The first part of Hannah Kent’s memoir Always Home, Always Homesick spans the award-winning author’s early childhood in Adelaide through to her first trip to Iceland as a 17-year-old Rotary exchange student, in 2003. Aged four, Hannah is friendless, “illiterate in a common tongue of childhood”. In books, she finds refuge and relief. As a teenager, she is annoyed by adults’ talk of Atars, harbouring a grander aspiration: to awaken to the “divine mystery” of the world.
The promotional material for Always Home, Always Homesick frames Iceland as Kent’s muse, spurring not only her award-winning debut Burial Rites but also the literary practice that spawned subsequent novels The Good People and Devotion. And indeed, the place feels personified in this memoir. As though she were falling for a full-blooded human, the young Kent progresses from initial awkwardness in her new surrounds to physical infatuation, “euphoric sublimation” to its beauty, and eventually, a kind of enmeshment: “My bones have knitted with this place.” Returning to Australia, she is beset by longing and grief.
Inseparable from Kent’s enchantment with Iceland is her own artistic blossoming, making this first section of the memoir read like a Künstlerroman. Encouraged by a kindly teacher in Sauðárkrókur (the small northern town where she has been posted), she scrawls poems in class and the act gives her a “physical rush”. Writing, she says, is her “calling”, and “feels like prayer”. There are frequent moments of epiphany, brought about through contact with the natural world – horse-riding, gathering berries, lying against the snow. Facing an aurora-rippled sky, she writes: “I long to fit these swerving arcs of brilliant green … into language.” For it is only through writing that Kent can attempt to “articulate the hold” Iceland has on her.
The second part of the memoir sees Kent return to Iceland in her 20s, with a sharpening resolve to research and write about Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in that country, in 1830.
On the face of it, the figure of Agnes is at great remove from Kent; even if she weren’t, a writer writing about their own writing process could risk alienating the general reader. But Kent’s gift is to bridge these apparent distances. As with Agnes’ voice in Burial Rites, Kent’s narration here is immediate, intimate and never less than captivating. For a description of an extended, conceptual process, Kent’s account feels startlingly physical. She visits the kinds of dwellings Agnes would have inhabited; she finds examples of objects – axes, needles, butter churns – that will make her book “as real as possible”; she gathers stories directly from farmers in their cow stalls; she handles original letters at the national archives and carries out her own translations. She applies what she has learned experientially in her exchange year – about family, and land, and isolation – to illuminate Agnes’ story.
This behind-the-scenes view of the artist at work is interesting in its own right, but especially fascinating is Kent’s personal closeness to the historical figure of Agnes, who has a “continued, humming hold” over her. At times, Kent’s feelings drift into identification, but this is done with careful understatement. Discovering that Agnes spent her final six months with a local family, for example, Kent draws a parallel to being placed with a host family: “I know it is not the same, but I know a little of what it is like to be alone among others … to be placed with strangers.” Following Burial Rites’ publication in 2013, Kent gained access to court documents associated with a mock retrial of Agnes’ case. She was struck by how close her invented details were to these transcripts, and surely this is testament to the author’s imaginative and empathetic powers.
Australian authors waxing lyrical about foreign locations can often lapse into idealisation. But when Kent describes Iceland as her true home, and says she finds it easier to be herself there, these feel like genuine, hard-won truths. Thanks to her gradual acculturation as a high-school student, she is fluent in Icelandic and counts various locals as family. There is a decidedly Romantic bent to Kent’s writing – a lyrical treatment of nature; frequent reference to the liminal. But this is in keeping with her highly sensitive disposition as well as Icelanders’ own interest in the mythic and the uncanny. As a novelist, Kent is interested in “what is unsaid”, and this too chimes with something in the Icelandic psyche and its “tradition of silence”.
On her most recent trip to Iceland, captured in the third and final part of the memoir, Kent visits the site of Agnes’ execution, which has been made into a memorial. She is moved to find plaques lining the pathway engraved with lines from her novel. It’s a beautiful scene, with a strange symmetry: an imprinting of the author’s own imaginative spirit on to a place which has so deeply imprinted itself on her.
Always Home, Always Homesick is an absorbing memoir that will appeal to existing readers of Kent’s work, and will undoubtedly see new ones seek out her earlier writing in all its mystery and glory.
Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent is out through Pan Macmillan Australia ($36.99)
