Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Mistress of Husaby by Sigrid Undset

It seemed to her that when her weary body at last was rotting under a tombstone, her restless spirit would still be doomed to wander about somewhere near by, as an unhappy ghost wanders lamenting round the tumble-down houses of a ruined farm.  For in her soul sin still had its being, as the root tissue of the weeds is inwoven in the soil.  It flowered and flamed and scented the air no long, but 'twas still there in the soil, bleached, but strong and full of life.  In despite of all the tenderness that welled up in her heart when she saw her husband's despair, she had not will or strength to stifle the voice in her that cried out, in bitterness and anger: Can you speak thus to me?  Have you forgotten the time when I was your dearest love?  And yet she knew that as long as this voice questioned thus within her, so long would she speak to him as though she had forgotten.

The Mistress of Husaby, the sequel to The Wreath, the first book in Sigrid Undset's series about the medieval Norsewoman Kristin Lavransdatter, picks up as Kristin moves into her husband Erlend's ancestral home, Husaby.  Husaby is a wreck: it's filthy, poorly managed, largely neglected.  Kristin makes it her mission to whip the house and its servants into shape, and to turn it into a home as noble and warm as the one she's left behind.  (It's a fascinating glimpse into the strange domestic habits of the medieval Norse household, arranged, Beowulf-style, around a great hall, and where everyone sleeps together on benches for some reason.)  For Kristin, the remaking of Husaby offers a chance to make things right, to forge respect and harmony out of a tumultuous courtship and marriage.  Soon, the house is completed by the addition of six--six!--young boys that Kristin bears.

But Kristin has trouble leaving the past behind.  She continues to be haunted by the way she and Erlend got together: the initial affair, the loss of virginity, and the ultimate suicide of Erlend's first wife.  The marriage is largely an unhappy one, complicated by Erlend's recklessness and diffidence, but Kristin makes things worse by keeping the original sin of their marriage polished and ready, like a dagger, to wound both Erlend and herself.  Her brother-in-law, a priest named Gunnulf, chides her:  "Kristin... dare you think in your wicked pride that sin of yours can be so great that God's loving-kindness is not greater?"  While The Wreath seemed to me an honest and empathetic depiction of the complexity of living out a life of honest faith, Kristin's obsession with her sin in The Mistress of Husaby can be tedious and dour.  The Wreath showed that reconciliation and forgiveness are possible; The Mistress of Husaby suggests that they're never quite complete enough, and that moving past our own failures takes an almost impossible strength.

The political subtext of The Wreath gets amplified in Husaby.  It's easy to forget that these characters, whose lives seem so close to the earth compared to our own, are really a kind of nobility.  I hadn't remembered that Erlend is related to the queen regent, Ingebjorg.  He spends a lot of this novel away from Husaby, serving as a Warden on a distant island.  Symbolically, Erlend continues to spend a lot of time with men--his integration into his own home never quite seems complete.  But he's also embroiled in a lot of political intrigue that happens almost completely out of narrative vision, which is focused narrowly on Husaby.  The distance emphasizes how the political world pressures the domestic sphere without being totally seen or understood; Kristin is a victim of political turmoil she cannot see.  Erlend, apparently, gets implicated in a scheme to usurp the throne and redivide Norway and Sweden (a political crisis I never totally understood) and spends the last third of the book in prison, on trial for his life.

The possibility that Erlend will die seems very real.  It would be a fitting subversion of the fairytale narrative in which love overcomes everything: family, religion, and politics.  But it's family that saves the day, in the form of Simon Darre, the man once betrothed to Kristin and who has since married her sister Ramborg.  Darre puts his own life and reputation at risk to defend Erlend, a man he despises.  Just like The Wreath's last chapters are overtaken by the point-of-view of Kristin's parents, the last chapters of Husaby belong, surprisingly, to Simon Darre, his complex goodness, his feelings of obligation and revulsion.  These chapters are a glimpse into the life that Kristin might have had, and a reminder that there are more good things in the world than passion.  And like The Wreath, the addition of Simon's voice to a larger multitude of voices emphasizes the complex social fabric that Undset explores so well.  She doesn't let you forget that Kristin's life is not lived in a vacuum, that as tedious as her obsession with her sin can be, it reflects meaningful obligations to her family and her community.

In the end, Erlend is saved, but not changed.  The last thing he does is make a reckless joke about how, if he had died, Simon could swoop in and marry Kristin.  It's maddening: Erlend forgets that Simon is married to Ramborg; he misunderstands Simon's motivations; because he had become resigned to the prospect of losing his life he underestimates the pain and effort others have taken on his behalf.  It's an unsettling place to end the story, but there's a kind of steely-eyed realism to it.  Erlend won't change, and Simon is a better man, but the love between Erlend and Kristin is not nothing, and neither is Simon's effort on Erlend wasted.  It's enough, all of it, because it has to be.