Burial Rites - Hannah Kent

One can feel hopelessly isolated at times

pp.330

Published: Picador, 2013

In 1830, Agnes Magnusdottir, sentenced to death for murder and arson, was the last person to be executed in Iceland. Many accounts of the crime for which she was condemned and of the execution, as Hannah Kent points out in the author’s note, ‘hold a common view of Agnes as ‘an inhumane witch, stirring up murder.’’ Kent’s version of the story reimagines the events from the perspective of the maidservant herself, as well as the family forced to take her in as a prisoner while she awaits her death. As the family struggle to come to terms with the killer in their midst, Kent delivers a thoroughly sympathetic portrayal of the character.

From the very prologue we are given a sense of the novel’s attitude. In the line, ‘They said that I stole the breath from men, and now they must steal mine,’ there is the suggestion of injustice, of a false accusation. In the space between ‘they said’ and what has actually happened, Kent writes over three hundred pages, all of them vital, urgent, and necessary in reshaping the emotional investment of the characters in Agnes’ struggle with the truth.    

The way that this is achieved is through a striking combination of official documentation, third person narration, and monologue. It slowly builds up a precise picture of the events. The cold, factual information contained in the trial reports and letters combines well with the sentimental, charged passages written from Agnes’ perspective. The third person allows a shift in perspective, so that we can see how others react and are altered by what they learn through the course of the book.

Kent’s writing is intelligent in that its pacing is that of a high-grade thriller, intense and plot-driven, whereas the novel also has a compelling literary quality. This author has the ability to write sentences of enormous emotional power and deep metaphysical and social value. The book is equally an entertaining journey and a relevant exploration of the treatment of women and suspected criminals in an era and country not very well-equipped to deal with crime of this magnitude. Be prepared to be morally outraged.

Agnes is introduced to us as an animal, held in the store-room of a farm at Stora-Borg, sometimes with her legs tied together like ‘the forelegs of horses, to ensure I will not run away.’ As she is taken to  Thristopar to await her execution and begins working as she used to on the farm, and then further on as she makes significant impressions on the family who have taken her in, we begin to love her and to feel sorry for her. In retelling her story either to the Reverend, to herself, or to Margret, we get a sense of her utter loneliness, her unluckiness to have lived a life so devoid of sympathetic human contact. She describes in one passage the period of time she spent with Natan, the man she is supposed to have killed: ‘I had no friends. I didn’t understand the landscape. Only the outlying tongues of rock scarred the perfect kiss of sea and sky – there was no one and nothing else. There was nowhere else to go.’

This idea of entrapment by landscape is prevalent throughout the book. Bare open expanses. Storms often raging through the country, cutting districts off completely from one another. The loneliness inherent in such a world and in such weather is a ubiquitous feeling in Burial Rites. One can feel hopelessly isolated at times.

No wonder, then, that the novel was written from Kent’s own experiences of isolation as an exchange student in Iceland. Her feelings of alienation feed the lonesome passages of the book like the plaintive moan and whistle of a cold wind. It gives the energy and drive necessary to power such a beautiful lament as this. And while the landscape is lonely, it is nevertheless poetically, vastly gorgeous. Something about the narration suggests that the author is compulsively attracted to the country, to its mysterious, almost holy beauty, despite its long echoes of the void.    

This is a valuable story that will often be read quickly, as its tensions are maintained throughout. The reader’s opinions about the murders, and about the nature of Agnes Magnusdottir, that inhumane witch, are changed drastically by the end. And the denouement, which comes as no surprise but as an irrevocable inevitability, is charged with an astounding emotional force.