By Clea Simon
This novel is as fresh and charming as any contemporary work this critic has read in ages.
The Book of I by David Greig. Europa Editions, 160 pp. $26
Seldom does such a short book deliver such surprising delights as the new The Book of I, Scottish playwright David Grieg’s first novel. Set in 825 on the tiny Scottish island of I – the original name of what is now known as Iona – it is as fresh and charming as any contemporary work this critic has read in ages.
In large part, that’s because The Book of I’s characters are so unselfconsciously themselves. Yes, one is a Viking, accidentally left behind by the murderous raiding party that opens the action. Another is a timid monk, who survives the raid by humiliating means, and the third is a mead wife, the soon-to-be widow of the island’s blacksmith, whose skill with the honey-based brew (and the bees who provide it) both heal and bind.
Along the way, The Book of I deals with questions of faith and friendship, love and loyalty, and all the major themes that a novel starting with a slaughter and ending with, well, something close to redemption should tackle. But, along its way, the narrative is bloody and sharp and laugh-out-loud funny, with touches of poetry that flow as naturally as the tides.
Take the aging Viking Grimur, for example. Early on Grimur recognizes that “the only skill he had left, the only gift that had been enriched by drink, age, and failure, was poetry.” Falling into the image-heavy, broken-line form of Anglo-Saxon (Old English), he continues: “The sand of his mind beach was rich in words, the mead of Odin flowed in his breast.”
Poetry, of the Anglo-Saxon kind, runs through this book. A battle is a “sword storm”; a ship a “wooden war-gull” or a “red-sailed wave horse.”
But for all its lyrical beauty, this is an earthy book. Una, the mead wife, is the most rooted of the small cast. A survivor, she comes to joy late (“Smiling had not been part of Una’s life”), to find “[t]he world … was an excited child, alive and demanding her attention.” She’s the one who sustains that world, with her mead, barley porridge, and the occasional mutton she cooks for Grimur, Martin the monk, and beautiful Sister Bronagh, a would-be anchorite who appears just in time to tempt the young monk’s saintly resolve.
That’s not a bad thing on an island that has witnessed devastating violence and where life is not the easiest, and the three main characters soon fall into a comfortable rhythm. Seasons pass, Grimur toys with resuming his Viking ways, and the mystery of a saint’s relic continues to haunt I. But even as the whales and puffins make their rounds, so too does humanity, all leading up to a final confrontation and, just maybe, something like peace for the small island.
“Good morning, life, you gorgeous bitch—I’m back!” cries Grimur at one point. At a spare 160 pages, The Book of I will never be called wordy. But if this gem of a novel needed to be boiled down to one line, that would be it.
Clea Simon is the Somerville-based author most recently of the novel The Butterfly Trap.