Independent People : An Epic

Independence is the most important thing of all in life. I say for my part that a man lives in vain until he is independent. People who aren’t independent aren’t people. A man who isn’t his own master is as bad as a man without a dog.

Independent People is certainly an epic of Icelandic history and culture as advertised, but what I hadn't expected was for it to be so tragicomic: In addition to many scenes that are played out with laughworthy dialogue and interactions, so much – from the title to the misguided thoughts that run through the head of our sheep-farming protagonist Guðbjartur Jónsson (commonly known as Bjartur of Summerhouses) – are overladen with an amusing irony by author Halldór Laxness. And yet, this is certainly a tragedy as well: This is no tribute to the idylls of a preindustrial civilisation – Bjartur suffers in the same way his ancestors had for a thousand years of Icelandic colonisation – but rather in the way of The Grapes of Wrath or Les Misérables, Laxness uses a tale of common folk to indict the prevailing socio-political systems that keep those commoners at starvation levels of survival (first released as two volumes in 1934 and 1935, it is manifest in this book that Laxness was a known supporter of Communism). There is, naturally, an old-fashioned sensibility in this book (which might not be to everyone's tastes), and as with any political fiction, Laxness walks a murky line between having characters naturally discuss current events and having them act as mouthpieces for his own arguments, but to my tastes, it holds up really well; at the very least as a valuable snapshot of its time. I felt for these characters, I thought that the nature writing was gorgeous, and I learned plenty about Iceland – who am I to give this Nobel Laureate less than five stars on his most famous work? (Some spoilers ahead.)

Century after century the lone worker leaves the settlements to tempt fortune on this knoll between the lake and the cleft in the mountain, determined to challenge the evil powers that hold his land in thrall and thirst for his blood and the marrow in his bones. Generation after generation the crofter raises his chant, contemptuous of the powers that lay claim to his limbs and seek to rule his fate to his dying day. The history of the centuries in this valley is the history of an independent man who grapples barehanded with the spectre which bears a new and ever a newer name. Sometimes the spectre is some half-divine fiend who lays a curse on his land. Sometimes it breaks his bones in the guise of a norn. Sometimes it destroys his croft in the form of a monster. And yet, always, to all eternity, it is the same spectre assailing the same man century after century.

Independent People begins with a centuries-old tale of witches and devilry and a curse put on the land; the same boggy acres that freeholder Bjartur of Summerhouses commits to buying from his former master, and avowed enemy, the Bailiff of Myri. Bjartur doesn't believe in curses – indeed, he will refuse to permit his new bride, Rósa, to offer a stone to the dead witch Gunnvör's cairn; perhaps to their future doom – but Bjartur will allow for the possibility of elves and trolls and the absolute truth of the history of the Epics and Rimes that recount Iceland's great heroes; Bjartur can quote the epics at length and even spends his solitary hours composing rimes of his own. To Bjartur, being “independent” is everything, and to achieve that blessed state, he commits to following exactly in the footsteps of those sheep-farming peasants who came before him: Help the ewes with their lambs in spring, work fourteen-to-sixteen hours days throughout the summer and fall to grow and harvest the hay that will sustain the sheep through the winter, hope that there is enough wool and mutton annually to trade for the salt fish, flour, and coffee that feeds his own family throughout all seasons. And yet, because Bjartur must engage in trade – because all his hours of farming don't directly sustain him; he rarely even partakes of mutton himself – he will never be independent; beholden to “middlemen” and “capitalists” who turn his and his neighbours' labour into their own profits, following unquestioningly in the footsteps of previous generations of sheepfarmers seems the least independent course he could choose. Over the years, sometimes rich men from town come to Bjartur's land to hunt ducks and fish for trout, and even when they leave some meat behind in payment, Bjartur turns up his nose – that's “famine food”, not fit for eating by his provisioned-for family (pale and rickety but not quite starving) – and it's plain to see that following the traditions of barely surviving ancestors leads to barely surviving. And for a man who lauds his own independence, Bjartur is forever allowing his betters to place demands on him: The first wife given to him was already pregnant with the issue of a rich man's son; when she dies in childbirth, Bjartur is given responsibility for another woman (whom he eventually marries) and her aged mother because they were a “drain on the parish”; a cow is “gifted” to his family (a burden he never wanted, his ingratitude being justified when a harsh winter diverts hay to the cow to the loss of his sheep), and to help with the cow, a nasty old woman is assigned to Bjartur's farm as a hired labourer; and just when WWI proves a boon for wool and mutton prices, the local Farmers Co-Operative induces Bjartur to build a proper stone and concrete house (in place of a timber and turf croft) that puts this man of independent means into terrible debt.

