Michael Ridpath's Blog - Posts Tagged "magnus"

I began to read. At this stage I was just trying to get a general idea of the country, its society and its people. Wide was good; serendipity ruled. I had done this before: I had set books in Brazil and South Africa, and Iceland is much smaller than those two countries, and therefore less daunting.

The first book I picked up was Dreaming of Iceland by Sally Magnusson, a charming description of a one-week holiday the author took with her famous father Magnus back to his homeland.

Then I read Ring of Seasons, by Terry Lacy, an American who has lived in Iceland for many years and The Killer’s Guide to Iceland by Zane Radcliffe, an excellent novel about an Englishman visiting the country and getting himself into deep trouble. Radcliffe has a way with food similes: lava-like digestive biscuits, glaciers like icing on a cake. It sounds corny, but it’s actually rather good.

I assumed that there were no crime writers of note in Iceland, which was unforgivably naïve. In fact, Arnaldur Indridason had written several novels translated into English, one of which, Silence of the Grave, had won the British Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 2005. Crime writers like to claim that their novels shine a powerful light on the societies in which they are set, and I think they are correct. Arnaldur and his detective Erlendur introduced me to a useful range of fictional Icelanders.

On a more mundane level, the ‘Contexts’ sections of the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides were excellent. I find the authors of these guides in particular are diligent and careful and their books are packed full of useful detail.

W.H. Auden and his friend Louis MacNeice produced a whimsical collection of poems and diary entries as payment to Faber for a holiday in Iceland in the 1930s, when the country was the poorest in Europe. This was updated imaginatively by the modern British poets Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell, chronicling their own Icelandic travels in Moon Country.

I soon encountered the Iceland Review, a quarterly magazine with stunning photographs and interesting articles about all aspects of Icelandic life. The magazine is online, of course, but it’s better in its physical version.

The Iceland Weather Report was a blog by the Icelandic-Canadian Alda Sigmundsdóttir. The blog no longer exists, but Alda is well worth following on Facebook and elsewhere: over the years, she has given me all sorts of information and ideas.

The Reykjavík Grapevine is a weekly English-language newspaper with a good web presence.

I bought DVDs; I wanted to see what the country actually looked like. 101 Reykjavík, a film of the book by Hallgrímur Helgason, is an enjoyable story of Reykjavík’s nightlife. Nói Albinói is a bleak tale of the bleak life of a bleak teenager in a small isolated town in the middle of winter. Seagull’s Laughter is a sweet film set in a fishing village in Iceland in the 1950s.

I was beginning to get some idea of what Iceland was like. These are the sources I used at the very beginning: I will give much fuller lists of books, websites and films about Iceland in a future post.

I studied history at university, and I like to know the history of any country I write about. Given my intended plot for the first book in the series, this was especially necessary.

There are, of course, many histories of Iceland, but the one I stumbled across was Iceland Saga by Magnus Magnusson. This is more than a history. Magnusson takes his reader on a journey around Iceland to the locations where the major events in the country’s early history took place. The book really fired my imagination.

More about Iceland’s history in my next post.

In my last post, I talked about how Iceland came to have a system of government with no actual ruler, but a parliament of the chieftains, known as the Althing.  This lasted until the late thirteenth century, when there were a series of armed clashes between the chieftains, ending with an appeal in 1264 to the King of Norway to take charge and sort things out. 


This turned out to be not such a good idea in the long term. The plan was for the Althing to maintain its authority, but over time the power of the Norwegian king in Iceland’s affairs grew. Then, in a bewildering session of a medieval version of the board game Risk, Norway and Sweden united with Denmark. The Danes ended up being in charge, and over the following centuries they established a monopoly of trade with Iceland. Iceland became a very poor country, one of the poorest in Europe.

Tough, cold conditions
At this time also, Europe was in the throes of the mini-ice age. The climate was becoming colder, which can’t have helped Icelandic farmers much. They could no longer grow barley. The Greenland settlement died out, its ports frozen, its crops failed, and the local Inuit outcompeting the Norsemen for walrus and caribou. Trade with the rest of Europe was constrained by increasing interference from the Danish government. There were no towns, and villages were small. People lived in hovels of rock and earth, with turf roofs.


Every year, farmers feared not having enough hay to see them through the winter, as they huddled in a single room above their livestock, surrounded by darkness and snow. Spring was the time of starvation, when the crops were planted, the grass was beginning to grow, but as yet there was nothing to feed the sheep or the family cow. There was a feudal system of sorts: rich farmers and poor peasants, but in truth the rich farmers were poor.


