Falling Off the Map

by Pico Iyer

  The largest glacier in Europe (more than three times the size of Luxembourg) is somewhere in this nothingness, and the largest lava field in the world; the oldest parliament in Europe was set up on this youngest soil. Samuel Johnson used to boast of reciting a whole chapter of The Natural History of Iceland from the Danish of Horrebow. That was Chapter LXXII, “Concerning snakes.” It reads, in its entirety: “There are no snakes to be met with throughout the whole island.”

  The other factor that accentuates the bleak and weather-beaten beauty is the climate: in October there is already a wild white quilt swaddling the countryside, and the sun shines silver over silver lakes, the view from a bus identical to that from a plane thirty thousand feet above the Pole. Icelanders will tell you that, because of the North Atlantic Drift, the country has no extremes of temperature: many years see no snow at all in Reykjavik, and the lowest temperature recorded in the capital in thirty years is — 15° Fahrenheit. But no extremes of temperature, in my book, means that it is never, ever warm. In summer, when I visited, people were complaining of a heat wave when the temperature hit a chilly 54°; by early fall, bitter winds were whipping through the silent streets, slapping my face and almost knocking me off my feet. A local friend told me that he had been to Stockholm once and almost suffocated in the sweltering 64° heat. He couldn’t wait, he said, to “get back to my cold Iceland.”

  In such an unaccommodating world, it is not surprising that visitors are often as unorthodox, in their way, as locals. (“Whenever I meet a foreigner here,” an Icelandic girl told me in a disco, “I ask him, ‘Why do you come to Iceland?’ It is cold; it is expensive; and the people, they are closed.”) Yet the country seems to bring out something pure in visitors, something a little bit out of the ordinary. The most luminous translations of modern Icelandic poetry into English, for example, were composed by a recent U.S. ambassador to Iceland, Marshall Brement, who has written beautifully of how Icelanders were the great European poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and how even now, on one night a year, every member of Parliament must speak in rhyme. And though the island’s attraction to photographers (Eliot Porter) and to poets (from Auden and MacNeice to Leithauser) may be self-evident, it seems to evoke something poetic even in an everyman. I once asked a young Danish student, who had chosen to live here for a year, what was the most exciting thing to do in Reykjavik. He thought for a long, long time. Then, a little sheepish, he replied, “Well, for me, I like walking at night in the Old Town, seeing the old houses. Or if you can go a little bit out of Reykjavik, if it is cold, like tonight, you can see the northern lights.” The most beautiful place he had ever seen, he said, was Greenland. “It is so rich, in many ways. When you walk there, you see more clearly, you think more easily. Here it is a little bit the same.”

  That kind of calm transparency is, inevitably, harder and harder to maintain as the villages of Iceland get drawn into the shrinking global village. For ten centuries now, the island has preserved its own culture and its Old Norse diphthongs by living apart from the world, remote from changing realities. For centuries, Iceland has been a kind of hermit among nations, a private, inward-looking Lonely Place of fishermen and visionaries and poets. The pursuits for which it has been famous are largely solitary ones, made to ward off months of winter dark: thus the land with a population smaller than that of Corpus Christi, Texas, boasts six chess grandmasters and recently placed first in the World Contract Bridge Championship. The most famous Icelander in England, Magnus Magnusson, is, appropriately enough, the host of a fiendishly difficult quiz show, Mastermind (there are now fifty-three Magnus Magnussons in the country’s phone book). Iceland is a kind of conscientious objector to modernity, out of it in all the right ways and priding itself on being a sort of no-man’s-land in the middle of nowhere (and nowhen), a quiet neutral zone far from superpower rivalries: midway between Moscow and Manhattan, halfway between medievalism and modernity, it had its two moments of ambiguous fame—in 1972, when it was the site of the Boris Spassky-Bobby Fischer chess championship, and in 1986, when it was the safe house where Reagan and Gorbachev met and almost abandoned nuclear weapons. The miracle of Iceland is not just that, as Auden wrote, “any average educated person one meets can turn out competent verse” (and a kitchen maid he met gave “an excellent criticism of a medieval saga”) but that the verse itself is devilishly complex, bristling with alliteration and internal rhyme, trickier than a sonnet. That tangled, palindromic, old-fashioned kind of rime has become almost a model for the country.

