Betrayal by Lilja Sigurdardottir
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‘With the benefit of hindsight, it was clear that Úrsula’s promise, made on her very first day in office, was her downfall.’ In the opening lines of her new thriller, shortlisted for the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel, Sigurdardottir sets out the path her protagonist must follow. Úrsula’s elevation to political power will ultimately be followed by loss of status, resulting from a single impulsive action. It’s a familiar and tragic pattern in both life and literature.
Sigurdardottir’s method of describing Úrsula’s decline and fall is less conventional. She is stalked by a mysterious dropout, barely surviving on the fringes of Icelandic society. What could such a person possibly know about a government minister’s past? United by a mutual craving for nicotine, Úrsula and an office cleaner exchange casual chat. How can such a lowly employee influence her future? A woman deprived of justice for the rape of her daughter secures Úrsula’s support, and afterwards thanks God ‘….that the minister of the interior was a woman.’ Career charity worker Úrsula does not hesitate to offer her help, to a mother and child who find themselves in a desperate situation.
Úrsula is also a mother, but her emotions have been frozen by the suffering she witnessed while organising the delivery of aid to war refugees. ‘Part of her had been lost, dripping into the bloodstained earth.’ While Úrsula was working abroad, her supportive husband Nonni, an academic, took over the nurturing role that should have been hers. On her return to Iceland, she finds herself unable to reclaim her place in the emotional life of her family. This is an unusual form of post traumatic stress disorder. W.B.Yeats wrote that ‘Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart,’ and Úrsula’s long sacrifice, which included working to save lives during an Ebola outbreak, has rendered her unable to feel. This leads to her heartbreaking emotional betrayal of her family.
Political scandal threatens when it becomes clear that Úrsula’s new, and predominantly male, colleagues are setting her up as the scapegoat for an unpopular decision. Who can she trust? At first, she refuses to have a personal driver, believing it will set her apart from ordinary Icelanders. Finally accepting that, like it or not, her temporary government appointment has raised her to a different level, she accepts the protection of aspirational bodyguard Gunnar. This endearing character proves to have a significant role to play in Úrsula’s struggle for personal and political survival.
Secretive Stella, office cleaner and part-time witch, casts her web of enchantment around Úrsula. A killer combination of ignorance, sexual power and substance abuse exposes this young immigrant girl to corruption, as well as to magical visitations from her grandmother, who is far away in South America. Whether the reader believes in witchcraft or not, they will be drawn in by Sigurdardottir’s imaginative portrayal of Stella’s beliefs. ‘The best spells always demanded sacrifice.’
Throughout the book, Sigurdardottir displays an intense awareness of place, from the smoker’s hideaway at the government offices, on a balcony with a view of tower blocks on the city skyline, to the small-town landscape where snow chills the calves of a vagrant begging for food, and a jounalist’s smart city apartment. A description of Úrsula stepping out of the front door of her family home, and taking a deep breath of cold Icelandic air, underlines the physical contrasts between her new administrative position and her hands-on charity role in Liberia and Syria.
The first book of Sigurdardottir’s I read was Snare, the story of a desperate young mother who turns to cocaine smuggling. Since then, her writing has developed great emotional depth. She is not afraid to approach sensitive themes, and refers to national and international issues with a humane touch, by showing how they directly affect individuals. Told from the multiple perspectives popular in Scandi Noir, the short chapters in Betrayal are economical with words, brilliantly weaving together various narrative threads. Quentin Bates’ translation does full justice to the subtleties of this exciting and dramatic story of crime, and so much more. The notes on how to produce Icelandic names made me feel more involved with the characters.
