beautifully written novel, the prose sweeps off the page like the seabirds of the Faroes as Murray evokes wonder and disapproval in the vivid depiction of Karl Einarsson, a man whose attempts at self-creation inevitably veered towards self-destruction.