  Now, though, increasingly, that legacy is threatened. Scarcely a century ago, only 5 percent of Icelanders lived in towns; today, the figure is more than 80 percent. For nine centuries almost, the population scarcely rose (it hit six figures only in this century); and as recently as 1806, there were only 300 citizens in Reykjavik, of whom 27 were in jail for public drunkenness. Today, however, 145,000 of the country’s 255,000 people live in or around the suburb-sprouting capital. And the single fact of television alone has inevitably cast a shadow over a world in which lighthouse keepers read Shakespeare to fishing fleets and families wax Homeric in the dark. Though the government has worked overtime to protect its culture (hence the longtime ban on daytime television, and no broadcasting in the month of July), its efforts have often been in vain: Iceland (which seems to lead the world in leading the world in categories) now boasts more VCRs per household than any other country. In the Westman Isles, the rock formation that used to be called Cleopatra is now known by some as Marge Simpson, and the fishing crates nearby are decorated with portraits of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Even young couples, when not talking of their holidays in Spain and their dreams of seeing the Pyramids, will tell you that purity is to be found now only in the countryside; that Reykjavik is dangerous and full of drugs; that, sadly, people use the word “cassette” instead of its Icelandic equivalent.

  Iceland is also more and more full of foreign faces and less militantly blond than even four years ago. There is a Thai restaurant now in Reykjavik, and a Thai snack bar (complete with Buddha, picture of King Bhumibol, and sign for Coke in Thai); there are Somalian refugees, adopted kids from Sri Lanka, even immigrants from North Africa (whose children must—by law—be given names like Bjorn and Gudrun). In one factory alone, there are ten “mail order brides,” three of them cousins from the Philippines. None of this would seem exceptional except in a country where, until recently, many people could hardly imagine Somalia, or Sri Lanka, or even California. When I was here in 1987, I found myself an object of dark fascination to people who could hardly tell an Indian from a Indianan; now, when I went to restaurants, I was greeted with a polite, unsurprised Godan dag in Icelandic.

  The zealously maintained racial purity of the people has, of course, a shadow side: Hitler’s Mein Kampf appears in the window of a local bookstore, and D. ÜBER ALLES has been scribbled up on walls downtown. Many Icelanders draw their imaginations tightly round themselves. One day an emaciated young ship’s cook with nicotine-stained teeth leaned over to me in a café. He had been to Japan, he said, and China, and Baltimore. Which was his favorite place? He thought for a long time. “Holland. Is okay. And Norway and Denmark. Okay, but expensive.” Was he preparing now for his next trip? “No,” he said matter-of-factly. “I am an alcoholic. And on the ship I cannot go to A.A. meetings.” Some Icelanders in the countryside still live in fear of a Turkish attack (there was one as recently as 1627).

  At the same time, of course, the isolation that is so transporting to the foreigner is desperately confining to the would-be with-it teenager, and if Iceland seems very far from the world, the world can seem very far from Iceland. In Iceland, again by law, most shops and offices must bear Icelandic names, and the hotels—aimed at foreigners—are duly given unpronounceable names like Esja, Gardur, Ódinsvé. Yet more and more of the names used for recreation—aimed at the locals—bespeak a longing for abroad. The famous discos in Reykjavik have been Berlin, Hollywood, Casablanca, and Broadway; the
new places to eat are Asia, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Siam. One of the trendiest joints in town is the L.A. Café; people downtown gather round the Texas snack bar. None of this would have much significance except in a culture that sees its identity reflected in its names.

  One day an old man who was loitering outside a video arcade came up to me near the entrance of Tomma Hamborgarar. “There is so much new here,” he declared. “It is almost as if Iceland was built in 1900 and not ten centuries ago. I remember when I was a child, hearing about the fairies who lived in the fields and everywhere. And the ghosts.” The ghosts, he added, “sometimes follow a family for two hundred years.”