The lone worker will never escape from his life of poverty for ever and ever; he will go on existing in affliction as long as man is not man's protector, but his worst enemy. The life of the lone worker, the life of the independent man, is in its nature a flight from other men, who seek to kill him. From one night-lodging into another even worse. A peasant family flits, four generations of the thirty that have maintained life and death in this country for a thousand years – for whom? Not for themselves anyway, nor for anyone of theirs. They resembled nothing so much as fugitives in a land devastated by year after year of furious warfare; hunted outlaws – in whose land? Not in their own at least.

Despite feeling like an epic, interesting writing made this a fairly quick read. I could have flagged passages on nearly every page, but here are a few examples of bits I admired:

• The mornings were never commonplace, each morning was a new morning, but as day advanced the birds would sing less and the Blue Mountains would gradually lose the beauty of their colours. The days were like grown-up people, the mornings always young.

• Shortly afterwards it started raining, very innocently at first, but the sky was packed tight with cloud and gradually the drops grew bigger and heavier, until it was autumn’s dismal rain that was falling—rain that seemed to fill the entire world with its leaden beat, rain suggestive in its dreariness of everlasting waterfalls between the planets, rain that thatched the heavens with drabness and brooded oppressively over the whole countryside, like a disease, strong in the power of its flat, unvarying monotony, its smothering heaviness, its cold, unrelenting cruelty. Smoothly, smoothly it fell, over the whole shire, over the fallen marsh grass, over the troubled lake, the iron-grey gravel flats, the sombre mountain above the croft, smudging out every prospect. And the heavy, hopeless, interminable beat wormed its way into every crevice in the house, lay like a pad of cotton wool over the ears, and embraced everything, both near and far, in its compass, like an unromantic story from life itself that has no rhythm and no crescendo, no climax, but which is nevertheless overwhelming in its scope, terrifying in its significance.


• The life of man is so short that ordinary people simply cannot afford to be born.

I also want to comment on the irony of Bjartur's apparent misogyny. He's so single-minded in his goals, so incurious about the needs of others, that he honestly doesn't seem to understand how his actions will affect anyone around him; and especially how his actions will affect womenfolk, an apparently unfathomably different species from his own. He will leave a woman alone on a lonely acreage when she's scared out of her wits (indeed, he'll later leave that same woman alone as childbirth approaches); he will unflinchingly slaughter the one creature that gives a sick woman a reason to leave her bed; he will banish the one person he loves if she threatens the social norms; he will banish the one person he needs if she threatens his independence. Bjartur makes such unthinking comments as “women are more to be pitied than ordinary mortals”; when he thinks a housekeeper is overstepping her bounds, he muses that he might “marry the bitch so he could have full leave to tell her to shut up”; and when some farmers are discussing the rash of illegitimate children running around the community – and one tries to make a distinction between those women who are taken by force and those by guile – Bjartur declares, “I see very little difference between guile and force as long as the object is the same”. This could all be very offputting if it wasn't of a piece with the infernal sheep-raising: Bjartur is the least independent of men, more to be pitied than reviled, when he walks these pathways of accepted custom, even to the breaking of his own heart. Laxness plays it all out with a deftly tragicomic touch.

And yet, the times, they are a changin'. Set right at the turn of the twentieth century, Bjartur and his Icelandic brethren have tended their sheep for a thousand years, and when he put his first payment down on Summerhouses, he expected that his line would be freeholders on this land for a thousand years more. How could he know that global markets, world wars, emigration to America, universal education, industrialisation and general strikes would disrupt literally everything? Laxness can be forgiven for jumping on the Communism train before the true horrors of its excesses were revealed (imagine Stalin's or Mao's subjects as the very models of “independent people”), but he wasn't wrong in what he saw as the failings and abuses of capitalism in his day. Plus ça change.

Interesting and entertaining, literary and enduring; what's not to like? To love?