Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.06.2013, Blaðsíða 33

R
E
V
IE
W
B
O
O
K
“Nobody Gets Out
Of Iceland Alive”
The novel opens, Columbo-style,
on the murderer: a lonely farmer
who rapes and then accidentally
kills a stripper. The clumsy killer
is not without his human side,
though: like Job, he’s suffered
the consecutive losses of every-
one he loves, leaving him with no
one to talk to but his loyal dog,
Halldór Laxness. This murder
sets a deranged pimp off on a
vengeance quest and also coin-
cides with the arrival of Hobson,
an American ex-cop, who stops-
over in Reykjavík on his way to
Europe to heal wounds wrought
by his own grim past. But then a
volcanic eruption strands Hob-
son, and he finds himself cir-
cumnavigating the country with
a group of hapless tourists who
each fall prey to the terrors of
Iceland, such as one-eyed witches and herds of man-eating swine.
In the last third or so of the novel, the absurdity of the aforementioned
terrors hits such a fever pitch that you can actually, briefly, enjoy yourself:
there is a deus ex polar bear that earns a chuckle, and Edward imagines
a fittingly epic role in his post-apocalyptic Bizarro-Iceland for the croco-
diles that Húsavík mayor Reinhard Reynisson sought to import for waste-
disposal purposes in 2010.
Unfortunately, Edward hasn’t really written an alternate-reality, ab-
surdist thriller-comedy about Iceland. If that were the case, his portrayal
of the country could be read as farce and could be enjoyed in the spirit of
a Carl Hiaasen Everglade caper. But Edward is gunning for credibility: he’s
lived here, and obviously thinks he got to know the “real” Iceland, as the
reader will surely be convinced of by his references to The Blue Lagoon,
Prikið, deCode, and, oddly, www.vedur.is.
It is presumably on the strength of his copious insights into Iceland
that Edward offers up frequent narratorial voice-overs in which he de-
claims assessments about the country which range from the facetious
to the patently offensive. The best
example of the latter is found in
the novel’s very first sentence,
which declares that “[s]ince Ice-
land’s lesbian prime minister out-
lawed strip clubs, women living in
rural towns have begun...double-
checking to make sure their front
doors are securely locked.” The
logic of this statement follows in
a page-long scree, which is trot-
ted out at regular intervals, and
with more than one reference to
the prime minister’s sexual orien-
tation throughout the novel: with
no strip clubs left for randy farmers and lusty sailors to relieve their ten-
sions, these men have no alternative but to rape women (the lack of strip
clubs is also blamed for the existence of prostitution in Iceland).
There have been an average of two murders a year in Iceland for the
last three decades. Given this, the sheer volume of violent deaths in this
purportedly “serious” crime novel just seems silly (there are at least six
murders in the novel and nature dispatches countless others). Of course
Iceland, like any country, has its share of violent crime, if not much of it.
And yes, the weather is unpredictable and often deadly, the winter days
are very short, there are all sorts of kooky characters living here, and pe-
riodically, there are volcanic eruptions, although the only people killed in
the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010 were a few tourists who got lost while
trying to find a good vantage point to watch it from.
There’s nothing to prevent someone from writing a crime novel set
in Iceland that deals with serious issues such as prostitution or domes-
tic abuse or sexual assault or financial intrigue or murder. These topics
and more have been successfully taken up by many Icelandic and foreign
crime authors alike. ‘The Ring Road’s’ missteps (aside from its rampant
misogyny, which we haven’t even touched on here) lie not in saying mean
things about Iceland, but in not bothering to take its setting or its charac-
ters at all seriously. Rather, it delights in exoticizing Iceland, in portray-
ing it as a place of ridiculous extremes, “a country so inhospitable that
instead of nurturing its inhabitants it punishes them.” - Larissa Kyzer
Literature
Edward Weinman spent eight years as a freelance journalist in
Iceland, or rather, he “endur[ed] many long, dark, cold, windy,
grey winters” during which he “suffered only one nervous break-
down.” It is apparently lucky that he escaped the country when
he did because according to his portrayal of Iceland in ‘The Ring
Road’—a “Scando crime thriller” and “dark fantasy” by his own
reckoning—this is a truly dangerous and horrible place, one in
which the threat of sexual assault is ever-present, where if the
constant darkness doesn’t “finally break” you, the constant light
will, and where death and disfigurement take myriad creative
forms, threatening locals and travellers alike with scalding show-
ers, wild animal attacks, and of course, volcanic eruptions.
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33
Edward Weinman’s The Ring Road
“Un-
fortunately,
Edward hasn’t
really written an
alternate-reality,
absurdist thriller-
comedy about
Iceland.”