The Atom Station

The Atom Station is a highly entertaining work by the great Icelandic storyteller Halldor Laxness. The heroine of the tale is Ugla, a plain speaking country girl from the North who is working as a maid in the house of her Member of Parliament. In the privileged, eccentric household she is the one character who stands out as real. Incapable of displaying the submissive obedience expected of her by the mistress of the house, Ugla soon falls out of favour with her. 'This woman has given me nothing but insolence ever since she came into this house, full of some sort of northishness as if she were my superior,' complains the lady to her husband, who has a warmer view of Ugla. The country girl's influence is a positive one on the children of the disfunctional household, who come to respect her authority and down to earth ways. Exposed to and baffled by the political world around her, Ugla is rather untouched by it, as if by a fantasy. She becomes pregnant and returns to the north country and her father's horse farm, where life has real meaning. Halldor Laxness writes the tale with humour and a sense of longing at times. His heroine stands head and shoulders over the mad characters she encounters in the city, like the calm hub in the centre of a strangely turning wheel. This reader for one couldn't help but fall in love with her. A great read.

One should not read this book before getting acquainted with the sagas, if you read only one, then try Njal's Saga. Laxness tries to convey to us the destructiveness of globalization long before it was called by that name, the destructiveness of making a liquid market in everything, putting a price on everything, eliminating all stability formed by old tradition. The girl in the story is the voice of the past, the voice from the sagas, and you cannot hear this voice at all if you have been programmed, indoctrinated by the ideology of neo-classical economic theory (the 'religion' of totally unregulated free markets, which are now known anyway to be dynamically unstable). Other books for some perspective: Berger's Pig Earth, Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld, Ross's The Annexation of Mexico. Also strongly recommended: Laxness's Independent People. Like John Berger, Laxness points out for us the destructiveness of unregulated 'development' and suggests that the antidote lies in something that most of us have'forgotten' about the past, about human relations as human relations rather than human beings as 'rational agents' in the neo-classical economic theory implicitly assumed true by the IMF, The World Bank, and The EU, the disastrous philosophy of totally unregulated free markets that has been swallowed hook, line and sinker by recent US leaders. If you wonder why the world is in crisis, look for the answer in the assumptions that are taken for granted by the leaders, the assumptions that they don't question.

For the first two thirds of the book, we are cast headlong into a confused world of materialistic politicians, posturing socialists, and over-precious intellectuals. This mirrors the perplexity that the young Ugla finds when she leaves the North of Iceland to live in Reykjavik as the serving girl to a powerful member of parliament. I could have laid the book aside, but I had read Laxness before and was curious to see where he would take me. Ugla becomes pregnant and returns to her family in the country to have her child and think things through and, in her words, "to become a person." From crazy Reykjavik, we suddenly find ourselves in the clear light of the great Sagas of the 13th century. Here there are no harsh moral judgments; and even the Lutheran pastor refers to Gunnar of Hlidarendi in NJAL'S SAGA as being on the same plane as the Good Book. As a hardened Saga fiend, I was enthralled. Here was an Icelander saying that the answer to the topsy turvy world of Cold War Europe was to look at the past and within onseself -- to follow the God who, by definition, was the one left over when all the other ones have been named. Ugla finds her way in the end -- even if she traced a great circle in the process. Like G K Chesterton, Laxness is a great optimist; and he left this reader with a smile and the resolve to read more of his works.

In the Atom Station, Halldor Laxness demonstrates the skill and complexity that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel tells the story of a simple lass from the north of Iceland who comes face to face with the duplicity of politicians who sell out Icelandic sovereignty for the sake of a nuclear station during the cold war. She also comes to some realizations about herself and the importance of social class and knowledge and how these interact in today's modern world. The novel will be of very special interest to those with some knowledge of Iceland and its history. For those without such knowledge, the novel will compel you to learn more about this fascinating country and its wonderful author laureate, Halldor Laxness.

Halldor Laxness, the prodigal son of Icelandic literature, made a distinct stylistic change with this novel, moving from long post-Naturalist tragedies of the outlying regions of Iceland to a fast-paced and often funny romp through Reykavik. This novel tells the story of the protest surrounding the founding of an American military base in Iceland. The story is told through the eyes of a young, naive servant girl from the country, who, shortly after moving to the city, finds herself surrounded by poets, protesting Socialist students, and Icelandic and American government officials. The girl loses her innocence but gains, not knowledge of the world, but rather entry to the modern world. Laxness is one of the largely-ignored greats (possibly doomed to obscurity by winning the Nobel prize for literature), and this novel is a fantastic entry into the canon of postmodern literature.