And the Icelanders were farmers. The sea around Iceland was teeming with cod and herring, but this was fished by large ships from England, France and Germany. There was some illicit trade with these foreigners, but not much.


Foreigners also came from further afield than Western Europe.  Barbary pirates found Icelandic women easy pickings, plucking them from defenceless coastal communities, and whisking them back to the bazaars of North Africa.


Unicorns
There was one secret source of wealth for the Icelanders during the Middle Ages. Unicorn horn. Unicorns were much prized in Europe: unicorn horn was the most prestigious material to use in court, and ground up it had potent medicinal strength.

The fact that unicorns don’t actually exist wasn’t an insuperable problem for Icelanders and Danish merchants. The narwhal is a small whale with a long spiral horn which is found in the waters around Greenland. Narwhal horn was imported into western Iceland and unicorn horn was exported from eastern Iceland to Denmark from whence it was sold all over Europe.


Eruption of Laki
Iceland reached its nadir at the time of the eruption of the volcano Laki in 1783. This was one of those eruptions, similar to but bigger than Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, which threw tons of ash and in particular sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. The resulting ‘Haze Famine’ led to the deaths of eighty per cent of the livestock and a quarter of the population. At one point, the remaining Icelanders considered abandoning their country entirely, leaving it to the volcanoes, the glaciers and the bitter cold.


In the following century Icelanders legged it to North America in large numbers, for Iceland, setting up communities in the Midwest and Canada, such as the town of Gimli in Manitoba. These Vestur-Íslendingar would sometimes return home with fancy clothes and stories of wooden houses and roofs which didn’t leak.


Families were large, and then they weren’t, as children died young.


Wealthier Icelanders went abroad for education, to Denmark. They returned to their homeland with ideas. Ideas about national identity, ideas about independence. The Danes gradually acceded to Icelanders’ demands.


Independence
Independence came in stages: Iceland got its own constitution in 1874, in 1918 Iceland was recognized as a sovereign state under the Danish Crown and finally in 1944, while Denmark was under Nazi occupation, Iceland declared itself a Republic.


The relationship between Denmark and Iceland is a tricky one. On the one hand, Denmark is and has been for many years a remarkably civilized society with progressive values. Most educated Icelanders used to receive their postgraduate university education there, and many still do. Until quite recently, Danish was the foreign language taught in schools.


And yet. I have met Danes who have been eager to explain Iceland to me on the basis that the country was a former colony of theirs, in the same way a Briton might have spoken about India in the 1960s. Some Icelanders are suspicious of Danes. If Danes try to speak to them in Danish, an Icelander will reply in English.


World Wars
The First World War was a boom time for Icelanders, as Britain in particular became desperate to import food. The depression took its toll, and then in the Second World War the country was invaded.


On 9 May 1940, Hitler unleashed his cunning master plan to invade Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland, to outflank the French and British armies and within weeks to overrun France itself. On that very same day, the British unleashed their own master plan, to invade Iceland, over a thousand miles in the wrong direction from Belgium.


The British invasion was a total success. They landed, put up their tents and made tea. The Icelanders were a little miffed, but decided to be polite and treat the occupying army as guests. At one point, there were 25,000 British servicemen in Iceland. They provided jobs and wages for the inhabitants. Things really looked up in July 1941, when the British handed over the occupation of the island to 40,000 Americans.


The Americans paid higher wages, and brought chewing gum and nylon stockings to the island. There were at that point more American young men than young Icelandic males in the country. Some say it was a good time to be a young Icelandic woman.




Post-war prosperity
This was when Iceland’s fortunes really turned around. The country moved rapidly from being the poorest country in Europe on a per capita basis in the 1940s, to becoming the richest in 2007. Some of this wealth came directly from the U.S. base, which was expanded during the Cold War. Some of it came from the fish, which the Icelanders now caught for themselves. And some of it came from a highly educated, hard-working population creating wealth.


Icelanders fought three ‘cod wars’ against the British in the 1950s through to the 1970s, establishing their right to extend their fishing limits from there miles, to four miles, to fifty miles and then to two hundred miles. Iceland’s fishing villages boomed; England’s fishing port of Hull went bust.


All countries are a product of their history. You have to be tough to have survived Iceland’s past: the cold, the long, isolated winters of hunger, the long summers of back-breaking toil. It’s worth remembering this.


