‘The Glass Woman’ by Caroline Lea (Book Review).

Not only is Caroline Lea’s The Glass Woman the best book I have read this year; it also marks the first occasion in a really long time that a novel’s ending has left me crying hysterically into my pillowcase about the brutal, cruel unfairness of this world, and the devastating shortness of happy endings. In this novel set in seventeenth-century Iceland, Lea tells a story that places all the expressive and emotional range of a sweeping historical epic into two small, isolated rural communities, thus displaying a Herman Melville-like brilliance in embracing the devastating poetry of the lives of ordinary people.

Rósa, an ardent admirer of the Icelandic sagas who has even created a few of her own, lives in a perilous cultural climate where Christianity is beginning to stamp out the still-widespread old ways through witch trials and executions. When Rósa and her mother are plunged into poverty following the death of her father, she accepts a marriage proposal from Jón, the rich goði (or chieftain) of the village of Stykkisholmur. It is the farthest away from home she has ever been. Forced to abandon her childhood sweetheart Páll, and to leave her mother for the first time in her life, Rósa finds life in Stykkisholmur lonely and suffocating. Her new husband, for whom she feels a powerful mix of fear and sexual desire, imposes rigorous domesticity on her through intimidation and cruelty, all the while forbidding questions about Anna, his first wife who died in questionable circumstances. Rósa is barred from any form of contact with the other villagers, and in her loneliness is only kept company by Jón and his friend Pétur, a charismatic outcast whose ability to function in society is compromised by a widespread rumour that he is one of the huldufólk (i.e. that he is half-fairy). Alone during the day, her interactions restricted to Jón and his unnerving friend, Rósa begins to hear scratching noises from a locked room she may not enter, and to be woken in the night by a dark figure that watches her while she sleeps.

Author Caroline Lea.

Lea has imbued The Glass Woman with a sense of place so magnificent that the mountains seem to rear up to meet the reader, and the weather to tear at our clothes and skin, just as it does to the characters. The location is breathtaking, and the writing even more so, so that seventeenth-century Iceland, a place that will seem as far removed from most readers as the dark side of the moon, becomes a place that we can smell and taste, and perhaps even understand.

The cast of characters inhabiting this landscape are just as fascinating, if not more so.  Rósa is independent-minded and defiant, but not so much so that she behaves and speaks like a suffragette. She is also intriguingly complicated: trapped, petrified, writing letters she will never send and suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, but also curious, compassionate and brave enough to begin to take her story into her own hands. The two principal male characters, Jón and Pétur, are both haunting and magnetic, each in his own way, and Lea’s gradual revelation of their story and relationship is a masterpiece of subtle character development. Both behave badly, particularly Jón, but Lea’s skill as a writer is such that our compassion for both becomes almost painful to experience. The reader invests in these characters very early on and becomes exceedingly attached to them. The relationships between them are rendered far more complex and believable by Lea’s treatment of love and sexuality as a spectrum and refusal to tell her characters whom or how they should love. Thus, The Glass Woman is not only a realistic novel, but a profoundly romantic one.

The Glass Woman is also terrifying. Christianity or no Christianity, there is no light after dark in this place, and people still fear the draugar, or undead. They see them in every creak and unexplained sound, and turn murderously on their own neighbours at the first suspicion of witchcraft. This fact, together with the dread that Rósa experiences at the scratching noises from the locked room, blankets the entire novel in a sense of impending doom and creates a restlessness that both characters and readers must attempt to shake off. This also accounts for the novel’s ability to stay with you after you’ve finished it. That restlessness is never quite resolved.

The Glass Woman  brings to life enduring and heartrending themes without once confining love, nobility or fear to the lives of princesses, kings or popes. It is thus a masterful chronicle of the poetry of ordinary, working people and the love and sacrifices of which they are capable.