When I was younger, I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series, the stories of family life in the Midwest in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was these tales of hardship and struggle, frequently punctuated with optimistic aphorisms, which transported me back to another time. The landscape was bleak and scarcity abounded. Yet, the family brought light. The connection between me, the reader, and the characters ignited my imagination and presented a more tangible portrait of the novel’s world.
While reading Hannah Kent’s Burial Rights, I was continually reminded of my first reading of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s various novels. The parallels between the novels don’t extend too far beyond the incredibly bleak landscape and the time period. Kent’s novel tells the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman to be executed in Iceland. Agnes was a real historical figure, and the book contains excerpts from poems and court documents from that time.
The story matches the landscape it describes, undoubtedly bleak and dark. From the start, Agnes is a condemned woman, living out the remainder of her sentence before her execution. Given lack of funding for public jails, Agnes is placed with the family of a low level government official in a town close to the one in which the murder she is accused of took place. Slowly, however, her story unfolds, with the gently prodding of Toti, an Assistant Reverend, who is to prepare her for death.
The story matches the landscape it describes, undoubtedly bleak and dark. From the start, Agnes is a condemned woman, living out the remainder of her sentence before her execution. Given lack of funding for public jails, Agnes is placed with the family of a low level government official in a town close to the one in which the murder she is accused of took place. Slowly, however, her story unfolds, with the gently prodding of Toti, an Assistant Reverend, who is to prepare her for death.
Kent brings real dimension to the time and the struggles to survive. As a servant woman, the odds are stacked against Agnes early on. But unlike many others, she survives her childhood, only to bounce from one farm to another seeking work. She lands employment with the man she will be executed for murdering, Natan Ketilsson. Like so many crimes, Natan’s murder has a number of sides, and the complexity of the situation builds as the plot continues. The family that takes her in at first fear and shun her, but come to see her as a human as opposed to the monster that village gossip has conjured.
I loved this book. I know the brief plot summary might not have been the biggest selling point for many, having learned that first hand when I saw the reactions from those whom I told I was reading this. First of all, the experience is very sensory. The writing is such that you can almost feel the cold rattling your limbs and smell the turf from which the homes are made (see right for a photo of one of these traditional homes, taken by the author Hannah Kent). The reader will start to feel Agnes’ frustration and helplessness as his / her own. This doesn’t happen immediately, but as the main character opens herself more to others we start to feel her plight. Second, the book is a great length for the story it tells. A little over 300 pages, the novel builds slowly enough to make the reader constantly wonder what more Agnes will reveal, but not so slowly that the reader gets bored. I often get confused when names sound too foreign, but there are few enough characters with names close enough to ones that I recognize that I never found the language or setting to be a barrier.
I think this is a wonderful debut novel from a young Australian novelist who chose a neglected topic in history and used it to create a beautiful story and a very compelling read. I continually stopped to consider how tough life must have been for my ancestors, and how far we have progressed as a society in terms of our justice systems and rights for women and lower classes. I can’t tell you that if you pick up this novel you’ll read an uplifting tale, but I do think that you will learn a little bit about Scandinavian culture (while reading a really good book!).
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