25
CRAZY NORSES
Iceland
FEBRUARY 1997, JULY 1997, JUNE 1998
I HAVEN’T BEEN TO Iceland since I wrote what appears below, stitched together from three assignments—one for The Independent, one for The Sunday Times and one, as it turned out, for reasons explained shortly, for nobody. What happened, essentially, was this. For the first time ever, Iceland exported a famous pop group, The Sugarcubes, from which emerged an even more famous pop singer, Björk. The inevitable result was that everybody in Iceland, more or less, then formed a pop group of their own. Most of these, as is the way of such opportunist clusterfucks—see Manchester circa 1990, Seattle circa 1993—were neither use nor ornament, but this did not deter the pertinent departments of Iceland’s government from displaying the blithe largesse with public money characteristic of Scandinavian societies. Frequent flights and generous accommodations were laid on for foreign music, arts and travel journalists interested in visiting Reykjavik—and the aeroplane seats and hotel rooms filled briskly as word spread of Iceland’s aptitude for sodden revelry, and (not incidentally) of the frostbitten island’s womenfolk, whose poleaxing beauty was secondary, as an attraction, only to their cheerful, enthusiastic and altogether refreshing lack of discrimination where visiting males were concerned.
There were two severe, and eventually terminal, problems with this otherwise splendid arrangement. One was that commissioning editors rapidly grew bored with—and suspicious about—story pitches involving Iceland: one began to run up against responses like “What, again? Won’t this be the fifth new Bjork and/or Sigur Ros you’ve interviewed this year?” The other was that we serial junketers failed to organise ourselves—somebody, on one of the flights back, should have struggled to their feet and reminded the whimperingly hungover and hopelessly lovelorn passenger manifest that if at least one of us didn’t get something into print sometime soon, our hosts would wise up and we would be reduced, once again, to spending our weekends in places which didn’t seem like some alien planet where everything was just like it was on Earth, but weirder and better.
So I haven’t been back to Iceland. The spirit has been willing, but the bank balance weak—even by the uproarious standards of Scandinavia, Iceland was always very much a place you want to visit on expenses. I therefore missed riding along on any part of the up-as-a-rocket, down-as-a-stick economic trajectory that Iceland pursued over the subsequent decade. So I wasn’t there as Iceland’s financial services industry boomed, bequeathing every citizen with (one prefers to assume) their own platinum-plated snowmobile, and I wasn’t there when the undignified implosion of that same banking sector, which has (or so one reads) reduced Iceland to a subsistence economy under which everyone is forced to dine on thin soup made from puffin beaks, and the currency is now the herring.
THEY DO THINGS differently in Reykjavik. This much can be gleaned, on this long, northern-lights-illuminated winter’s night, from the polite, apologetic demeanour of the young chap who has been dispatched upstairs by his superiors at the Loftleidir Hotel’s reception desk.
The scene before him would test the humour, and the credulity, of any hotel employee. In the corridor, three people lie unconscious, the worse for the evening’s hilarity. The plate glass window on the landing is rent by a large, suspiciously foot-shaped hole. At the end of the hall, a half-dressed blond man with a length of blue rope tied around his waist is crawling on all fours and barking like a dog; at the other end of the blue rope is an unfeasibly tall red-haired woman dressed in black rubber, who appears to be taking him for a walk. There are parties occuring in at least five rooms, involving a volatile mix of musicians, local scenesters, foreign media and two pizza delivery boys who thought it all looked like more fun than going back to work. Leaning against one wall is a decent-sized tree that someone has liberated from its pot in the lobby.
Most hotels would have sent for the police, or possibly the army, some hours ago. The bloke from reception knocks on one open door, barely audible above the music blasting out of the room’s television set. Unheard, he steps over the shattered form of Baldur Steffanson, the manager of Gus Gus, the Reykjavik band everyone’s come to spend the weekend with. Baldur is dozing peacefully, a bottle of vodka cradled in one arm and the words “Love Me” printed on his forehead in black ink by some prankster.