The twenty-first century Icelander in his Ray-Bans, driving his BMW 4x4 home to his geothermally heated minimalist apartment in Reykjavík is only a generation or two away from almost unimaginable hardship. Dump him on a snowy mountain in the dark miles from anywhere and he will probably know what to do. Put him behind the wheel of his BMW, and he might get a little over-excited; it’s probably a good idea to be extra careful when crossing the road in Reykjavík.


Blog Post frequency
Until now I have been posting on this blog every week, but from now on I intend to post every two weeks, on a Tuesday. 

Thingvellir is one of my favourite places in Iceland.
 
Thingvellir or ‘Thing Valley’ is one of those rare places in the world: it is steeped in history, it is geologically extraordinary and its beauty takes your breath away.

It is about forty kilometres to the east of Reykjavík.  Once you escape the city’s suburbs you turn inland and drive through dramatic, desolate mountains. 
 
You descend to the entrance of what is now a national park, and after a kilometre or so stop your car at the floor of a green valley.  To the east rise rough foothills, to the west a dramatic cliff face of grizzled grey rock.  A clear stream runs through the valley past a church to a sizeable lake, Thingvallavatn.

Small wooden bridges span the river.  Stop on one of these and stare into the stream into deep pools of clear water whose colour changes and shifts depending on the sky, the clouds and the angle of the sun.  A host of native Icelandic plants line the pools: birch, willow, crowberries, bilberries, heathers, tiny flowers and all kinds of mosses and lichens.  In autumn, these pools reflect red, yellow, orange, gold and russet, and become the subjects of some of the most stunning photographs in Iceland.
 
You take a footpath up to the cliff from the valley floor.  It turns out that the cliff is actually two cliffs, with a narrow gorge, known as the Almannagjá, running between them for five miles parallel to the valley below.  This is part of the long rift that runs diagonally from the north-east of Iceland to the south-west, separating Europe from North America, a rift that incites volcanoes, earthquakes, and the mysterious depths of Lake Thingvellir, where scuba divers explore the scar between continents underwater.
 
A river, the Öxará, tumbles over the top of the cliff and along the gorge in a couple of powerful waterfalls, before falling down to the valley.  As the North American and European continents grind up against each other, the valley moves; geologists estimate that it has widened by about eight metres and subsided by four metres since the country was settled a thousand years ago.
 

At the top of these cliffs, the Law Speaker’s Rock juts out, from where the Law Speaker could look out over the godar and their companions assembled in the valley below him.  You can still see the rock and the ruins of stone booths where the godar stayed during the Althing.  Here the intricate legal stratagems devised by Njál in Njál’s Saga were acted out.  And in the tumult of the Öxarárfoss, witches were drowned.
 
This place has a claim to be the site of the oldest parliament in the world.  But rather than being housed in a magnificent building, it is located outside in a valley of desolation and beauty. 
 

Which brings us to names. The Icelanders have a unique approach to naming people. It ranges from the simple Jón Jónsson, a boy’s name, to the more complicated Boghildur Dögg Skarphédinsdóttir, a snappy girl’s name. The system works as follows.

Your ‘last name’ is your father’s name, plus ‘-son’ if you are a boy, and ‘-dóttir’ if you are a girl. There is no surname in a conventional European or American sense.

So I would be Michael Andrewsson, since my father’s name was Andrew. My sister would be Mary Andrewsdóttir. My grandfathers’ names were Claude and Conrad, so my parents would be Andrew Claudesson and Elizabeth Conradsdóttir.

This seems noble is some ways: our parents are honoured and my sister and mother have names which respect their sex – there is something fundamentally illogical about the English name Jane Johnson, for example. But our tight little family of four all end up with different last names, which can be a little weird when we try to check into a hotel together.

Of course, all rules are made to be broken. During the nineteenth century some Icelanders affected Danish-style surnames, often having returned from university there. Thus there are a few Icelanders who go by the traditional European naming system – Élin Briem, for example. Other examples of surnames are Blöndal, Thorlacius, Hansen, Nordal and Möller. This practice was banned as un-Icelandic in the twentieth century, but those who already had Danish-style last names could keep them.

Diminutives are often used: Gunni, for Gunnar, Magga for Margrét, Maggi for Magnús. There are thirty-five confusing boys’ names beginning in ‘Sigur-’ and thirty-three girls’ names. Fortunately, the boys are all called Siggi and the girls Sigga.

In times past, the Vikings were more imaginative with their nicknames. The sagas include Audun the Stutterer, Eystein Foul-Fart, Ulf the Squint-Eyed, Thorberg Ship-Breast and Ljótur the Unwashed. My favourite is the name of one of the most influential of the original settlers in Iceland, Aud the Deep-Minded, daughter of Ketil Flat-Nose.

In more modern times, as the number of Icelanders has proliferated, it has become more important to tell the Jón Jónssons apart. Hence the increasing use of middle names, many of which are one syllable, such as Örn, Thór or Dögg.

You may have wondered how I knew there were exactly thirty-five boys’ names beginning with ‘Sigur-’. You did, didn’t you? Well, there is an official book of names, which I have open in front of me. You cannot give your child a name unless it is on the list. Every year a committee adds to the names.

The book is stuffed full of wonderful Nordic creations such as Gunnthóra, Dagbjört and Ragnheidur, but there are also the more conventional biblical Davíd, Símon and Tinna, as well as modern-sounding Karlotta and Marvin. Somehow Michael crept in there, along with Carl, Cecil and Christian, even though the letter ‘c’ doesn’t really exist in Icelandic. Disappointing.

The Icelandic last name, a patronymic, is subtly different from the European surname. Gunnar Jónsson is the Gunnar whose father is Jón. Whereas Michael Ridpath means that I am part of the Ridpath family as well as being called Michael. More practically, there are many more Michaels than Ridpaths. So, in more formal situations, or in official lists or phone books, for example, I would be known as ‘Mr. Ridpath’, or show up as ‘Ridpath, M.’

This doesn’t apply in Iceland. ‘Jónsson’ is more or less as common as ‘Gunnar’. And Gunnar is more Gunnar than Jónsson. So Gunnar is called Gunnar in most situations, however formal, even if he becomes President, and he will be listed as Gunnar in the Reykjavík phone book.

This has its advantages. Two of the top Icelandic crime writers are Yrsa Sigurdardóttir (she has dark hair) and Lilja Sigurdardóttir (she has blonde hair). They are not sisters, but both their fathers happened to be called Sigurdur, a common name. It is much easier and clearer to speak about books by Yrsa and Lilja, than by Sigurdardóttir and Sigurdardóttir.

This naming system posed problems for my detective Magnus, whose father was Ragnar, and whose grandfather was Jón. So in Iceland, Magnus was Magnús Ragnarsson, and his father was Ragnar Jónsson.

When Magnus came to the U.S. to be with his father, this caused difficulties for the American bureaucracy, and so he took his father’s last name and anglicized it slightly to Jonson. Of course, when he returned to Iceland, he retook his father’s first name for his last name. So Magnus Jonson became Magnús Ragnarsson, a constant reminder of his confused identity.

I try to show this by employing the American ‘Magnus’ in prose or when characters are speaking in English, but ‘Magnús’ when they are speaking in Icelandic. It drives my copy editors mad.

Turning aside from Iceland for a moment, I should just mention that my new thriller, The Diplomat's Wife is out next week. Sadly, no launch party. I do like a good launch party.

Magnus is an Icelander and an American, which can be confusing for the poor guy.   He has to fit in.  But fit into what? What is Icelandic society like?
 
Tucked into that per-capita list in my last post, was ‘gender equality’.  The generalisation goes that women are tough, independent and well-educated in Iceland.  Although they are not paid the same as men, pay is closer than in other countries.  Iceland had the first elected female president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir who was elected in 1980. 
 
The success of women is ascribed by some to the fact that many were left alone to manage while their husbands went away to sea.  Some say that having children early helps.  Women will often have their first child while still at university, which means that when they are in their early thirties they have older children and are able to struggle with men on equal terms on the career ladder.
 
On Friday 24 October 1975, Icelandic women went on strike for a day, refusing to go to work or to do any chores around the house or look after children.  Ninety per cent of Icelandic women participated.  The men prepared: employers bought paper and crayons in anticipation of kids joining their fathers to work, and easy-to-cook sausages sold out in the shops.  The strike was successful: in 1976 Parliament passed a law guaranteeing equal pay.
 
And yet sexism is not unknown in Iceland.  In 2018 a group of mostly male politicians were recorded by a fellow customer in a bar near Parliament discussing what they would like to do to their female colleagues, causing uproar and demands for resignations.  Domestic abuse is still a real problem.
 
