Michael Ridpath's Blog - Posts Tagged "iceland-magnus"
Not Quite Scandinavians: The Icelanders
So, Magnus is an Icelander. But what are Icelanders really like?
Now that is a dangerous question. Dangerous because we are in the territory of playing with stereotypes.
I first came across the notion of stereotype at school studying history. I think I had suggested that the first world war started because Germans liked invading people. I was admonished, quite rightly, and told that ‘stereotypes’ had no place in history. You couldn’t say that Italians were excitable, the French didn’t queue, the Americans were loud or that the Germans liked invading people. It was bad history, it was often plain wrong and it was morally dubious. All true.
And yet. It is hard to suggest that the unification of Germany or even the origins of the first world war can be analysed without some understanding of the development of Prussian militarism.
I believe there are certain traits that are more prevalent in Iceland than elsewhere, and I think it is the job of a novelist to capture these. But a writer has to be careful. For many of the most obvious characteristics, there are less obvious, opposing trends lying just beneath the surface. Which makes it all the more interesting.
Some of what follows is based on my own observation. Much of it comes from Icelanders themselves speaking about their own country, especially some of those I have met in London, whose removal from home gives them some clarity. Many of these characteristics will be examined in future posts.
Most of the character of Icelanders derives from their geography and history, which I have already touched upon: dark cold winters, summer days of interminable length, poverty, rubbish weather, the struggle to grow food, a small society and centuries of dominance by a foreign absentee government.
Icelanders work hard, and they work quickly. I have already mentioned how most of them have several different jobs. Historically, there was a lot to get done during the short summer on the farm, and many daylight hours to do it in. If you didn’t work all those hours, you starved in the winter. They are not good planners and they are not good timekeepers. If they say they will do something, they do it right away or not at all.
An example. When I emailed Pétur and asked him if he knew any policemen in Reykjavík I could talk to, I expected a response in a couple of days giving me the contact details of a friend’s husband who was a cop. What I received was an email ten minutes later saying that the chief of the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police was expecting my call. Immediately. The police chief gave me a great contact whom I have met several times.
Another example. Crimefest is an enjoyable literary festival for crime fiction which takes place in Bristol every May. In May 2013, a bunch of Icelandic crime writers were having a beer, and thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a similar international crime festival in Reykjavík? Classic authors’ chat in the bar. Except that in November that same year Iceland Noir held its first festival in Reykjavík, with top crime writers from all over the world showing up. I can’t imagine a major literary festival being set up so quickly in any other country.
Speed helps in other ways. Icelanders take search and rescue seriously: there are 99 units with 3,500 volunteers. They have plenty of toys: snowmobiles, boats, super-jeeps with massive tyres, horses, even parachutes. They have always been willing to drop everything and set out in rough seas to help a ship in distress, or to rush up a mountain through a blizzard to look for a lost neighbour, or these days a lost tourist. This all plays to Icelanders’ strengths: tough, brave, resourceful, quick to react, eager to play with man-toys.
They are ready to respond to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or flash floods at a moment’s notice. They have found their niche in world disasters: they get there first. The Icelanders only have a small global emergency unit, but they pride themselves on being the first international response on the scene in places like Haiti.
I have mentioned that literature has always been important in Icelandic culture, and so too is art, music and sport. With a hard-working population, willing to put in the extra hours, some of it is very good. Reykjavík’s bookshops are big, and groaning with books written by a small population.
The city is teeming with art, some of it good, some of it bad, most of it quirky. Early in the evenings on Fridays and Saturdays the streets of downtown Reykjavík are full of bearded men unloading the musical equipment of dozens of groups ready to play their heart out.
The Icelanders love per-capita comparisons, but the national achievements really are impressive for a place with a population similar to Coventry or Buffalo. World-class musicians include Björk, Sigur Rós and Of Monsters and Men. Iceland’s opera singers, artists and designers spread across the globe. Dramas about sheep win international film awards. The football team reached the semi-finals of the 2016 Euros, and in Halldór Laxness Iceland had a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. After this victory, Icelanders crowed that they had the highest number of Nobel laureates per capita until they found out a guy from the Faroe Islands had won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1903.