“Excuse me,” the bloke from reception says, dimming the volume on the television. “Could you all possibly please keep it down a little bit?”
It’s just gone eight in the morning. So, they won’t let you bring your cocktail into the breakfast room, but that aside, Reykjavik’s credentials as a the kind of place you’d want to spend more time in seem, on first acquaintance, impeccable.
IN ICELAND IN the summertime, the sun doesn’t set, it bounces. Just after midnight, it dips below the horizon before emerging minutes later, like some vast celestial digit that has been dipped gingerly into the North Atlantic and found the water too cold. It doesn’t really get dark at all. I spend days feeling jetlagged—my body clock, deprived of its day/night mechanisms, demands hot dinners at four in the morning and plunges me into deep sleeps at five in the afternoon. There are few feelings as appalling as staggering out of a dark nightclub at three in the morning to get a face full of blazing mid-afternoon sunshine.
The acclimatised locals regard the relentless daylight of June and July as a fine excuse for staying up all night, getting uproariously drunk and staggering around Reykjavik until dawn trying to find someone to get into a fight or bed with. Though, given that Icelanders seem to feel pretty much the same about the other ten months of the year, not too much should be read into this.
For most of its thousand-odd years of human settlement, Iceland has been a wallflower at the dance of nations. On the rare occasions that the toadfish-shaped island has made the nine o’clock news, it’s generally been due to forces beyond its control. These have originated either outside Iceland (the Cod War with Britain in the 70s, the Reagan/ Gorbachev summit in 1986) or under it (the sudden appearance of the island of Surtsey in 1963, the volcanic eruption that forced the evacuation of the island of Heimaey in 1973, 1996’s spectacular meltdown of the mighty Vatnajökull icecap).
In the last couple of years, though, Iceland’s stock has risen dramatically. At last count, every magazine in the world has packed a feature writer off to knock up a piece titled “The Coolest Place On Earth.” These pieces invariably mention that Björk lives here, that Damon Albarn of Blur lives here sometimes, that Icelanders drink a lot and eat puffins, and that the drink, like the puffin, and like everything else for that matter, is terribly expensive.
This is all true enough. Björk has become only the third internationally famous Icelander in history, after Leif Eiríksson and Magnus Magnússon.
Eiríksson achieved his fame by discovering America nearly five centuries before Columbus, even if he did keep getting chased out of it by the natives; Magnússon by spending years and years on television asking mad old librarians and retired colonels arcane questions about P.G. Wodehouse and steam trains.
Björk has done it by dressing up as an assortment of Christmas tree decorations and warbling, to periodically beguiling effect, in a voice which sounds like an angel with hiccups; I always kind of preferred the records she made with The Sugarcubes, myself. Her success has invigorated Iceland, encouraging Reykjavik’s large subclass of bohemian dilettantes to entertain ambition as well as delusions of artistic grandeur. Everybody under the age of forty that I meet in Reykjavik gives their occupation as singer, poet, actor, novelist, photographer, director or sculptor. I have no idea who, if anyone, is doing Iceland’s actual work. If this generation ever decides to replace Iceland’s national anthem, the only realistic title for the new one will be “I Have a Number of Projects in Development.”
It’s not surprising that a few British artists have been tempted to find out if there’s something stimulating in Iceland’s sulphurous tap water. Blur recorded much of their f
ifth, and best, album in a Reykjavik studio. Several other celebrities of various description have been spotted beneath the tables of the city’s nightspots. It’s been enough to prompt Albarn to worry out loud that Iceland will turn into “the new Ibiza,” but he shouldn’t concern himself overmuch—Iceland’s prices will continue to prove the most effective deterrent to package tour invasion a country could possibly muster, short of staging a civil war or ebola epidemic. A modest round of drinks for four leaves little change from thirty quid. The McDonald’s takes credit cards.
REYKJAVIK IS HOME to half of Iceland’s population of 260,000. It’s a cosy, low-rise town almost completely lacking in such traditional signifiers of municipal stature as pollution, crime and poverty. The poor parts of town—the colourful new pre-fab flats that sit along the road in from Keflavik airport—don’t look all that poor. The rich parts—the colourful old wooden houses that cluster around the body of water in the city centre that is either a small lake or a big pond—don’t look all that rich.
Reykjavik has only two landmarks. One, Hallgrímskirkja, is a large basalt church that presides over the centre of the city; built from unblemished, monotone grey stone, it look like it was assembled last week from a kit. The other is Perlan, an excellent but riotously expensive revolving restaurant which sits atop four silver water tanks, and looks like something that might have been inhabited by the bad guy in the black jumpsuit in a Jon Pertweeera episode of Doctor Who.
By day, Reykjavik has the forlorn, deserted feel of a theme park closed for repairs. The only times I see crowds are on the Tuesday, when they’re out celebrating Iceland’s national day—the birthday of nineteenth-century nationalist hero Jon Sigurdsson—and on the Friday and Saturday nights, when they’re out celebrating Friday and Saturday night. Nothing happens in Reykjavik until midnight, and after midnight everything that does happen in Reykjavik looks and sounds like a crowd scene from Caligula.
The frenetic wassailing centres on a few clubs based on and around Laugavegur and Bankastraeti, all a short stumble apart in the middle of town. Places like Kaffibarrin, Cafe au Lait and Rosenborg begin to fill up properly at about 1:00 AM—due to the frightening expense of drinking in clubs, people tend to warm up by drinking at home. By chucking-out time at 3:00 AM, all of them are full of Icelanders enjoying themselves, which is to say all these clubs look like they are hosting a match of some Nordic variant of indoor rugby played with 200 on each side and no ball.
The natives, while occasionally terrifyingly exuberant, are friendly. It’s not difficult, on nights like these, to find people willing to talk to someone from out of town (that said, it’s not difficult, on nights like these, to find people happy to talk to mailboxes, streetlamps, potted plants and themselves). And when the people of Reykjavik address you, after a few drinks, it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard, especially if you’re male and not used to women so beautiful they could have put Helen out of the ship-launching racket for good saying the kind of things that women who look like that usually only say to you when you’re dreaming. Their technique stops only just short of a club over the head, a hoist over one shoulder and a drag back to their cave.
“Icelandic men,” explains one such vision, one night, “are no good. That’s why we like it when foreign men come here. Fresh meat.”
Right.
“Icelandic men drink too much and never speak of their feelings.”
I’ve heard this complaint about other nationalities of my gender, funnily enough, but I don’t have time to elaborate. She grabs me by the hand and leads me at a brisk march through the crowd to a table at the other end of the club, where two morose young men sit silently contemplating their drinks.
“You see these two shitbags?”
Evening, chaps.
“My ex-husbands. I have a son with that one and a daughter with that one.”
God, but I wish she’d let go of me. Neither of the fathers of her children look that far descended from the Vikings. Happily, they don’t seem to object to her, or her tirade, or me, much. In fact, I get the impression they’re used to it—it does seem that everyone in Reykjavik has been married to everyone else at least once.
“Now,” she announces. “I have never slept with an Australian.”
I return to my hotel alone, convinced that there must be a catch to this somewhere.
ASIDE FROM REYKJAVIK’S lately acquired, and thoroughly warranted, reputation as the world’s finest night out, Iceland’s major appeal is its unique geological volatility. Everywhere else on the planet, the ground is what things happen to, or on, or above. In Iceland, the ground is what happens. On this vast, spherical bottle of agitated, bubbling rock that humanity calls home, Iceland is the twitching cork.
There are numerous sites around Reykjavik that confirm this, strung together on a route called “The Golden Circle.” The Golden Circle isn’t circular, and nothing in the bleak, rugged Icelandic countryside is golden, but tourist brochures have to call their excursions something, and nobody’s going to sell many tickets for a coach trip around The Gloomy Ellipse.
The first stop is enchantingly pointless: a large greenhouse where the principal “attraction” is a collection of South American banana plants. I wonder if, under some reciprocal agreement organised in the name of Icelandic-Colombian friendship, there’s a museum full of horned helmets and longboats on the outskirts of Bogota.
