Myth the medium of refraction

The Whispering Muse

By Sjón, Telegram, 144pp, $19.95. Review by Jennifer Moran

It’s an idle pleasure to imagine our lives as art - a friend’s love affair pitched as an opera plot or beautiful lunch companions painted on canvas. For the voyagers of Icelandic writer Sjón’s newly translated novel, the medium of refraction is myth.

Not that Valdimar Haraldsson, the narrator, is a willing participant in such frippery. Literal, obsessive, self-aggrandising and over-sensitive to the faults of others, he can barely contain his impatience listening to the stories told on the maiden voyage of the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen, sailing from Denmark to Norway to load a cargo of paper for Turkey and Georgia.

These stories, an artful interweaving of Greek and Norse myth, are echoed in the lives of the travellers. The year is 1949. The twice-widowed Haraldsson is invited to join the voyage because of a shared interest with the now-dead son of the shipping line’s owner – the promotion of his belief that the fish diet of “the Nordic race” has assured its superiority. He is one of two voyagers not on crew – the other is “the lady friend” of the purser, the only woman aboard.

The most travelled crewman is the second mate, Caeneus, and the rest of the seamen are in thrall to his stories. After dinner he takes a “rotten chip of wood” from his pocket and listens to it. Then he tells tales from the heroic voyage of the Argo, of the men who sailed with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, and the women they encountered.

In Greek myth Caeneus was a hero and the father of the Argonaut Coronos. The intriguing detail about the mythical Caeneus is that he once was female and eventually may have escaped crushing by flying away as a bird. This slippery ability to alter reality in form or substance allows the storyteller Caeneus to present an omniscient view.

In Caeneus’ version of the Argonauts’ stay on Thesbos, where only women remain, a long-limbed poet recites a poem about Sigurd and the sorceress Gudrun, a story from Norse mythology which is like a prophecy of the return of Jason with the Golden Fleece and with Medea. Thus Sjón intermingles the stories of ancient cultures, making apparent their universality while the details that emerge of the mid-20th Century voyagers become a variation on the theme.

He is clearly a writer who also relishes the surreal and the absurd. Time slides out of alignment in the modern voyage, pieces of the told stories manifest in the present, a climactic scene exposes the odd mechanism of the voyagers’ future journeys. Small wonder that Haraldsson’s own narrative is shifted.

Sjón’s work has won numerous prizes and nominations, and has been translated into 25 languages. In addition to his novels he has written poems, plays, film scripts, libretti and lyrics for the singer Björk.

The Whispering Muse was first published in Icelandic in 2005. This translation into English is by Victoria Cribb who previously translated two of Sjón’s other novels, From the Mouth of the Whale and The Blue Fox.

This review first appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald 12 May 2012. © Jennifer Moran 2012


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