Burial Rites

When you already know how a story ends and yet, you find yourself agonizing over the fate of its protagonists willing for History to change direction, it says a lot about the writer's talent to make you so interested in the novel that you deny reality. This is what happens with Hannah Kent's Burial Rites.

The haunting, almost harrowing, landscape of Iceland becomes a character as significant as Agnes, Tóti, Natan and Margret. Each character springs out of the pages and right into your soul. Agnes' voice is full of dignity and beauty, even when she momentarily gives in to despair. Margret is strength and determination, Tóti is compassion and Natan is love as a destructive force.

Burial Rites is one of the best books in the Gothic Crime show more fiction genre, a genre that is rejuvenated by authors like Hannah Kent and Cecilia Ekbäck. show less

Burial Rites – Hannah Kent
audio performance by Morven Christie
4.5 stars ( round up to 5)

“They said I must die”

It’s a gripping first sentence. The entire book remained just that compelling until the last page. It took me away to a completely different time and place. What did I know about Iceland before reading this story? Not a great deal; barren landscape, sheep, volcanoes, hot springs, its general location on a globe. Maybe my virtual ignorance helped to focus my attention, but Hannah Kent made the landscape and the poverty of the people come alive for me.

It is not a cheerful story. Agnes Magnusdattir has been tried and condemned. Her execution is delayed, pending approval of authorities in Denmark. Lacking prisons, the show more district authorities house Agnes on the farm of Jon Bjarnason. Imagine being forced to house and feed a murderess in a hovel where servants and family alike sleep in the same room. Imagine being Agnes, awaiting your own beheading as you go about the daily chores of a servant. Hannah Kent imagined it very well. The character interactions seemed genuine. I felt the fear and the growing sympathy. Those in authority are very concerned with the spiritual well-being of their prisoner. She is expected to repent. It is through her conversations with Assistant Reverend Toti that we get to hear Agnes’ side of the story.

Not that is makes any difference. It’s a very well told story, but not a happy one.

The audio performance enhanced this book for me. I appreciated hearing correct pronunciation of names and places. show less

This is an immensely effective and entertaining re-imagination of the last execution to take place in Iceland. The novel benefits from Kent’s extensive research into the historical record, as well as her familiarity with the harsh northwestern Icelandic environment and its hardy people. Most of the characters are based on actual people but their inner lives, of necessity, are imagined. The drama of the novel stems from Kent’s belief that Agnes may have been innocent of the crime and that the extenuating circumstances of her life and redemption while staying with the Jonsson family would argue for leniency; that the attitudes of the Jonsson family toward her—especially Margerit—was changed by their exposure to her; and that show more Reverend Toti began is relationship with Agnes naively thinking that he would “save her” but evolved to the more passive role of a listener (confessor?).
Agnes is an intriguing creation: abandoned as a child by her mother; abandoned by her foster father after the death of her foster mother; expelled into a snowstorm by her lover—Natan; and incarcerated under the most brutal and inhumane conditions by the state. She clearly has little to live for when she arrives at the Jonsson farm. Despite that background, Kent depicts Agnes as a strong articulate and intelligent person who is redeemed by her work on the farm and her relationship with the family, especially Margerit and Steina. Kent makes an effective case for Agnes’ innocence and the brutality of the punishment primarily by evoking abundant images of the Christian myth: Christ’s healing mission, forgiveness, Satan’s scheming and Christ’s brutal and unjust crucifixion. This makes for a highly effective tale but it is unclear how well it may represent reality. It is not too surprising that plans are already afoot to make this novel into a movie with some talk of Jennifer Lawrence in the Agnes role. show less

Burial Rites surprised me. I went in expecting a grim historical novel, but what Kent delivers is something far heavier — a cold, controlled excavation of a woman’s last months, written with an emotional precision that never allows you an easy out. The book’s power doesn’t come from melodrama. It comes from restraint, from the quiet horror of a community where gossip is moral law, and from the claustrophobic daily life of a household forced to live with someone they’ve already been told to fear.

Kent’s writing is beautiful, sometimes too beautiful. She loves to describe things — landscapes, gestures, emotional beats — and there are moments when it feels like she is describing for the sake of describing. As a reader, you show more occasionally want to say, “Yes, I get it, you’ve already shown me this.” There’s a stretch around pages 240–263 where the story slows to almost a crawl. You feel the wheel spinning, the mood tightening. For me, it was a slog to get through — but it pays off, because the emotional weight of the ending relies on that tightening coil.

The characters are what make the novel unforgettable.

Burial Rites is beautifully written, emotionally punishing, occasionally overwritten, and absolutely worth reading. It’s the story of a woman the world decided to erase — told in a tone so stark and unsentimental that you feel the erasure happening even as you read. It hurt, and I loved it. show less

This book made me thankful I was born in the US in the latter half of the twentieth century. Yeah, it’s one of those. Full of grinding poverty, disease, filth, vermin, hard physical labor, wicked weather and death. Not that we have learned to give death the slip or manage the weather, but they don’t control our everyday lives like it was for the people of Iceland in the 1820s. For those folks, wooden panels for your dirt walls were luxury. Having teeth was a luxury. More than one dress. Food. I read this book electronically, but if I’d read it as a physical copy, it was so atmospheric I would have expected dirt to fall out of it.

