There has been a vogue in the past few years for novels about gender and sexuality set in early modern Scandinavia: Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, Sally Magnusson’s The Sealwoman’s Daughter, Caroline Lea’s The Glass Woman. The region in an era of insecure theocracy seems to speak to anglophone writers interested in stories of feminist resistance. Remote settlements, brutal weather and patriarchal violence offer a reflection in historical fiction of the fashion for feminist sci-fi dystopias.
The Mercies, Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s first novel for adults, is set on the Norwegian island of Vardø, where in 1617 a Christmas Eve storm blew up while all the men were out fishing. None survived, and so for months the island’s women managed the fishing, building, reindeer herding and butchery as well as their usual domestic work. In 1618, King Christian IV introduced laws against witchcraft modelled on those of James VI in Scotland. His primary target was the Sámi people of the far north, but hundreds of other Norwegian women were also executed. John Cunningham, brought from Scotland to subdue the Finnmark region, oversaw 52 trials, and was particularly excited to find some of the Vardø women in the wake of their strange storm wearing men’s clothes to do men’s work and integrating local Sámi funerary traditions into their grieving. Some of the widows were tried and burned at the stake. A memorial by Louise Bourgeois and Peter Zumthor now stands on the site and was the touchpaper for this novel.
The Mercies opens with a young woman, Maren, dreaming of drowning in the sea and burning at the same time while men hack a stranded whale to death on the beach. It’s a striking, uneasy beginning, but a prophetic dream is an odd foundation for a novel fundamentally opposed to superstition. Maren is practical and skilled, among the first of the women to rise from the shock of grief to relight the fire, prepare food and then bring the men’s bodies from the shore. Encouraged by her friend Kirsten, Maren takes responsibility, in the months after the storm, for her mother, Sámi sister-in-law Diina and infant nephew – even going out to sea when the village runs out of fish. Some women are better willing and able to take on “men’s work” than others, some rely more on the church for consolation than others, but everyone uses Sámi runes, dolls called “poppets” and talismans alongside Christian ritual. Without men, the community reshapes itself and, more or less, not without tensions, works: “All of them have their skills, their uses, interlaced and built up like a haphazard ladder.” And then the pastor tells the women that a new “lensmann” or governor is coming to “oversee” the village.
The narrative now switches between Maren and Ursa, a teenager in Bergen whose father owns the ship on which the Scottish lensmann, Commissioner Cornet, will travel north. Married off to Cornet, Ursa begins a grim voyage with a man who forces himself on her nightly, resents her talking to anyone else and takes away her money. A middle-class city dweller, Ursa has neither the skills nor the clothes to manage life in Vardø, and turns to Maren as housemaid/teacher and then friend. The women’s relationship strengthens as Cornet takes control of Vardø, dividing its women into godly submissives and those whose unfeminine powers require supernatural explanation. As the trials begin and the burnings draw closer, Maren and Ursa’s friendship turns to romance. Ursa’s status as Cornet’s wife is the women’s best protection, but also their greatest vulnerability.
The most interesting historical fiction speaks of the time of writing as much as of its subject. The Mercies has all the strengths of Millwood Hargrave’s children’s fiction: strong characters, gorgeous settings, a literary commitment to women’s lives, work and relationships with each other. However, the echoing truth here is simultaneously four centuries old and sadly modern. Strong men in power can remake reality and invert reason to defend that power at any cost. Having ordained that women are weak, evidence of women’s strength must be evidence of dark magic – the more a woman survives, the more dangerous she must be. I admired the way The Mercies shows us the patriarchal fear of women’s strength and reason. It is the men in power who give themselves up to hysteria and superstition, abusing their control of others’ lives and deaths in the service of self-justifying conspiracy theories: wouldn’t it be nice if the Enlightenment had put an end to such tales?
• Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall is published by Granta. The Mercies, by Kiran Milwood Hargrave, is published by Picador (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