As is alcoholism.  Many Icelanders are binge drinkers.  They share this with many northern countries, places where winter nights are long.  And, despite the extortionate prices, they somehow manage to get drunk at the weekend.  Which, I have to admit, can be fun.
 
Icelandic families used to be large.  Two parents, nine children and an extended family of cousins and aunts.  When the parents were in trouble, the father lost at sea, for example, relatives would step in.  Families are often large now, but in a different, more complex, way. 
 
I mentioned that people have children young.  They don’t necessarily get married young, or get married at all.  Many people get married several times to other people who already have children.  A child may have several parents and step-parents, and a minibus full of siblings, step-siblings and half-siblings, and an aunt her age.  Grandmothers in their forties help out their daughters with child care. 
 
It all seems to work, in fact it seems to work very well, but I wonder what effect if any this breakdown in the nucleus of the family has on children.                  
 
One of the global measures that Iceland seems to score very highly is equality.  And at first glance, it does seem to be a classic Nordic social-democratic society where everyone respects everyone else, everyone calls everyone else by their first names, and everyone goes to school together.  This derives from the shared hardship of a community of poor farmers and the historic lack of an aristocratic or governing class.
 
And yet, scratch beneath the surface . . .  At the beginning of the twentieth century a small group of families, known as ‘The Octopus’, controlled trade into the country.  They were rich, the rest of the Icelanders were poor, but they kept a low profile. 
 
These were joined and in some cases supplanted by a new generation of entrepreneurs and bankers in the 1990s and early 2000s, who rode the boom.  They bought newspapers and some of their friends became politicians.  When the bust came in 2008, known in Iceland as the kreppa, this group was badly bruised but survived.  Many Icelanders are still resentful of them.
 
In a society where networks are so integral, cliques develop.  My own experience is that the bankers know the bankers and the writers know the writers, but they don’t know each other, or not very well – although I do know one writer who is both.  It’s not a rigid class system on the classic British model.  But it’s not a social-democratic paradise of equality either.
 
I mentioned how history can resonate in current Icelandic society.  But one aspect of the past which seems for some reason to have left no trace is the thirst for blood of the Vikings.  Icelanders are peaceable, at least when sober.  The country has no army, and although Iceland is a member of NATO, joining caused mass demonstrations. 
 
Cynics might say they only joined for the money flowing from the U.S. airbase at Keflavík.  A young male culture that venerates toughness and strength when faced with nature, does not produce enthusiastic soldiers, or anything more violent than the magnificent cry in unison of ‘Huh!’ with a thunderclap at Iceland football games.  Apparently this isn’t Viking at all, but was imported from Motherwell Football Club near Glasgow.
 
Icelanders can be rude behind the till in a shop and look as if they want to be somewhere else, but that’s only because they are thinking through their chord change at the gig at the Kaffibarinn that evening.  You might have been cut up by a guy in a Jeep on his mobile phone with no indicator flashing, but he has things to do and people to see.  Icelanders may never include you in a round of drinks in a bar, but that is only because they haven’t had time to take out the mortgage to pay for it. 


In my experience, Icelanders are warm, friendly, generous, kind, interesting, well-read and have the sharpest of senses of humour.  And that’s a generalisation I am willing to stick by. 
 
To understand Icelanders, I believe you need to understand Bjartur.  Bjartur is the independent hero of Halldór Laxness’s greatest novel, Independent People.  The book is set at the beginning of the twentieth century.  Over eighteen years as a shepherd, Bjartur saves the money to buy his own farm on some very marginal land. 
 
Bjartur’s life is a struggle to eke a living out of this farm, called Summerhouses.  He marries twice, faces starvation and destitution, but never gives up on his dream of remaining an independent farmer.  He is stubborn to the point of cruelty  He is also a poet and sensitive to the folklore around him.
 
Why make Magnus American and not English?  He could easily be a detective from Scotland Yard who had been sent to England as a child.
 
I considered this initially.  But as I began to understand Icelanders, I realized Britain wouldn’t work as well as America.  Icelanders fit in very well in London, and a London detective would have little trouble fitting into Iceland.  The irony, the reserve, the reluctance to use guns: that would all seem familiar.  It seemed to me that an American homicide detective would notice more differences, and would have a harder time fitting in, which would make for a more interesting series of novels.
 
Understanding Magnus’s American background and experiences brought its own challenges.  I don’t make life easy for myself.
 
