Discovering America before Columbus
Mark Illis
THE ICE-SHIRT by William T. Vollmann Deutsch, £13.95, pp.412
In olden times one Floxi from Sodor ex- claimed, upon first seeing Snaefellsness, `This must be a great land we have disco- vered, and here are mighty rivers!'
On reading this your heart may well sink. If so, your mood is unlikely to be improved by the news that the text of this book is thick with such names as Grjot- gaard Brother-Burner and 'Thorbjorg Ship- Breast. These signs may, however, be misleading, because this is not quite a Tolkienesque fantasy (although trolls are occasionally involved). It is the story of the first 'discovery' of America, by Norsemen, about 492 years before Columbus.
Vollman, anxious that we should be clear about this distinction, goes to some lengths to tell us about his research. The text is littered with epigraphs and foot- notes, and supplemented by 60 pages of glossaries, a chronology, notes on sources and acknowledgements. All this is pre- ceded by an uneasy apology which seems to say that there is a preference for a clean page of text but the reader can't be expected to get the author's drift without a bit of help. The urge to validate even seeps into the autobiographical blurb, where we are told about Vollman's travels in prepa- ration for writing the book. This is perhaps intended to prepare us for his intermittent appearances in the text, meeting the Inuit, and checking out his locations. All this anxiety is hard to understand. The Ice-Shirt is not going to be read as a history book, since it is drenched in myth, and it rejects any suggestion that there might be a definitive version of that myth. It is in- teresting to know that it conflates two largely contradictory Icelandic sagas, in- teresting too to see Pynchon's Vineland appear as the Norsemen's Vinland or Wineland, but the mass of detail Vollmann gives us adds little, and eventually suggests only the insecurity of an author hoping for recognition as a scholar.
The story itself sits uncomfortably some- where between a chronicle, with the matter-of-fact tone that that implies, and the more thoroughly imagined form of the novel. For the first half of the book the strangely named characters tend to blend together. They are like the emblematic, interchangeable characters of fairy-tales: hero, princess, ogre. There is the odd exception, such as Queen Sigrid of Sweden who was surnamed "The Haughty" be- cause of her habit of burning her suitors alive'. Such a habit arouses the interest, but we hear little more of Sigrid. Her story pauses, and then is finished 16 pages later, in a parenthesis. The chronicle must move on, there are many centuries to cover.
It is only when the tales gradually gather around two characters, Freydis and Gudrid, joint settlers of America, that Vollmann allows himself to slow down, and change the ratio of pages to years. The two, with their husbands and their men, spend about three years there, before leaving because (historically) the natives have become restless, and (mythically) Freydis's pact with a demon has brought frost to the paradisal country. Vollman has time to invest his characters with life but still, too often, he plays the plain-speaking chronicler, which tends to kill any spark in his writing:
Now that Gudrid had finally achieved a marriage which was satisfactory to her, she came to love her husband dearly, for that was her clear duty.
Too many lifeless sentences like this can make the most exotic events monotonous. A narrator with a distinctive character and voice might have helped, but Vollmann is too faithful to his sources, and even to the story of his research into his sources, to allow this.
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