  For visitors, however, there are still enough ghosts to fill another planet. A middle-aged matron invited me one night into her solemn, sepulchral parlor. The first things I saw when I entered were a book on the Gestapo and a picture of a sea-blue sprite hiding inside a waterfall. Her grandchildren came out to stare at me, and when I explained that I was from India, they confessed that they did not know if that was near Pluto or Neptune. Then I was asked what kind of music I would like to hear. Icelandic, I replied, and on came a blast of local heavy metal.

  There is, in fact, a deafening strain of rock ‘n’ roll in Iceland, and it is the voice of kids banging their fists against the narrow limits of their culture. With so few people in so vast a space, both elements are intensified, extreme: “wild” applies as much to society as to nature here. Iceland, then, is an inspired setting for the Hard Rock Café. It is not just that the island used to have the two largest discos in Europe; or that its most famous recent export is the eccentric dance band the Sugarcubes (“I’d never been in a skyscraper place before,” said their lead singer recently, after her first trip to Manhattan); or even that Amina, the belle of Carthage, was recently performing in Reykjavik. It is, rather, that rock ‘n’ roll is an almost primal statement of rebellion here, a spirit of release. It is the way the young advertise their impatience with the old ways and their hunger for the new. Garage bands are sizzling in Reykjavik, and local magazines are full of articles on such local heroes as Deep Jimi and the Zep Creams. The radio was blasting “Leader of the Pack” when I drove one night to Kringlan, the glittery new yupburb where the Hard Rock is situated, and inside which blondes in dark glasses and boys in ties were clapping along to “The Wall” and shouting out, in English, “Unbelievable!” and “Give me five!”

  It is, in fact, easy to feel in Iceland that one is caught up in some homemade Arctic version of American Graffiti. The first time I visited the country, I could not believe the “cruising” rituals that filled even the tiniest places on every weekend night; in the small northern town of Akureyri I watched a whole procession of Pontiacs, Range Rovers, and Porsches circling the tiny central square till 4:00 a.m., teenagers hanging out of their windows; motorcycle gangs (called Sniglar, or Snails) revving up along the sidewalks; twelve-year-old boys crying out Gledileg Jól (Merry Christmas) in the golden evening light. But this was in the middle of the saturnalian summer, when everything is topsy-turvy, and golf tournaments start at midnight, and three-year-old toddlers caper around till one in the morning each night (or one at night each morning). This was the time of midsummer madness, when people believe that rolling naked in the dew will cure you of nineteen separate ailments and that you will be granted a wish if you walk naked in the grass or cross seven fences, collecting a flower at each one of them.

  When I returned to Iceland in the dark, though, I found that the same furious rites were taking place even in the freezing cold, bodies jamming the narrow streets of Reykjavik, “Jumping Jack Flash” pouring out of their windows, the streets packed at 2:00 a.m., muscle cars burning rubber in the parking lots. Reykjavik on a Saturday night is a reeling madhouse of people puking, people barking, people lying flat out on the street, their beautiful faces shining with illicit glee. A local band was playing “Runaway” in the Gaukar á Stöng pub, and the girls at their tables were lip-synching every word, and when the group went into “Break on through to the other side …” the girls got up and started flinging their naked arms around, whirling themselves into a bacchic frenzy, long hair and short skirts flying, like nothing so much as the Dionysian revelers in Oliver Stone’s The Doors.

  Sex? asked Auden in Letters from Iceland. “Uninhibited.” And that was fifty-five years ago! Iceland discos, it seems safe to say, are not for the faint of heart. “I started smoking when I was ten, gave up when I was eleven, started again when I was twelve,” a hard-drinking girl of nineteen told me, while her friend started raving about her holiday in Bulgaria; around us, various boys were burping, dancing on the table, and pursuing rites of courtship in which solicitations came well before introductions. “These men do not have any behavior,” a young Danish boy standing near me remarked. “They are not even having a funny time.” Later, I found there was a subtext to his complaint. “I went with four girls to the Moulin Rouge,” he reported, “and all the men were blinking at me.” After the discos close, at 3:00 a.m., everyone who is not in somebody else’s arms (and even some who are) staggers off to swim naked in one of the city’s open-air pools, I’M ICELANDIC, says a local T-shirt. WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE?

