Book Review: The Half-Drowned King
/The Half-Drowned King
by Linnea HartsuykerHarper, 2017For Linnea Hartsuyker's impressive debut novel The Half-Drowned King (new from Harper with a stunning cover design by Milan Bozic) certain literary comparisons are going to be inevitable, or at least inevitable when the book is considered by long-in-the-tooth reviewers who'll take one rheumy look at her book's setting – ninth-century Norway – and immediately flash back to the dewy days of their reviewing prime and the appearance of Frans Bengtsson's epic novel about tenth-century Vikings, The Long Ships, a book that follows the rollicking adventures of its sword-wielding hero Orm from roughly 980 to roughly 1010 and was published in 1955 in an English-language translation by Michael Meyer (and, delightfully, just recently given a natty paperback reprint by the folks at the New York Review of Books Classics line, so it could reach a whole new generation of Upper East Side book reviewers). Much like Hartsuyker, Bengtsson unabashedly if a trifle unwisely admitted to owing a great creative debt to Snorri Sturluson, the 12th-century Icelandic historian who in the course of his writing career generated so much bullhooey that the whole of Scandinavia has been fertilized with it ever since. Snorri's book Heimskringla tells the stories of the old Norse kings, interweaves all its high and low deeds with charged drama and supernatural shadings, and exerts a hypnotic spell as powerful as that of any hoard-guarding dragon.This spell is extremely potent; it worked even on a hard-eyed realist like Bengtsson, so that by the end of The Long Ships he was writing in more or less full Snorri style:
Some of the crazy magister's men escaped in boats: but not many, for they were hunted by men and dogs along the shore. Their wounded were killed, since they were all miscreants. Twenty-three of Orm's men had been killed, and many wounded: and all agreed that this had been a good fight, and one that would be much talked about in the years to come.
The lure of that style is every bit as powerful today as it was half a century ago, and that presents a problem for sharp young writers like Hartsuyker, writing in the more clinical reading atmosphere of the 21st century, where if your Über driver doesn't have a MFA, you're legally entitled to a refund. Go ahead and suggest, in 2017, that it's OK to kill wounded people as long as they're “miscreants” – go ahead, and may the spinning Norns have mercy on you.And as an antidote to Snorri style, The Half-Drowned King could scarcely be improved, even if the young author might not have intended any ingratitude (her brief biographical note mentions that she's a descendant of one of her characters, the saga hero Harald Fairhair, so she's got, as the saying goes, some skin in the game). The book tells the story of Ragnvald Eysteinsson, a feisty, opinionated fighter (“You stir trouble in many pots,” he's told at one point, and although he instinctively denies it, the proof is all around him) who's double-crossed by his scheming stepfather Olaf (there being, after all, only so much one can do with a stepfather named Olaf) and must fight his way back to a position from which he can defend his sister Svanhild from Olaf's plans to marry her off to the nearest beer-bellied candidate. And along the way, Ragnvald encounters the charismatic Harald of Vestfold, foretold to one day unite all of Norway under one throne. And there's Adisa, a fiercely spirited young mother who kills a man to save her child during a sudden raid and then gets a little help from Ragnvald to finish off the man's accomplice:
“I dare you,” she was crying [at the accomplice, although she initially has her doubts about our hero as well]. “I will serve you the same.”Ragnvald followed her sight line and saw another man waiting in the shadows of a smaller outbuilding. He was alone, Ragnvald decided. If more than two of them had come, this one would not be so hesitant. Ragnvald charged at him, crossing the courtyard between them. The man hesitated, made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a shout. Ragnvald's face heated, and he gave chase as the man sprinted away. Ragnvald caught up with him at the fence that separated Adisa's inner yard from the outer field, and slashed his throat so he toppled backward over it.
The lean, confident action-line of that passage runs all through The Half-Drowned King; it has a very knowing, very Nordic wry directness that gets more pleasing as the novel goes on. The reason the attacker makes a noise “somewhere between a laugh and a shout” is because Ragnvald has run to Adisa's rescue straight from the bath and is fish-scale naked, but even plenty of seasoned professionals at historical fiction might have overdone the attacker's reaction to that fact, or else accidentally overlooked mentioning the reaction at all.And the portrayal of Adisa – and especially of Svanhild, the standout fictional creation of this book by a wide margin – as fully fleshed-out and starkly courageous characters is not some punctilious historical revisionism … in fact, it's some long-overdue historical accuracy. As any reader of the Heimskringla can attest, the women of the Viking sagas are easily more compelling than the men, and Hartsuyker is alive to their dramatic possibilities. Bengtsson's classic novel opened with the Kipling poem “Harp Song of the Dane Women,” in which the narrator complains about being forsaken by her Viking husband every roving season (“Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow:/And the sound of your oar-blades falling hollow/Is all we have left through the months to follow”). But that was always more Victorian sentimentality than hard reality, where these women had to be the equal of their men in courage and by far their superiors in resourcefulness. The Half-Drowned King is the first book in a projected series, and it's clear from these pages that it'll be at least as much fun to read the adventures of Svanhild and her sister-characters as it will be to soak up the more conventional swashbuckling of Ragnvald and Harald.And all of those adventures can now be eagerly awaited. This is a fantastic debut.