So, I had my detective.  I had my plot.  I had studied the language, spoken to Icelanders in London and read widely about the country. 
 
It was time to go there.  More on that in my next post.



In my last post, I described my arduous research trips to places like Rio and South Africa.  But now, for better or worse, I had decided to write several books in a city with appalling weather: Reykjavík. I have looked back at my notes on this trip in May of 2008, and these were my rather disjointed first impressions.


First Impressions
"It’s small and northern. Despite the cloud, there is a feeling of lightness about the place. Most of Reykjavík is in shades of grey, many of them light grey, brightened by a number of small houses with brightly coloured metal roofs.


It’s a hip, fashion-conscious city, yet innocent at the same time, clean, easy to walk around. Although many streets are narrow, you can usually see some distance to the sea and mountains, so it doesn’t feel cramped. It’s friendly in rather a repressed way.


The air is fresh and cool, with an occasional hint of sulphur. There is not much smell of traffic. The main sounds are the hum, not the roar, of traffic, the laugh or yelp of a human, the muffled bass line coming out of a car or bar, the clank of construction equipment and the occasional cry of a seabird.


The sky changes constantly as clouds mix and merge with the sun, performing a kind of bridal dance; you catch glimpses of lighter grey and sometimes bright blue. It rains and then it stops. The few trees are short, unhappy and just budding. A few stubby daffodils are still blooming in May. The temperature is cool: eight degrees, and at this time of year it doesn’t get dark until 10.30pm.


Movement and details. 
Steam rising from a road junction — perhaps a leak in the underground geothermal heating system? A bright yellow Mustang convertible. A girl wobbling on a bike wearing a lime green top, a leopard-skin skirt and a tail. A man pushing a baby round and round the city — I saw him several times. Two doughty tourists walking through the main shopping street in hiking gear. A class of kids in the Parliament Square, all with blonde hair apart from one East Asian girl."


What are the smells of Reykjavík? There is an impression of cleanliness, although I’m told the pollution from cars is worse than a visitor might assume. When the wind is from the harbour, you can smell fish. And when the wind is from the south-east, you can smell sulphur, leaking out from the centre of the earth at the geothermal power station thirty kilometres away.


Symbols
I needed symbols of Reykjavík, and there were two obvious candidates, both of which have recurred frequently in my novels.


The first is Mount Esja. This is a large, long, muscular ridge of crenellated rock and snow that lies to the north of Reykjavík, on the other side of a smooth grey fjord dotted with islands. You can see glimpses of it from many places in town. It changes constantly, with the seasons, the weather and even the time of day.

It can glow pink, glisten yellow, gleam white and brood black. On some days its grey wrinkles can be clearly made out in the sunshine under a blue sky. Tiny clouds can hover just above the flat summit, larger cumulus plunge and soar above it, or heavy grey blankets of moisture bear down, leaving only the foothills showing. It can look beautiful or ominous, or sometimes both at once. It has become an old friend, a friend with ever-changing moods.


The second is the Hallgrímskirkja, or Hallgrímur’s church. A hill rises above the centre of Reykjavík, and on top of this hill stands the Hallgrímskirkja, the largest church in Iceland. Despite its size, it’s not a cathedral: that is an older, much smaller building near the parliament square. Inside, it’s very warm, unlike any English church I have ever been to.


From the top of its spire you get a marvellous view over Reykjavík, the sea that surrounds the city on three sides, and beyond that, the mountains. But it's not the view from it that is important, it’s the view of it.


The church was designed in the 1930s and built between 1945 and 1986. It is constructed out of smooth concrete. The spire, supported by swept-back wings, swoops upwards to dominate the town. You see it from afar as you approach Reykjavík, and you see it as you walk the streets downtown. It can glow soft and yellow in low evening light, or loom grey and brutal in the drizzle. It has a kind of smooth grace to it, but it's also austere, depending on how you are feeling. Some of my characters think it looks like an intercontinental ballistic missile. Some of them think it looks like a space rocket. One of them thinks it looks like a penis. 


People
I identified a number of distinct ‘types’ among the people I saw on that first trip. I wouldn’t say that this is a definitive taxonomy of Icelanders at all, merely a snapshot of some of those I saw in 2008, and I fear some of my descriptions are not very kind.