We are then driven to a large, geographically significant hole in the ground, which I have difficulty distinguishing from the many large, geographically insignificant holes in the ground I have seen in my time. Things improve dramatically when the bus disgorges its cargo of German pensioners and me at the Gullfoss falls. Gullfoss, the most spectacular of Iceland’s umpty-hundred waterfalls, is where the glacial waters of the Hyvítá River tumble down two thirty-metre cascades at right angles to each other. The result is a rainbow-necklaced fountain of vapour that goes up as high as the falls go down. As is the case with most of Iceland’s natural attractions, there is little in the way of fences or ropes to stop you from getting too close. It’s possible to creep along one muddy ledge far enough to reach out and touch the fall, which is both a startling lesson in the fall’s power and a sad reminder of how many of the world’s natural wonders are as fenced off and inaccessible as zoo exhibits.
At Geysir—the field of bubbling, sneezing puddles that has given its name to similar phenomena everywhere—there are only desultory ropes and signs gently reminding visitors that falling into boiling volcanic mud can be bad for you. The actual Great Geysir packed it in some decades back, so the main reason for being here now is the Strokkur spout, which blasts water twenty metres into the air every five minutes or so. This is mildy entertaining the first time, and after that amusing only in proportion to the number of unwary German camcorder enthusiasts it drenches in hot sulphuric spume.
The final stop on the Golden Circle is Thingvellir, the lava plain that was the site of Iceland’s—and the world’s—first national assembly, the Althing, first convened in 930. The significance of the place is acknowledged only by an Icelandic flag flapping on the spot where chieftains would address this early experiment in democracy, but Thingvellir bears a much more imposing natural gravitas. The site is rent by a huge gash in the black rock that marks the boundary where the American and European continental plates grind together. The fissure in between the two cliffs is muddy, and carpeted with pale green moss. Climbing down to stand on it, I feel that with a big enough lever, I could prise the whole world apart.
ALL OF ICELAND is apt to engender a sense of humanity’s impotence before the forces commanded by nature, but Heimaey, more than anywhere else, is an eloquent confirmation of our status as barely tolerated parasites. Heimaey is the largest of the Westmann Islands, a cluster of small-to-medium-sized lumps of rock off Iceland’s south coast, a twenty-five-minute flight from Reykjavik.
The Westmann Islands are a reminder that, before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it was only Iceland th
at kept the world’s mapmakers in steady business. Contemplating the geology of the Westmanns, and comparing it with the stately pace at which the rest of the planet erodes and erupts, is as disorientating as listening to a 33rpm record at 78. One of the Westmanns, Surtsey, appeared out of the sea between 1963 and 1967. In 1973, Heimaey, the largest and the only inhabited Westmann island, was enlarged twenty percent by an eruption beneath the ocean that buried much of the town and forced the population to leave for six months—it can be imagined that Heimaey’s insurance underwriters were the first aboard the fleeing trawler boats and its real estate agents the last.
This recently arrived portion of Heimaey still belches grumpy clouds of steam, and the ground below the top layer of dirt is hot enough to burn skin, which is something I discover the hard way. If you can be bothered, it is apparently possible to bake bread in it, by digging a hole and burying your dough overnight. It’s a sobering idea to take on board, the notion of the ground as a living thing, capable of such fury. When I get aboard one of the cruise boats that sail around the island, it’s striking how much the charred mountain spewed up in 1973 resembles an immense clenched fist in the process of snatching lush, placid Heimaey back into the sea.
The inert, lunar landscape of the new Heimaey is a total contrast to the life that teems around the rest of the island. On Heimaey’s cliffs nest uncountable thousands of puffins, terns and gulls, and in the water beneath the boat lurk otherwordly fugitives from Neptune’s nightmares. These creatures are on display in Heimaey’s small aquarium, and are almost enough to put me off lunch. The Icelandic catfish is, beyond any doubt, the single ugliest creature on earth. They look like diseased lungs with faces.
Rock and Hard Places Page 35