39  Iceland – Sjon – From the mouth of the whale – September 2016 (Score 5.00)

This book didn’t do much for me. It is set on Iceland, some hundreds of years ago at the time of the Reformation when many of the countries of Northern Europe were leaving the Roman Catholic religion for reformed Protestant worship. As in other countries there was an outbreak of iconoclasm.

The protagonist was in exile, prescribed, so that none may offer him succour on pain of death. He was on an isolated island, miles off the shore of Iceland. Though the Reformation had taken hold on Iceland among the upper classes, but the ordinary people still adhered to the old ways and the worship of saints, a very dangerous practice.

It seems that the people believed that neither God, Jesus, nor the majority of saints could speak their Norse tongue. Two particular saints were needed to translate the people’s prayers and pleas into the heavenly language,

Eventually the protagonist was delivered from exile in the belly of a whale, rather like Jonah.

While there is some good descriptive language in the book, there are also many long digressions consisting, mostly, of lists of seabirds, fish, crustaceans and other creatures of the wild, the sea and the air.

I couldn’t find it in myself to give this book more than six out of ten.