The Age review

The Promise of Iceland is 'pick of the week' in Fiona Capp's review section in Saturday's The Age. Fiona describes the work in this way:

Few countries are further apart than Iceland and Australia. Central to Kari Gislason's story is the secret of his paternity. His married Icelandic father insisted his British-Australian mother (with whom he had a seven-year affair) keep Gislason and the relationship a secret. Gislason spent his early years in Iceland before his mother went back to Australia. The Promise of Iceland is not only about Gislason's return to Iceland to meet his father but also about the search for, and meaning of, home. It dawns on Gislason that his father is inseparable from the stark landscape of Iceland. "The interior was only ever a feared and dangerous place - something like my father, I thought, and the mysteries of his interior life." However, it is Gislason's portrait of his mother, Susan - her restlessness, her shyness, her dreams of elsewhere and her life in Iceland - that forms the spine of the memorable, finely crafted book.

(from the "Life and Style" lift-out in The Saturday Age, 27/8/11, p. 30)

Road Marking #8

August 24, 1961 is the date of Hammarskjöld's final entry in Markings, and like most of the entries for 1961 this one is a poem. Here is the second verse:

I awoke

To an ordinary morning with grey light

Reflected from the street,

But still remembered

The dark-blue night

Above the tree-line,

The open moor in moonlight,

The crest in shadow.

Remembered other dreams

Of the same mountain country:

Twice I stood on its summits,

I stayed by its remotest lake,

and followed the river

Towards its source.

The seasons have changed

And the light

And the weather

And the hour.

But it is the same land.

And I begin to know the map

And to get my bearings.

(Markings, p. 181)

Many of the themes of the collection as a whole are gathered in this verse: the night and its dreams can take you back to a landscape where you felt a greater sense of belonging, but out of that projection back comes a more acute sense of isolation and uncertainty about life as it goes on in the present moment. The country that features in your dreams 'is the same land' - it has remained in place for you - but it is also remote. In a dream, you get your 'bearings', while outside there is the 'ordinary morning with grey light / Reflected from the street'. 

One hopes that the dream and the street outside are related. As Auden writes in the foreword to the collection, Markings witnesses an 'attempt by a professional man of action to unite in one life the Via Activa and the Via Contemplativa'. And perhaps after all the 'map' exists both in your dreams and when you rejoin the outside; it becomes one form taken by the road markers that lie between action and contemplation.

(This post is part of a series of "markings" made in the lead-up to a trip I am making to Zambia in September to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Dag Hammarskjöld death in a plane crash in Ndola in 1961. Other posts in the series can be found here.)

Canberra Times review

Sara Dowse's review of The Promise of Iceland has appeared in the Canberra Times. Her very interesting (and, he boasts, positive) review ties the book to public discourses around parenting and privacy laws. She continues,

The Promise of Iceland is, in effect, that of Gislason's three strong formative loves. The first is his mother, an intriguingly complex and adventurous woman whom her son attempts to fathom with tremendous sensitivity and respect. Susan Reid (she was married before her liaison and kept her husband's name) had a passion for travel and, ultimately, Iceland became her dreamland. What Gislason does particularly well is make a case for the significance of place in people's lives, and indeed, his mother's love for the beauty of Iceland and the tight-knit community of its stoic, hard-drinking people is ultimately mirrored in his own. And further, Iceland's pull on him is bound up with his seemingly unrequited love for his father.


[...]


It's not usual for me to give the bones of a plot to readers--it's generally bad reviewing and spoils things for the reader. I've relented in this case because the plot is not really the meat of this narrative, which is how a young boy who's been raised in somewhat extraordinary circumstances grows into a highly perceptive and self-aware man, courageous enough to break the taboo surrounding his birth. What it illustrates clearly is the powerful need children have in most cases for the love of both their parents, and the necessity of loving them regardless of whether that love is judged by others to be undeserved. The journeys to Iceland, then, a country beautifully realised in the book's pages, are truly stations on the author's bumpy, if often amusing, road to healing and self-knowledge.


(from the "Panorama" lift-out in the Canberra Times, 13/8/11, p. 26)

Road Marking #7

Hammarskjöld's entry in Markings for 6 August 1961 - the second last entry in the journal - is a poem about Poughkeepsie in New York State, where in summers he hired the house of Swedish journalist Einar Thulin.

