The Sealwoman's Gift - Sally Magnusson

"In 1627 Barbary pirates raided the coast of Iceland and abducted some 400 of its people, including 250 from a tiny island off the mainland. Among the captives sold into slavery in Algiers were the island pastor, his wife and their three children. Although the raid itself is well documented, little is known about what happened to the women and children afterwards. It was a time when women everywhere were largely silent.

In this brilliant reimagining, Sally Magnusson gives a voice to Ásta, the pastor's wife. Enslaved in an alien Arab culture Ásta meets the loss of both her freedom and her children with the one thing she has brought from home: the stories in her head. Steeped in the sagas and folk tales of her northern homeland, she finds herself experiencing not just the separations and agonies of captivity, but the reassessments that come in any age when intelligent eyes are opened to other lives, other cultures and other kinds of loving."

I started this book really really enjoying it. The writing is stunning. Descriptive and immersive without you being bogged down in long passages. The descriptions of Algiers and Iceland are fabulous and you get an immediate understanding and feel for each place. I could feel myself nigh on shivering in the Iceland passages.

The characters are also well portrayed. They felt nuanced, deep and their emotions well fleshed out. 

The author has captured Icelandic ways very well—the feel of the land, both its beauty and its harshness, and the importance of sagas in Icelandic culture. However when the story shifts to Algiers, the telling becomes less authentic, less vivid. This part is mostly fiction and it feels as such. We are told of the difficulties that arose for the large group of Icelanders gathered there. These Icelanders remain as a diffuse group. Their sufferings feel distant, spoken of, but not felt by the reader. Ásta and her three children, one child was born on the ship, were well treated. Their suffering is incredibly marginal, which in my view gives the parts of the book set in Algiers a fairy tale feel to them. Only when Ásta must decide whether to remain or return to Iceland, leave behind her children and a man toward whom she has come to have ambiguous feelings of love, does the story begin to have depth. 

Sally Magnusson clearly did her due diligence in research, and you can see Magnusson striving to describe the contrasts between the chilly poverty of life in a small Icelandic village with the warm opulence of a wealthy merchant's townhouse in north Africa. However, it all felt a bit laboured. The pacing is rough, the occasional hints at mythical/magical realism elements are out of place, there's lots of telling-not-showing, and frankly I found Magnusson's representation of slavery and the experiences of enslaved people to make for increasingly uncomfortable reading as the novel progressed.

Is it possible for there to be a complicated, fraught, emotional relationship between an enslaved woman and the man who owns her, who threatens her with sexual violence and who sells her children away from her forever? Yes. Is it possible for a read to be uncomfortable without being distasteful—to ask a reader to face up to difficult issues without being vulgar or maudlin? Yes. But Magnusson's writing doesn't have the depth needed to sell the relationship she posits between Ásta and Cilleby as believable, and so she falls back on stale, shallow tropes: the blonde, feisty woman from Iceland who is seduced into pleasure on a silk mattress by a blue-eyed, half-Dutch Moor. As the book progressed, I felt ever more like I was reading a slightly more high-minded version of one of those awful orientalising Mills and Boons novels. 

It was interesting to observe why some Icelanders chose to remain in Algiers. However as said before these conflict where very emotionally removed from the story and I couldn't explore these issues as much as I wanted to. Here the author takes the opportunity to compare lifestyle differences in Iceland and in Algiers. Similarities and differences in religious beliefs where cleverly dealt with. Ásta’s emotional difficulties on returning to Iceland are well drawn. It was this that saved the book for me. 

However I found her choice to go back to Iceland frustrating. Leaving behind her beloved children, knowing that she will never see them again, only to return to a life of cold hardship. Maybe it comes from me being a Third Culture Kid but that kind of stupid homesickness didn't resonate with me, especially after it is made clear that she has grown to love Algiers just as much. How will the common Icelander's even relate to her experiences, her struggles? They won't, she will forever be an outsider in her own country. Rather stay somewhere where you are really an outsider and where you have a better chance of seeing your children again. 

Age Rating 15+. As said before there are some threats of sexual violence. Obviously slavery is a main theme and the violence that come with that is quite central to the plot. A women is raped, though it is off page, it is still obvious what happened. Asta's youngest son is sold to a man that it is heavily hinted sexually abuses him. So quite heavy stuff.