"Old guys who think of themselves as cool: long greying curly hair, bushy beard or raffish moustaches, leather jacket, broad-rimmed hat and a scarf tied just so. Big guys, square shoulders, blonde, with stubble on their cheeks and stubble on their scalps, wearing black leather jackets. Thin guys with straggly red hair and thin straggly facial hair, woolly hats and jeans that sag and straggle. Big, broad, pasty-faced men, with thin fair hair, acne, a paunch and a couple of breasts. Little neat bird-like men with thick silver hair brushed back Soviet-style, weather-beaten faces and bright blue twinkling eyes. Young men wearing T-shirts under expensive sweaters, jeans, leather shoes, thick fair hair brushed back and oiled, neat designer stubble and thin metal glasses.


Tall, long-limbed women with blonde hair, fair complexion, blue eyes, white smile, striding with an air of confidence but not unapproachable. Thin small women with pale skin, blue eyes and black hair. What look like farm girls: hefty, broad pasty-face, bad skin, upturned piggy nose, looking unsophisticated and innocent. Middle-aged women with black hair, bright lipstick, mascara and leather trousers. Thin middle-aged woman with red collar-length hair, glasses, pale slightly freckled skin and blue intelligent eyes."




A failed night on the town
After a full afternoon of muttering into my tape recorder, I headed to my hotel. The Leifur Eiríksson is situated at the top of the hill right opposite the Hallgrímskirkja. Between the hotel and the church stands a fine statue of Leifur Eiríksson, the son of Erik the Red of Greenland fame, who sailed from Greenland to discover America. He is clutching a battleaxe and striding westwards across the city beneath him towards Canada.


My room had a fine view of Leif. I diligently wrote up my notes of the day’s sightings and then set out for a night on the town. Reykjavík is famous for its raucous nightlife, it was Saturday, and I needed to do my research. I found a bar, ordered a burger, and drank a beer. Quickly. I ordered another one.


The bar was barely a quarter full. It was eight-thirty. I had another beer. It had been a large burger. The beer was yellow and gassy. My stomach was full and I was tired. And the bar was still three-quarters empty.


Sometimes I really enjoy a long slow pint in a bar by myself. Sometimes I just get impatient. This was one of those impatient evenings. At nine-thirty I concluded that the stuff about Reykjavík nightlife I had read was overblown hype. At nine-forty-five I left the bar and looked for somewhere else more lively. The streets were more or less empty, although there was a parade of fancy cars on the main shopping street, Laugavegur.


I gave up and went to bed.


The curtains were thin, and it was not yet dark, so it took me a while to go to sleep. I was woken at about midnight by laughter and shouting. For the next three or four hours the clamour rose, until it sounded as if there was a riot going on not far from my hotel. I knew I should have got up and checked it all out. But I was feeling tired, foolish and a little middle-aged. I read a book for half an hour and eventually went back to sleep.

My Reykjavík researches continued along Laugavegur, which is Reykjavík’s smartest shopping street. Laug means ‘hot spring’, so this was the road from Ingólfur’s original Norse settlement to the geothermal spring, which is now a swimming pool with hot tubs near Borgartún.

It became the route women took to do their washing, and presumably a crowded thoroughfare on Saturday, or laugardagur, when everyone went off for a bath. It’s still a hot place on Saturday night, after my bedtime, since most of the trendy clubs and bars are on this street.

The trendiest of these is Kaffibarinn. This is a small metal town house, painted bright red, a few yards up Bergstadastraeti from Laugavegur. It is easily identifiable by the London Underground sign hung above the door. It has an awesome reputation: the place to go on a weekend night for music and violent dancing. It’s supposed to be or have been part-owned by Damon Albarn of Blur, but it’s hard to pin that factoid down: maybe he had a drink there once. Iceland’s most famous film director, Baltasar Kormákur, met Hallgrímur Helgason at the bar there, and decided to make a film of his book, 101 Reykjavík.

The bar itself is a very pleasant place to go during the day, or an early weekday evening. Warm, cosy, wooden, old, with trendily dressed and laid-back bar staff. By night, things change, as I found out several years later.

I went to dinner at my publisher Pétur’s house one Saturday. I told him and his guests I planned to go to some clubs afterwards for research purposes. Dinner was wonderful, but it dragged on, and we all drank quite a bit. I assumed everyone had forgotten about my plan. Finally, at 2.30 a.m., an author there announced it was time to go to Kaffibarinn.

It was a bewildering experience. The music was loud, the beat insistent — fair enough. The room at the back was heaving with a mass of bodies, mostly Icelandic, all drunk or high, swaying and writhing. It was summer — at 3 a.m. it was dawn or dusk or something — and the dim daylight seemed to give everyone an illicit energy.