The meadow's massive
Green wave rises
Over the rolling ridge,
Crested with the white foam
Of a thousand oxeye daisies
Which blush
As the midsummer sun
Sets scarlet
In a haze of heat
Over Poughkeepsie.


Seven weeks have gone by,
Seven kinds of blossom
Have been picked or moved,
Now the leaves of the Indian corn grow broad,
And its cobs make much of themselves,
Waxing fat and fertile.
Was it here,
Here, that paradise was revealed
For one brief moment
On a night in midsummer?

(Markings, p. 180)

It's a beautiful poem in its own right, but I am also reminded of Hammarskjöld's last essay, "Castle Hill", which he was working on in the weeks before his death. The essay is a study of the seasons in his hometown Uppsala, and the poem shares with that work the commingling of visual impressions with a sense of the fragility of time: across the summer there is but "one brief moment" when the oxeye daisies, "the seven kinds of blossom", and the Indian corn offer both a perfect presence and a sense of their transience. (See here for my earlier discussion of the essay.)

But what I like most about the poem is what it reveals about his last summer, and that on at least one day he was returned to that magical feeling, one we experience perhaps more often in youth, of paradise in the everyday.

Road Marking #6

Another day and another marking on the figurative road to Ndola. Below is part of the entry in Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings for 2 August 1961, 50 years ago today:

Forgive

My doubt,
My anger,
My pride.

(Markings, p. 178)

It seems typical of inspiring figures to question themselves in this way - a person who shows such resolve, moderation and humility will accuse himself of the opposite. A truly proud person, of course, never would.

A Letter from the Tower, by Richard Carroll

We caught our first glimpse of the Tower as we drove into Allevard-les-Bains, a small town nestled in a valley at the foot of the Alps in Savoie. The Tour du Treuil is an imposing medieval structure on a knoll on the western slope of the valley, from where it presides over the surrounding countryside with an unflinching eye. Originally built in the twelfth century as a fortress from which the ruling powers could observe the traffic through the valley below, the tower has had many uses over the centuries, one of which was housing Russian refugees during the Second World War. Fortunately, Rose and I weren’t refugees, we were guests of the present owners, our Australian friends, Chris and Suzanne Carroll (no relation), who bought the tower in 2010.

From our room on the third floor, reached by a lift no less (or a narrow staircase, legs permitting), we could see the Gleyzin glacier (2697 m.) and snow-covered mountains framed in the massive window. We quickly settled in, then set off to tour the premises.

To celebrate our arrival, our hosts had invited their neighbours Louis and Colette for dinner on the terrace. While drinking an aperitif, we indulged in a game of croquet, with Chris explaining the rules. I had never played and didn’t realise just how cut-throat croquet could be. We blasted each others' balls around the grass or into the bushes in our surge to the winning post. With the game over, Louis suggested a round of petanque, to be played with square balls.

“Square balls?” I enquired, not quite managing to keep a note of incredulity from my voice.

“Oui, oui, c’est vrai; des boules carrées,” (Yes, yes, it’s true; square balls) Louis assured me, a twinkle in his eye. “Because of the hills. If we play with round balls, they disappear down the slopes, never to be seen again. So, we use square ones instead and the problem is solved, no?” he added with a wink that did little to dissipate the feeling he was taking me for a ride.

“I’m willing to give it a try,” I responded, not sure how this would end.

Colette scurried off to her house to fetch the said balls and arrived back carrying a bucket, which she deposited at my feet. “Voila, we can start,” she exclaimed, standing with her hands on her hips and a knowing look in her eye. I observed that the balls were indeed square, or more correctly, cubic, numbered in pairs. I plucked one from the bucket and studied it closely. “10 cm by 10 cm by 10 cm and made from pine,” Louis instructed proudly.

This is a whole new ball game, I thought.

The “ball” certainly felt different in the hand, much lighter by far than the usual steel spheres, but the game was the same. You chuck the thing and hope it lands closer to the jack than the opposition’s balls. I quickly learnt that if the “ball” landed on a corner, whether on the grass or gravel, it would invariably bounce and take off like a rocket into the nearest bush. We all got the hang of it and were soon into the fun of the game, square balls ricocheting in all directions, the tower seemingly watching all that transpired at its feet in benevolent tolerance. The pastis warmed my blood, while the verdant valley and forested hills stood as backdrops to a balmy French evening.

Richard Carroll is a doctoral student in Creative Writing at QUT. He is writing an historical novel based on the life of Tom Petrie (1831-1910).

Another view of the tower is available here.