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"The Whispering Muse" by Sjón
Published on 3rd September 2013
There aren’t many novels of which the first lines become so lodged in the consciousness of their readers that they become difficult to forget - Tolstoy’s happy and unhappy families, Joyce’s nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. I can’t decide whether “I, Valdimar Haraldsson, was in my twenty-seventh year when I embarked on the publication of a small journal devoted to my chief preoccupation, the link between fish consumption and the superiority of the Nordic race.” is such a first line, or the emphatic opposite of such a line. This ambivalence sums up my attitude towards the novel as a whole - I can’t work out whether the cryptically single-named Sjón’s third novel is an eccentric, idiosyncratic little gem, or just nonsensical. His fresh, dry prose cultivates an inclination to opt for the former - the writing is vigorous, brisk, smelling of sea-salt. But the case for the latter is compellingly argued by a short plot summary: on a Danish merchant ship in 1949, an eccentric Icelander meets the mythical hero Caeneus (one of the Argonauts), disguised as a crew-member. So far, so Scandinavian design hipster. Somehow, though, this summary slays the essential life of the thing. It is impossible not to be tempted into suspending one’s disbelief and falling into Sjón’s beguiling world. After all, when we track Caeneus through the Iliad and Metamorphoses, he appears as a woman, a man, and a “golden bird”, so why shouldn’t he turn up on a Danish merchant ship in 1949? Perhaps the novel’s indefinable effectiveness is derived from the heritage of its Icelandic writer - the Scandinavians have paid much attention to the preservation in the national consciousness of their traditional yarns, and the influence of the sagas permeates two layers of translation (Latin, to Icelandic, to English) into the novel, giving the reader a refreshingly frosty frame of reference from which to view a familiar narrative. In any case, at just under 150 pages, the novel refuses to give us time to think over such things - the reader dunks their head into the icy Danish waters for just a moment, and when they pull themselves out, it is impossible not to feel invigorated.