Inside elbows and feet were jabbing. Outside, there was much shouting, swearing, baring of stomachs and chests, and vomiting. We left after an hour or so, because one of our group was embarrassed at jostling into her students from the university.

I found it extremely interesting, but it would be wrong to say I enjoyed it. I’m way too old.

But I do like a scruffy pub, and I thought Magnus would like one too. Two Icelanders in London had recommended I try the Grand Rokk, which lurked off Hverfisgata between Laugavegur and the bay. Sadly, this place is no longer open. To get in you went through a white picket gate in a white picket fence past a small outside tent for smokers.

Inside, the bar was wood-panelled, cosy and smelled strongly of spilled beer. A row of steady drinkers lined the bar: two old guys with grey hair and flat caps, a red-faced man with a bushy beard, a chubby American girl with short blonde hair and a chubby Icelandic friend, a Filipina and a shaven-headed Swedish guy in leathers. They all seemed to know each other, and the conversation was general and amiable in a mix of Icelandic and English.

The older guys had shot glasses of spirits to chase their beers. A few feet away from the bar two men were playing chess. A particularly ruddy drinker suddenly started singing ‘In the Summer Time’ from Porgy and Bess in a rich, sensuously slurred baritone. Everyone ignored him.

A good bolthole for Magnus.

Sadly the Grand Rokk went bankrupt and is closed now.

A city isn’t just its centre. I needed to get outside to the suburbs; that is after all where most of the people live and much of the crime is committed. So I spent a couple of days on buses. The Reykjavík bus system isn’t too difficult to figure out, and the drivers are helpful. It’s great for people-watching: it seemed to me that many ordinary Icelanders looked a lot like ordinary Britons, or to be more accurate, ordinary Scots. I was reminded of all that British and Irish DNA in the Icelandic genome.

The centre of Reykjavík has character, the outskirts don’t. The town has grown rapidly in the last fifty years, swallowing up the farms that surrounded it in uniform housing estates. There is an inner ring of housing built in the fifties and sixties, which now has a kind of grey pebbledash East German retro charm. Some of the fancier houses in the suburbs show signs of architectural imagination, but frankly, not many.

Oddly, there are some stunning modern churches, for example at Mjódd and Grafarholt. But the suburbs are also infested with dual carriageways, car dealerships, DIY stores, IKEA, small squat office blocks and billboards.

Some of the developments were under construction, some more had been abandoned half-built. The crash was coming. The only difference between Reykjavík’s dull suburbs and those of its American or European equivalents are the stunning views: of Faxaflói Bay and its islands, of Mount Esja, of the heath and mountains to the south, and of the dramatic black lavascape stretching towards Keflavík to the west.

If there is a tough suburb of Reykjavík, it is Breidholt. This is where rich men say they grew up in rags-to-riches stories, it’s where drug dealers live in novels and where people are interviewed about poverty in magazine articles. It all looked quite pleasant to me. It’s a reminder that high-crime areas in Iceland don’t resemble Baltimore, or Chicago’s South Side, or the Moss Side in Manchester or Harlesden in London. Frankly, the East Anglian town of King’s Lynn is scarier, and King’s Lynn is not very scary.

Breidholt has its gangsta rappers. One of them, Móri, describes life in Reykjavík’s grittiest streets:

‘I’ve been around. I’ve seen the darker side of life. I lived in Breidholt for a while. There is a drug dealer in every house there. There was also a gunfight there last year. But now I live in a nice area with my girlfriend and my pet turtle. I used to have two pet turtles but one of them died after the police raided my house and forgot to feed it. They didn’t even have a warrant.’

At the other end of the social scale is Seltjarnarnes, a neighbourhood just to the north-west of Reykjavík, sitting on a peninsula (a nes) jutting out into the bay. It’s flat and windswept, but there are some wealthy roads here, many of the houses on which were bought by ‘quota kings’, fishermen who made a killing by selling their fishing quotas.

Some of the new breed of entrepreneurs live here too. One of these wealthy streets is named Bakkavör, which is also the name of a large food company now headquartered in London and founded by two Icelandic brothers.

The houses themselves are modern and nicely designed, but not large. They look nowhere near as impressive as similar rich neighbourhoods in other capital cities, but that is in itself impressive. At least to me.

At the tip of Seltjarnarnes is the lighthouse and beach of Grótta. More about that next time.