Agnes is to be pitied, but isn’t full of self-pity. She knows she’s been railroaded to some degree show more (and just how much is hidden from the reader until almost the end, and who can trust the source anyway?), but she doesn’t rail and cry and only once does she try to change her destiny. Her destiny, along with one of her co-conspirators, is with the axe. Because that’s an established fact (Agnes will and did die, the character is based on the real Agnes Magnusdottir), you’d expect this book to be a total downer, but it isn’t.

It starts off that way, with everyone hating, condemning and repudiating every minute of her existence because of her part in the deaths of two men. Not only their deaths, but an attempt to cover those deaths by fire. She is treated brutally, far more brutally than you’d ever see today and probably worse than her two accomplices. She is bruised, beaten and starved. Malnutrition has caused her to stop menstruating, a fact she considers to mean she is no longer a woman. She is literally crusted over with dirt, blood, piss and shit when she’s delivered to the farm at Kornsa. She turns the bathwater to sludge and the stench of her burning clothes drives everyone from the croft. Instead of bathing in the water, at first, Agnes tries to drink it, plunging her whole head into the bucket. This moves the heart of the most steely Margret, in whose home she is billeted until her execution.

From there, it’s basically a story of Agnes’s life; flashbacks to her past and vignettes from her present. It was rewarding to see her become a person to those she is forced upon; Margret, Jon, Steina & Lauga. Steina is first to recognize Agnes and tries to draw her out about her past. She’s not too successful and draws the ire of both her mother and sister. Especially Lauga, who being the youngest still sees the world largely in black and white, and while her mother, sister and local priest and even her father start to see Agnes’s humanity, Lauga steadfastly refuses and continues to be horrified that they actually have to feed her and let her stay indoors.

Interspersed with the fictional parts of the story are what appear to be transcriptions of actual court documents, official letters and other records of the murder, the trial and the subsequent housing and execution of the prisoners. Some of the attitudes are so harsh that it seems our own criminal justice system is laughably soft. Even Sigga’s reduced sentence at first seems like a mercy, but is anything but.

The characters seemed realistic and balanced to me. No one is an over-the-top villain, hero or victim and while some attitudes and behaviors made me angry, they were of the place and time. Like blaming women for their rapes. Expecting men to understand and deal with women better than women because they are men. The general deference to men as knowing and being better than women. The whacky religious fervor. Ugh. Back to being glad for being born when and where I was.

The language is starkly beautiful in spots and I highlighted a few passages that struck me -

(Early in Agnes & Margret’s relationship, Margret muses on Agnes’s nature)
“This woman is not a saga woman. She’s a landless workmaid raised on a porridge of moss and poverty.”

“Winter comes like a punch in the dark.”

“Illugastadir. Of all the names, one is a mistake. One is a nightmare. The stair you miss in the darkness.”

“As they say...Blind is a man without a book.”

Agnes is remembering how her relationship with Natan changed -
“It was only later that our tongues produced landslides, that we became caught in the cracks between what we said and what we meant, until we could not find each other, did not trust the words in our own mouths.”

I’m not surprised this has been shortlisted for the Bailey’s Orange Prize this year. It’s a well-crafted novel that will stick with me and one I’ll probably read again someday. show less

Hannah Kent’s extraordinary debut novel transports the reader to northern Iceland in the 1820s, a time and place of harsh winters and harsher justice. The story concerns Agnes Magnúsdóttir, a young woman convicted, along with two others, of brutally murdering two men and burning down the house where the crime took place. All three have been sentenced to death. As the novel opens Agnes is being transferred from formal detention to a farmstead called Kornsá, in Húnavatn District, where she will reside with the family while the farm’s owner, Jón Jónsdóttir, the local District Officer, will oversee her final days before the execution takes place. The process of preparing the condemned for the end of her life includes spiritual show more guidance, and Agnes has requested this task be assigned to Assistant Reverand Thorvardur Jónsson, known as Tóti, a young priest still in training. Agnes’s story is intricately detailed, and Kent spreads the narrative duties around among several characters. Agnes narrates her sections in the first person, and through her we learn of her hardscrabble youth—abandoned by her mother, she eked out a meager living working as a housemaid and farmhand on several of the crofts in the area, including Kornsá. In the months leading up to the crime, she worked in the house of Natan Ketilsson, one of the victims, a man of dark and unpredictable moods whose vocation as a healer (some suspected him of sorcery) meant he was well known throughout the region. But Ketilsson, known to use people for his own ends, took Agnes as a lover, manipulated her into complete dependence on him, and then cruelly spurned her. Tóti’s sections are narrated in the third person, as are the passages that focus on Margrét, the consumptive wife of Jón and mother of the two Jónsdóttir daughters, who still live in the croft when Agnes arrives. At Kornsá Agnes initially encounters fear and hostility from Margrét and her daughters. But, after being put to work, through diligence, quiet intelligence and a meekly compliant presence, she earns the trust and affection of both Tóti and Margrét. The final two-thirds of the book are devoted primarily to Agnes, who narrates her tragic story to Tóti, covering her life of hardship up to the night of the murders. The novel is based on actual incidents and for context and clarification Kent includes a number of letters and official documents. In an afterword, Kent explains that Burial Rites emerged from her time as a 17-year-old exchange student in Iceland, where she first learned of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, who then became her focus a few years later when it came time for her to choose a thesis topic. To her credit, Kent has seamlessly incorporated her research into a taut, emotionally explosive narrative that is absorbing from start to finish, one that touches the heart and fires the intellect. Agnes lives and breathes in these pages, and the frozen, unforgiving land where she meets her fate is evoked in glittering detail. Does Agnes deserve what happens to her? That is a question the reader will be contemplating for a long time after putting down the book. show less