I sometimes think that there is a department at the University of Iceland devoted to calculating per-capita statistics. These supposedly include: the most peaceful country, the highest internet usage, the greatest levels of gender equality, the highest literacy ratio, the most rules for writing poetry, the most Coca Cola consumption, the most musicians, the most authors and the highest sales of the computer game Championship Manager.
They also eat a lot of Cheerios and Cocoa Puffs, but I don’t have the global statistics on those to hand.
There is something about the way Icelanders go about things that is effective, beyond just hard work. Like the great disrupters of Silicon Valley, they move fast and break things. They are optimists; when something goes wrong, they try something else. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn’t, but hey, thetta reddast.
Now that is a dangerous question. Dangerous because we are in the territory of playing with stereotypes.
I first came across the notion of stereotype at school studying history. I think I had suggested that the first world war started because Germans liked invading people. I was admonished, quite rightly, and told that ‘stereotypes’ had no place in history. You couldn’t say that Italians were excitable, the French didn’t queue, the Americans were loud or that the Germans liked invading people. It was bad history, it was often plain wrong and it was morally dubious. All true.
And yet. It is hard to suggest that the unification of Germany or even the origins of the first world war can be analysed without some understanding of the development of Prussian militarism.
I believe there are certain traits that are more prevalent in Iceland than elsewhere, and I think it is the job of a novelist to capture these. But a writer has to be careful. For many of the most obvious characteristics, there are less obvious, opposing trends lying just beneath the surface. Which makes it all the more interesting.
Some of what follows is based on my own observation. Much of it comes from Icelanders themselves speaking about their own country, especially some of those I have met in London, whose removal from home gives them some clarity. Many of these characteristics will be examined in future posts.
Most of the character of Icelanders derives from their geography and history, which I have already touched upon: dark cold winters, summer days of interminable length, poverty, rubbish weather, the struggle to grow food, a small society and centuries of dominance by a foreign absentee government.
Icelanders work hard, and they work quickly. I have already mentioned how most of them have several different jobs. Historically, there was a lot to get done during the short summer on the farm, and many daylight hours to do it in. If you didn’t work all those hours, you starved in the winter. They are not good planners and they are not good timekeepers. If they say they will do something, they do it right away or not at all.
An example. When I emailed Pétur and asked him if he knew any policemen in Reykjavík I could talk to, I expected a response in a couple of days giving me the contact details of a friend’s husband who was a cop. What I received was an email ten minutes later saying that the chief of the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police was expecting my call. Immediately. The police chief gave me a great contact whom I have met several times.
Another example. Crimefest is an enjoyable literary festival for crime fiction which takes place in Bristol every May. In May 2013, a bunch of Icelandic crime writers were having a beer, and thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a similar international crime festival in Reykjavík? Classic authors’ chat in the bar. Except that in November that same year Iceland Noir held its first festival in Reykjavík, with top crime writers from all over the world showing up. I can’t imagine a major literary festival being set up so quickly in any other country.
Speed helps in other ways. Icelanders take search and rescue seriously: there are 99 units with 3,500 volunteers. They have plenty of toys: snowmobiles, boats, super-jeeps with massive tyres, horses, even parachutes. They have always been willing to drop everything and set out in rough seas to help a ship in distress, or to rush up a mountain through a blizzard to look for a lost neighbour, or these days a lost tourist. This all plays to Icelanders’ strengths: tough, brave, resourceful, quick to react, eager to play with man-toys.
They are ready to respond to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or flash floods at a moment’s notice. They have found their niche in world disasters: they get there first. The Icelanders only have a small global emergency unit, but they pride themselves on being the first international response on the scene in places like Haiti.
