Hannah Kent’s relationship with Iceland is the kind of star-crossed lovers arc that sounds even more fantastic than the fiction she writes. From the dusty, flat and uninspiring plains of Adelaide to the frozen, distant tundra of Iceland, Kent has found a homeland about as far away as she could possibly get, and has written all about it in her new memoir Always Home, Always Homesick.
When Kent is a teenager, she is consumed by the desire to leave Australia and go to whatever northern country she could get to. At only 18 years old, she finds a way out through the local Rotary club. Rotary clubs are a network of around 1.2 million volunteers worldwide who seek to address humanitarian issues through social work. Through this, Kent applies for an exchange program to any place with snow, not knowing where exactly she wants to go: “It was enough simply to have the offer of travel.”
It is a rude shock, then, to discover that she is going to a country she has never heard of, as far away from Adelaide as it is possible to get. Every fact that Kent learns about Iceland, from its distance to its language to its local cuisine of “rotten whale” seems like it can only disincentivise travellers. But this is precisely what makes Kent so determined to go. Reading about her planning for a country that she is so wildly ill-equipped to travel to feels like watching a recording of a very slow car crash.
During an interview with the Rotary club to determine whether she is ready to go on exchange, the interviewer asks how Kent would cope if she is sent to a place where it is extremely dark during winter. We are privy to Kent’s internal response: “I haven’t anticipated darkness… I have always lived in a place of abundant light.”
Kent’s trip seems only more concerning when she tries to research Iceland and finds vanishingly little information on it. This is in 2003, when Iceland barely registers as a speck on the world map. There are no other exchange students going there — the rest of the Australians are jetting off to places like Brazil or Germany — and the collective knowledge in Adelaide about Icelandic culture, language, and history amounts to a handful of people saying that it must be very chilly over there.
To put the cherry on top, she’s being sent to a tiny town called Sauðárkrókur, right at the top of the island. It’s nowhere near the capital, Reykjavík, or indeed anything else; Kent’s father comments, “If you travelled any further [north], you’d start coming home again.”
It is little surprise, then, that Kent’s arrival in Iceland is a complete disaster — the spectacular, life-changing kind that only redeems itself when you get to write about it in a book. From the transit (three days, with stopovers in Dubai, Amsterdam and Reykjavik) to the warm welcome that Kent gets when she arrives (read: waiting in the airport for hours until she is ungracefully kicked out into the cold darkness), the prospect of finding any redemptive feature in Kent’s trip seems extremely far-fetched.
Despite all the odds, Kent manages to find a gradual sense of belonging in a country so far removed from her own. She bumbles through the language with the kind of awkwardness that is painful to read, but her effort is more than evident, and bit by bit, she chips away at the reserved exterior of the Icelanders around her.
But Kent, as many of her readers would know, would go on to write a novel called Burial Rites, closely based on the true story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, who was the last person in Iceland to be executed. We see how, during her exchange program, Kent comes into contact with the legend of this woman again and again, and how it leaves a forceful impression on her, to the point where Agnes appears to her in dreams.
Eventually, Kent goes back to Australia, but her memories of Iceland and Agnes only grow stronger. She starts researching her and finds only a few facts available online in English. In 1828, Agnes was arrested for the murder of two men named Natan Ketilsson and Petur Jonsson. She, alongside 17 year old Friðrik Sigurðsson and 16 year old Sidrigur, were accused of murdering the two men by stabbing them and setting their farm on fire. Sigridur had her sentence commuted to life imprisonment in Copenhagen, while Friðrik and Agnes were beheaded on 12th January 1830. Agnes was 34 years old.
Agnes was seen as the ringleader, and was portrayed as a one-dimensional murderer, a woman with no character or motive. But many things about the case do not make sense — like how Icelandic people sentenced to death were normally sent to Copenhagen for their execution, whilst Agnes was executed in Iceland — and Kent brings us along on her investigation as we see both how the history unfolded and how Kent’s novel formed.
Kent becomes consumed in her thoughts of Iceland and Agnes, and eventually travels back in 2007 to do intense research for her novel and to revisit the family whom she stayed with during her exchange program. Eventually she even brings her family along with her, and uncovers crucial evidence to help understand the exact circumstances surrounding Agne’s death and her case. This helps complete her novel, and in doing so Kent gains a complete understanding of both the woman she is writing about and the country she has been seeking to understand for years. Kent eventually published Burial Rites in 2013.
The memoir unfolds almost like a biopic; it reminds me of Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Rocketman (2019). It feels like a small, shining miracle for someone to have found a place that they have such a strong connection to, so far away from where they were born. Kent shows us the intense magic and beauty of Iceland, and teaches us the magnificence of this tiny, cold country.
Always Home, Always Homesick was published on 28th April by Pan Macmillan.
