It’s necessary to summarise this memoir in some detail, because its slowly cohering narrative is its essence.
It’s the back story of Aussie Hannah Kent’s deservedly acclaimed first novel, Burial Rites. A bit over two decades ago, the teenaged Kent flew to Iceland as an exchange student. She found herself in Sauðárkrókur, in the island’s north: “a raw and seething ocean before me and the sky is a lowered brow … a field of lava crowned with moss and, beyond that, a scoured glacier”. The setting instantly looms over the narrative, as it must have over the 17-year-old when she arrived.
She spends most of a year there, dining on lambs’ testicles, trudging through squeaky snow, finding a way into the alien language and school syllabus. She meets local actors, and also meets ghosts – on the page or in folklore. The name of long-dead Agnes Magnúsdóttir starts to resonate.
Since then, Kent has returned to Iceland and “my family” several times. She finds the predictable changes, losses, growths. She also finds herself – and it’s here, as well as during a teaching spell in Thailand: “my body laminated in layers of sweat, chalk dust and ink”, that her future novel starts to gestate – increasingly committed to the story of Agnes.
In 1828, Agnes Magnúsdóttir and others were convicted of murdering two brothers and burning down a farmhouse to destroy the evidence. She became the last woman executed on the island. Death was beheading with a broad axe wielded by one of the victims’ relatives.
At an Adelaide literary festival, Dorothy Porter’s verse novel convinces Kent that she can try such a form, hoping to liberate Agnes from the prejudices and stereotypes that have submerged her. The proposed form alters: it becomes “a haunting … a speculative biography”.
Research takes Kent once more to Iceland, to the probable block and axe, the incongruity of billeting the condemned woman with a local family in the days before her execution, other details potent and poignant (a priest knelt with his arms around Agnes as she died). More ghosts drift by; through a medium, the dead woman begs for her bones to be moved.
Back in Australia, the novel is chucked in a drawer and Kent tries to make money writing book reviews. Then: “Can you believe it!?” as sports commentators bawl, a friend bullies her into entering a competition, dust balls are blown off the pages, and in 2013 Burial Rites goes on to become a winner and a global hit, translated into 30 languages and now in the process of being adapted for film.
There’s other coverage as well. Early on, we get the author’s precocious childhood, announcing aged 6 that since she’s already written a short story, she’s going to be an author. The final sections welcome you to a published writer’s world: festivals, interviews, the fellowship of the keyboard, Iceland’s generous but xenophobic literary grants.
Assembled during early Covid lockdowns, and through the grey exhaustion of new motherhood, Always Home, Always Homesick is mostly present tense, which does boost its immediacy and focus. A few utterances may raise your eyebrows: “I want to be wide awake to the divine mystery of the world.” But okay, she was only 16 when she wrote that one.
Mostly, it’s precise, evocative, flecked with the gloriously exotic Icelandic names and vocab. It manages to be both panoramic and specific, stepping across centuries while showing the minutiae and marathon of making a book. As you learn about Agnes G, you also learn about Hannah K, and that builds a satisfyingly textured story.
Always Home, Always Homesick, by Hannah Kent (Macmillan, $39.99), is out now.
