Olav Audunsson: Providence by Sigrid Undset

But he couldn't escape from the childhood memories that arose--including the once secure knowledge that he and Ingunn belonged to each other and would always stay together. The very notion that something might come between them had never entered their minds, and for that reason being together had never stirred their hearts either to joy or astonishment. They had simply taken it for granted. That was how it would always be, precisely as it had been decided for them. Until the summer, that is, when, wrapped in each other's arms, they had tumbled out of their childhood and innocent state, frightened yet also giddy with joy at the new sweetness they had discovered in each other--regardless of whether it was right or wrong for them to surrender it. Even after Olav had roused himself to defy and fear everything and everyone who tried to intervene in their fate, he had been convinced that in the end they would win their case. Such memories would suddenly come upon Olav, and the pain burned like the stab of a knife.

Vows, the first book in Sigrid Undset's tetralogy about the live of Olav Audunsson, ends with Olav killing Teit, the Icelander who impregnated his wife Ingunn, and burning down the shack in which his body lay. I wrote that Olav had left his ornate ancestral axe within the shack, thinking that this would turn out to be the clue that led to Olav's downfall--but this turned out to be incorrect, as a kind reader pointed out: it was just an ordinary axe that Olav left. And I should have known better. This being Undset, author of the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, I should have understood that Olav's sin would not be revealed by simple detective work, that it would gnaw at Olav's heart until he was forced to reveal it himself.

In Providence, the second book in the series, Olav finds himself trapped by this secret. He vows to expiate his guilt by bringing Eirik, the child of Ingunn and Teit, back to his manor of Hestviken and pretend that he is his biological son. This presents several problems: for one, Eirik is really annoying. He turns out to be a very fanciful and imaginative child--we are reminded of the playful, reckless Teit--who has trouble distinguishing the real from fantasy. And he talks too much. Secondly, by raising Eirik to the heir of Hestviken, he has disinherited any legitimate son he might have with Ingunn. This is, perhaps, why Ingunn goes through several miscarriages; the one time she manages to birth a son, he withers and dies quickly. Ingunn withers, too; over the course of the novel she is struck by a terrible sickness that seems to emerge from her guilt and the frailty of her soul. It takes from her her sons, and then it takes her ability to walk. Olav keeps the secret for her sake, and yet keeping the secret gives the pair no happiness or joy.

Olav Audunsson, or the first two novels at least, is a much bleaker series than even Kristin Lavransdatter, which is also about living through the consequences of the choices of one's youth. Kristin is rewarded for her unfaithfulness to her father and her fiancee with a marriage to the romantic Erlend, and though it causes her much pain, and they even separate for a time, they are both rewarded with a kind of fiery love that is shared between them. When one reads about the chilly relationship between Olav and Ingunn, how they cling to one another out of duty and obligation but without joy or affection, one wonders, what was it all worth? When--spoiler alert--Ingunn dies at the novel's conclusion, we are left with the bitter sense that all the wreckage and faithlessness of their lives has had very little in the way of recompense.

Like Kristin Lavransdatter, Olav Audunsson is in some respect an apology for the Catholic model of confession and repentance. Olav knows that he would be doing his duty to God by confessing his sins and taking the appropriate consequences, but the possibility of cleansing is closed off to him. And for good reasons--his obligations toward Ingunn and toward Eirik, who is innocent of his own making--but these are worldly reasons, and not God's, and like Kristin, Olav suffers because he is too frail to trust in God's ideas of what constitute one's highest obligations. At the end of Part II, Olav finds himself without a wife and someone else's son. In a moment of weakness, he impregnates Torhild, the steadfast handmaiden of the household, and though he provides for her and her--his--son, it's not too hard to see that the next two parts of the tetralogy may set up a conflict between these two sons, innocent both of their circumstances, and yet neither of whom quite "deserves" to become the inheritor of Olav's estate. I'm looking forward to reading those, but it'll be next December, when another cold and chilly season rolls around--perfect for Undset's Norway, but also for the the themes of suffering and contrition that are at the heart of these incredible books.

The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul

I had lived with the idea of change, had seen it as a constant, had seen a world in flux, had seen human life as a series of cycles that sometimes ran together. But philosophy failed me now. Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memoires. And this end of a cycle, and in the life of a manor, mixed up with the feeling of age which my illness was forcing on me, caused me grief.

For many years, V. S. Naipaul lived in (some kind of) caretaker's cottage on the grounds of a large manor in Salisbury, England, not far from Stonehenge. It was, as Naipaul describes it, a kind of permanence and stability after years of uncertainty and moving around; among other things The Enigma of Arrival describes in touching detail what it was like for a young man from Trinidad to move to England for the first time, a place which was represented in his imagination by the works of classic English literature, and also by the pictures of green fields dotted by dairy cows that appear on the cartons of milk children drank in Trinidad. That experience captures much of what Naipaul wrote about, the anxiety of Empire, of being unable to see either the colonized homeland or the imperial center well because one has been so trained in seeing the myths that regulate the relationship between them. Naipaul struggles, writes, moves back and forth between England, Trinidad, the U.S., and Canada. The manor in Salisbury, coming alongside literary success, gives the man an anchor in the world.

Much of what The Enigma of Arrival has to say, I think, is that such stability is essentially an illusion. The essays collected here are mostly in the pastoral mode, describing the life of the gardens, the fields, the hills, the woods of the manor and its environment. Naipaul is deeply interested in the lives of the lower- and middle-class workers who keep the manor going: caretaker Jack, the Phillipses, the gardener Pitton, the driver Bray. He learns that where he sees stability and continuity there is also change; few of these people have been at the manor any longer than he has and have little claim to its magisterial aesthetic or history. Some are sacked, some die--there is a strangely incommensurate story of an affair that leads to murder--and the sands of the manor shift beneath Naipaul. He, too, grows ill, and must face his own aging and the possible end of his life at the manor. Perhaps this is the enigma of arrival--that it keeps going on, keeps changing, that arrival as such never really comes.

I enjoyed this--Naipaul can really write. In this setting, his English inspirations are worn very openly. But I also found it difficult to penetrate the specific milieu of the English countryside he clearly loves; something about it seems too private, to personally experience, to really resonate. I liked most those images of the young Trinidadian seeing the world the first time from the air.