A HAPPY LITTLE ISLAND

Lars Sund

Vagabond Voices, £12.95

Finnish author Lars Sund doesn’t pretend for a moment that this novel is anything other than a made-up story. Writers of novels have been drawing attention to the artificiality of the form since it was invented, of course, and it’s practically obligatory for post-modernists to make personal appearances in their texts to disrupt the illusion of realism. Sund begins A Happy Little Island by casting himself as God, devising the land on which he will set his story. But he has specific reasons for doing so, beyond literary affectation.

The island is called Fagero, a place where time is “telescoped” in such a way that the past is disconcertingly close and eye-witness accounts of mythical creatures can be as recent as only a couple of generations ago. Fagero’s insularity, however, is shattered when drowned bodies begin to wash ashore. One would be bad enough, but they keep on coming until scores of corpses are being temporarily housed in air-conditioned tents. Their identities are unknown, but they’re clearly foreign. And although no explanation is immediately forthcoming, with our media full of stories about migrants, refugees, cheap labour and unscrupulous people-traffickers, the reader can make a fairly educated guess.

The nearness of so much death depresses the islanders’ spirits and gives them nightmares. Violence flares. A shy, innocent girl can take no more and disappears. But it’s not the bodies that are the problem so much as Fagero’s parochialism and xenophobia. Migration is the great unspeakable here. It’s a fact of bar-owner Kangarn’s life, though he chooses not to talk about it and has adjusted his accent to blend in. The people of the island are so afraid of outsiders that they feel threatened even by their dead bodies. A section of the community even demands that they be exhumed from the crowded cemetery to make room for local people who will pass away in future.

All the way through, Sund draws attention to his narrative tricks, consistently emphasising that this is a world at the whim of its creator. He ushers us into the postman’s home so we can watch him furtively steam open letters, and the character will register our disapproval and defensively ask how else he is supposed to stay informed. He even acknowledges his fictional status, asking the author to write him a girlfriend.

Sund isn’t just showing off, he’s making the point that not even in imaginary worlds are we exempt from our responsibilities to our fellow human beings. The book is a plea for us not to invent excuses for turning our backs on the needy and suffering because they’re strangers.

That said, it’s also an absorbing tale with a cast of characters who could only exist in an isolated rural environment, their individuality accentuated by the open spaces and close-knit sense of community. Sund writes charmingly about the island (an old boat, for instance, likes to “rub her gunwales against a familiar quay”), and the tone is carried over by translator Peter Graves, who pleasingly renders the name of one landmark as “the Empress’s Cludgie”.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT