The Sealwoman’s Gift: Sally Magnussen

This ‘factional’ novel is part of a trend for taking real stories and turning them into fiction, sometimes introducing new characters, or changing an emphasis.

The catalyst for ‘The Sealwoman’s Gift’ was the Turkish raid on Iceland in the summer of 1627. Dozens of islanders were killed and at least four hundred taken back to North Algeria and sold into slavery. Sally Magnussen’s meticulous research provides the characters and most of the plot; her authorial twist is to use Asta, wife of the Reverend Olafur Egilsson, as the third person narrator. It is the Reverend’s journal, ‘The Travels of Reverend Olafur Egilsson’, which is the main source material for details of this tragic episode in Iceland’s past.

That Sally Magnussen borrowed the plot is not to denigrate the novel. It is a joy to read; in fact, it’s hard to leave it behind. The author’s imagination develops the historical story with rich details of the sufferings endured on the corsairs, the difficulties of adjusting to a new way of life, and characters with whom we can engage and empathise.

Against all cultural odds, Asta and her ‘owner’, Ali Piterling Cilleby, engage in a sort of “King and I” relationship that gradually – despite her better instincts and the agonies of loss – turns into love, flavoured with the exoticism of life in an Algerian harem and seasoned with sagas and story-telling. How will Asta respond if the Icelandic government pays a ransom to have its citizens returned?

Through this saga, Sally Magnussen explores many themes: slavery (by no means a recent phenomenon) and survivor guilt; the testing of cultural, religious and matrimonial loyalties; the pain of losing children, family, friends. A masterly writer, Magnussen draws us into the dilemmas her characters face. An added frisson is that all these characters really existed - this is their story.

Some of them could be described as suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, defined as “the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with, identify with, or sympathise with a his or her captor’. How would any of us behave in similar circumstances? Would we hold to our beliefs and reject those of our captors to the bitter end? Or would we decide to make the best of a bad job and gradually compromise?

Members of the Giffordtown Reading Group praised this novel highly; a wonderfully entertaining and distracting lock-down read.

September’s book, ‘Stoner’ by John Williams, was ‘lost’ for many decades, then rediscovered – to critical acclaim – in 2013. Will it bear rereading by the Giffordtown Reading Group member who recommended it? Will other members of the Reading Group agree with the plaudits? Or will they think it right to consign it to obscurity? Find out next month.