Ugla in Wonderland
Tony Gould
THE ATOM STATION by HaIldor Laxness, translated by Magnus Magnusson Hamill, £10.99, pp. 180, ISBN 1843430436
his novel is a bit of an oddity. To start with, the translator, Magnus Magnusson, is better known to most English readers than the Icelandic author, Halid& Laxness (1908-98), despite the fact that the latter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. Then there is the question of timing: The Atom Station was first published in 1948; this translation originally appeared in 1961 and is now being republished. According to the blurb, it is 'as relevant today as when it was written in 1948'. This is only partly true: a deeply cynical attitude towards politicians certainly has a contemporary ring to it, but the Cold War political landscape now seems very dated. And to this reader, at least, the novel has a slightly out-of-focus quality: I am not qualified to say if this is a fault of the translation (which reads fluently enough) or is due to the innate strangeness of Icelandic society. The dialogue is often stilted and the tone fluctuates uneasily between the naturalistic and the farcical. Yet Laxness is clearly an exceptional writer and I kept on reading.
The novel is both a political satire and a journey of self-discovery of a country girl from the north who comes to the capital to work as a maid in a rich politician's household. Ugla (which means owl) is a familiar figure in literature, an innocent who acts as a touchstone, reflecting or refracting the essential moral natures of those with whom she comes into contact, be they her suave employer and his pampered family, or the nihilistic artistic poseurs gathered around the 'organist' who teaches her the harmonium, or the earnest young communists to whose meetings she gravitates. Her personal dilemma revolves around her pregnancy and whether to accept the father of her child as a husband or to establish a life of her own.
The political theme is also about dependency — in this case, national sovereignty. The issue that divides the country is whether or not the Americans should be permitted to set up the atom station of the title in Iceland. Politicians being what they are — i.e. corrupt and on the make — of course are only too happy to go along with American wishes, provided they can dress them up in an acceptable form. So the atom station becomes a welfare mission, and the government demonstrates its nationalistic fervour by retrieving from Denmark what purport to be the bones of the 'Nation's Darling', the 19th-century poet Jonas Hallgrimsson, to be ritually reinterred on home soil.
Such a bald summary of the main themes fails to do justice to the zanier, more surrealistic elements of the story. As the epitome of common sense in a mad world, Ugla has something in common with a much better known heroine, her journey being occasionally reminiscent of that other compelling oddity, Lewis Carroll's Alice. Harvill are to be congratulated for continuing to publish fine foreign fiction that might otherwise be unobtainable in English.
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