  Yet still, for all these odd eruptions, there is a kind of innocence in Iceland—an innocence almost betrayed by that longing for sophistication—and it is one of those places that are difficult to dislike. Even now, it seems to belong as much to Hans Christian Andersen as to Tolkien, and Peer Gynt’s angels are as much in evidence as Axl Rose’s. The most elegant hotel in Reykjavik puts a single lighted candle on its reception desk at nightfall. The waitress at the Shanghai restaurant is a classic Nordic beauty, with long Godiva tresses falling over her Chinese page-boy suit. (“The good children do get ice-cream as dessert,” promises the menu, “with regards from Shanghai.”) Many telephone numbers here have only five digits, and a child’s painting of a rainbow that I saw in the National Art Gallery had only four (not very vibrant) colors. Sometimes you’re walking down the main street in the capital, and out of nowhere you come across a statue of a bear, dukes up, above the legend BERLIN 2380 KM. Everything’s out of context here, simply because there is no context.

  Much of Iceland still has the phlegmatic, Spartan style of the laconic north. The best hotels in Reykjavik offer little more than a bed, perhaps a TV, and a Bible in Icelandic (with a separate New Testament in German, French, and English); in rural areas, visitors generally stay in boarding schools. The museum in Akranes, the finest I saw in the country, displays a dentist’s drill. On Saturday nights, couples in cocktail dresses and suits munch on sheep’s heads, ram’s testicles, reindeer, and ptarmigan; Auden and MacNeice gnawed, less happily, on “half-dry, half-rotten shark.” One Westman Islander told me that during the terrible volcano eruption of 1973, he went with his grandmother to the harbor, just in time to see the last fishing boat fleeing to the mainland. “Oh, well,” the grandmother said as lava poured toward her, about to bury five hundred houses, “the last boat’s gone. Let’s go home and have a coffee.”

  Iceland has yet to lose this never-never quality; it is a cozy, friendly, Christmas-tree kind of place: even the chic black-leather girls who come into the cafés on Saturday afternoons are carrying bundles of babyhood in their arms. My old friend Kristín, now studying African dance, told me eagerly about her nine-year-old daughter’s class in karate, and how both of them kept strong with regular doses of “fish oil” (Icelanders, by some counts, are the longest-living people in the world). “Families are so important here,” I said. She looked surprised. “They are not everywhere?”

  And somehow, in the windswept silences, so bare and broad that the mind takes flight, the close-knit purity of the people can work a curious kind of magic. Chill Lutheran bells awakened me one ringing Sunday morning, and I went out into the quiet, rainy streets, empty save for a few children, and the smell of fresh-baked bread, and an old crone in earflaps, delivering the Morgunbladid. From inside the most modern church in town, I heard choi
rs singing hallelujahs in the cool, severely tall white nave. Hallgrimskirkja has the whitest, chastest interior I have ever seen, snow-capped islands misty through the windows behind its altar’s cross. Across the street is the Einar Jónsson House, which opens up for two afternoons a week to disclose the late artist’s mythopoeic sculptures and Blakean visions of angels and ascents to heaven, all white, but muscular and rugged.

  And in the sepulchral silence and unearthly calm of Iceland, the religious impulse has room to stretch out and take wing and pick up light. The only thing I could find inside the reading pocket on an Icelandair domestic flight was a copy of the New Testament, and Van Morrison was singing “Whenever God Shines His Light” above the sober businessmen’s breakfast at the Hotel Holt. The figure of Jesus in the Skálholt church is one of the most haunting apparitions I have ever seen, a dim blue figure, hardly corporeal, faint as a half-remembered dream, emerging from the wall to look out upon an ice-blue stained-glass window. One of my favorite Reykjavik restaurants is a medieval cavern underground, lit entirely by candles, its waiters wearing friars’ robes as they serve you pan-fried puffin in the dark. If countries were writers, Iceland would, I think, be Peter Matthiessen (whose very name and face suggest the elemental north): craggy, weathered, close to earth and sea, yet lit up from within by a high fierce restlessness. And as we sailed through large caverns near the Westman Islands, the captain of my ship stopped our vessel and got out a flute and started playing Bach toccatas and “Amazing Grace.” The high, angelic sounds echoed round and around the empty space.