I have mentioned that literature has always been important in Icelandic culture, and so too is art, music and sport. With a hard-working population, willing to put in the extra hours, some of it is very good. Reykjavík’s bookshops are big, and groaning with books written by a small population.
The city is teeming with art, some of it good, some of it bad, most of it quirky. Early in the evenings on Fridays and Saturdays the streets of downtown Reykjavík are full of bearded men unloading the musical equipment of dozens of groups ready to play their heart out.
The Icelanders love per-capita comparisons, but the national achievements really are impressive for a place with a population similar to Coventry or Buffalo. World-class musicians include Björk, Sigur Rós and Of Monsters and Men. Iceland’s opera singers, artists and designers spread across the globe. Dramas about sheep win international film awards. The football team reached the semi-finals of the 2016 Euros, and in Halldór Laxness Iceland had a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. After this victory, Icelanders crowed that they had the highest number of Nobel laureates per capita until they found out a guy from the Faroe Islands had won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1903.
I sometimes think that there is a department at the University of Iceland devoted to calculating per-capita statistics. These supposedly include: the most peaceful country, the highest internet usage, the greatest levels of gender equality, the highest literacy ratio, the most rules for writing poetry, the most Coca Cola consumption, the most musicians, the most authors and the highest sales of the computer game Championship Manager.
They also eat a lot of Cheerios and Cocoa Puffs, but I don’t have the global statistics on those to hand.
There is something about the way Icelanders go about things that is effective, beyond just hard work. Like the great disrupters of Silicon Valley, they move fast and break things. They are optimists; when something goes wrong, they try something else. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn’t, but hey, thetta reddast.
Publish and be Damned: Magnus I
Writing a novel is all very well, but at some point it has to be let out into the world to take its chances.
My agent Carole Blake and I had agreed that her assistant Oli would act for me on this one. I would be one of his first clients. But he had to like the book.
He read it. He liked it. Together, we came up with a plan. Oli sent the manuscript out.
I was nervous. Extremely nervous.
It takes a while for publishers to respond to submissions, even when supplied by an agent, but I received a couple of quick rejections of the ‘not one for us’ variety. That’s better than the ‘this book is a load of old crap’ variety.
I tried not to panic. I told myself that if a publisher was going to say yes, they would take their time to get back: the manuscript would have to be shown round to colleagues; sales and marketing would need to be convinced. But, frankly, the waiting was difficult. What the hell would
I do if they all said ‘no’? There was no Plan D.
They didn’t all say no. We found a publisher, Corvus, a brand-new imprint set up by Atlantic Books with Nic Cheetham in charge. Nic was young, imaginative and enthusiastic (he is still the latter two if not so much the former). He was setting up this completely new imprint, and he was excited. Kindle was just beginning to take off, and Nic saw it as an opportunity for smaller, nimbler publishers, rather than a threat. His enthusiasm, and that of Oli, fired me up. Publishing was fun again.
Magnus I was not a great title, and so I had submitted the manuscript under the title Fire and Ice. Nic had a better idea: Where the Shadows Lie, a reference to the verses in the epigraph of Lord of the Rings. That was a good title.
Where the Shadows Lie was published in March 2010. Someone, I don’t know whether it was Nic or a hidden person I had unwittingly met in Iceland, organized the most spectacular publicity stunt. In April of that year, Eyjafjallajökull erupted, spewing ash into the atmosphere all over the northern hemisphere, stranding air travellers and placing Iceland firmly on the map.
The book did reasonably well in physical form, but thanks to Nic’s efforts the ebook sold extremely well, getting to number one.
Oli swung into action. He managed to sell the novel to fifteen publishers throughout Europe and the United States, mostly on the back of the Lord of the Rings angle. This was very gratifying. But the best news came from the smallest country. Pétur wanted to publish the book in Icelandic.
Phew! No Plan D required. Time to write Magnus II.
By the way, if reading this post has caused a rich of blood to your head and you have a desire to buy Where the Shadows Lie immediately, go right ahead: Where the Shadows Lie