Hannah Kent was a teenage exchange student from Australia when she first heard about Agnes Magnusdottir, the last person to be executed in Iceland (in 1829). A decade long obsession with the woman has resulted in a fictionalised account of Agnes’ life which has become something of a publishing sensation, generating a bidding war for publishing rights after winning the inaugural Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award. As Hannah Kent is a local girl and there aren’t many girls (or boys for that matter) from my home town who make it big in world publishing, my book club couldn’t resist seeing what all the fuss was about.

If I had to choose a genre besides crime fiction as my favourite it would be what Kent describes (in the TV show more documentary that aired here a couple of months ago) as speculative biography. I’ve never heard the term before but it’s a perfect description to suit things like Geraldine Brooks’ YEAR OF WONDERS (one of my all time favourite novels) and this novel. Essentially Kent has researched as much as humanly possible about Agnes, the murders she was convicted of and life in Iceland at the time and told Agnes’ story, imagining what she wasn’t able to supply with facts.

Kent uses a range of mechanisms to piece together her version of Agnes’ life and death. The extracts from letters and other primary sources which begin each chapter ground the story in time and social structure. They also provide the factual details of the conviction, the sentence and the odd arrangements made for the period before the execution will take place. This is how we first learn for example that Agnes and and her fellow accused are, for financial and logistical reasons, to be housed with the families of local officials until the executions can be carried out. The discussions Agnes has with Toti, the young assistant priest she has chosen as her spiritual adviser, provide most of the details of Agnes’ early life of abandonment by her mother and eking out an existence as a servant. Finally the passages told from Agnes’ own point of view provide the perspective of a woman who knows she is going to die, horribly, and who is afraid. Her memories, her hopes, her fears, her wishes for a different life are all depicted alongside her experiences of conviction, imprisonment and living with the family who are, at least initially, repulsed by the idea of having to house someone universally thought of as a whore and murderer.

Together these elements tell an evocative story in which the setting plays a major role. Not only is the weather cold, miserable and dark for much of the novel but the time and location add to the sense of bleakness that pervades this book. It’s no surprise that a poor servant would have had little in the way of creature comforts during her life but even the home of Agnes’ host family – the father of whom is some sort of official – is pretty uninviting. The small house is made of mud which falls from the walls and ceilings and is always damp and all the householders – parents, children, servants, the occasional visitor and Agnes – sleep in the same room, which is basically the same space as all the inside living and cooking is done. I swear that as I read I started to smell a combination of bad food and unwashed bodies which is a testament to Kent’s image-laden writing.

Then of course there’s Agnes herself who, even by the end of the novel, is still something of an unknown quantity though I don’t mean this as a criticism. I simply don’t think we’re meant to know everything about her or have answers to all of the questions that her recollections and the known facts of her life might cause us to wonder about. We do however have a strong sense of who this woman might have been. When she hears that her priest wants to know more of her background she muses

“If he wants to learn of my family he’ll have a hard time of it. Two fathers and a mother who seem as blurry to me as strangers departing through a snowstorm”

which sets the scene for the kind of life she had in the 30 odd years prior to when we meet her. She has had to fend for herself, always, and even before she learned it would be dramatically cut short any dreams she harboured for her future were so modest they barely warrant the term. But even though Agnes was depicted as settling easily, almost willingly, into her role of servant to the family she never became resigned to her ultimate fate. She wanted, desperately, to live.

In small ways though she makes an impact, demonstrating to some of the family at least that she might not be what they had been led to believe. One of the family’s daughters comes to think of her as a friend and the mother grows quite close to Agnes in some ways. Though this aspect of the story must surely be conjecture, for me it seemed terribly credible. It’s hard to imagine not becoming close to others when you’re living and working on top of each other day in and day out.

In some ways the things I liked most about BURIAL RITES were the things that weren’t there. It didn’t provide easy answers, it’s ending didn’t include lurid details (though Kent doesn’t gloss over the undoubted horror of a public beheading) and there were no implausible scenes better suited to the modern day. It is a sad but rich story that offers a glimpse into the world of someone we have to imagine because Agnes Magnusdottir is one of the millions of people which official history records precious little about. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting her. show less