From an Icelandic saga

Press, 7 April 1979, Page 17

From an Icelandic saga

Men at Axlir. By Dominic Cooper. Chatto and Windus. 286 pp. $13.65. (Reviewed by Andrew Dennis) When William Morris stood before a bleak scene in north-west Iceland, which in saga-times had witnessed much passion and violence, he was moved to observe in his journals that “what solace your life is to have must come out of yourself or these old stories” — an apt comment on the toughness of life, and the tempering of it by tales and ballads — which is still evident in rural Iceland. Yet today, there is much more than solace in these old stories. For those who, by some turn of real or literary fate, have that wild island in their blood, then, old or newly-told, such stories remain irresistible. But the lure of this tale is not just vicarious. It wanders like the seasons in many moods and styles, back and forth in time and place, slowing putting the bits together — a journal entry here, a letter there, hearsay, first-hand or second; told by many tellers, yet by one. It shifts from a bare-boards prose of events to that raw lyricism characteristic of northern reflection. There is a feud (of course) and an almost innocent incest amid many

frozen fingers of morality; and always the land behind. Widening over swollen rivers and withered souls to the land at large, the story has brief moments of soft green grass and clear .skies among the duller colours of more difficult days — sunless, grassless summers in the grip of frozen earth or the shadow of ashes; disease decimating the district; endless, gnawing hunger. It is a tale told by a teller who knows the land — and the way “old stories” count. Dominic Cooper has a bold new imagination with strong roots in the past. Here is a line or two from the annals of the eighteenth century made into a careful saga. It is a journey. But a warning. Go (if you can) map in hand. Proper names stay proper and not easy. There is a helpful list of characters, but no maps, and no real explanation of the meaning of the suffixes of many geographical names. Yet, this sort of difficulty aside, it is feeling, not judgment which remains when the last page is turned and the mountains slip into the sea. Here is a land and a literature in close affinity — perhaps incestuously so. “Men at Axlir” is a bold and ambitious work by a young man from West Scotland, worthy successor to his novels “The Dead of Winter,” and “Sunrise.”