Caroline Lea
The Glass Woman by Caroline Lea is set in Iceland in 1686 and tells the story of Rósa’s marriage to Jón Eiríksson, the wealthy chief of an isolated settlement. Having lost her father and watching her mother slowly fading away because of illness and starvation, Rósa agrees to marry Jón because he lures her with promises to send food to her mother. She knows his first wife died under mysterious circumstances, but she brushes her suspicions aside and joins her husband in the far-off village of Stykkishólmur.
Isolated from the people she loves and forbidden by Jón to interact with the locals, Rósa begins to suspect her husband of nefarious deeds. Jón’s refusal to speak of his first wife or the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death serves to fuel her suspicions. And when Rósa hears noises in the locked loft which Jón has forbidden her to enter, her imagination runs amok with thoughts of ghosts, elves, and things that go bump in the night. A supposedly dead first wife, mysterious noises in the loft, the secrecy of Jón’s behavior, his veiled threats toward Rósa, and the ominous warnings the villagers mutter to Rósa about her husband enhance the gothic atmosphere, all of which is reinforced by Rosa’s isolation and virtual imprisonment in the croft.
The novel covers the period from August to December. The narrative unfolds in the third person point of view focusing on Rósa’s thoughts and actions. But about half way through the novel, the third person is intermittently interrupted with Jón’s first-person point of view in which he flashes back to past events. Threaded throughout the narrative are references to Icelandic sagas and superstitions.
One of the most successful qualities of the novel is Lea’s ability to evoke the frigid Iceland winters and life-threatening snow storms. Her descriptions immerse the reader in the hostile, and bone-chilling environment. Life is hard under these conditions, and this hardness is manifested in the villagers. An atmosphere of suspicion, violence, accusations of witchcraft, belief in the power of spells and runes, and a general sense of impending evil permeate village life. With few exceptions, the villagers are far from friendly and neighborly. They are consumed with jealousy, thrive on gossip, vilify those deemed different, and are ready to perpetrate violence at the slightest provocation.
The novel dragged in some parts, and was predictable and repetitive in others—especially in the sections where Rósa bemoans her fate. The shifts in timeline and point of view were jarring and could have been handled with more skill. The switches from one month to the next and back to a previous month were unnecessarily complicated and did little to advance the narrative. But the novel is worth reading primarily because of its ability to generate a rich Icelandic atmosphere.
Recommended with reservations.