The Bone Clocks

maybe not for a while, if that’s ok. It still hurts and I’m bored of the pain. No offense meant and mind yourself. C.

After pressing send I wish I’d taken more care to sound less petulant and/or self-pitying. Suddenly the river’s a

No. We can’t talk. I switch off my phone.

“THE NAME OF my lecture is On Never Not Thinking About Iceland.” It’s a decent turnout at the House of Literature, but half of the two hundred attendees are here because the Bo

Either the audience is listening, or else they’re merely snoozing with eyes open. I turn over my notes.

“So much for the pen. Now for the place. From the vantage point of continental Europeans, Iceland is, of course, a mostly treeless, mostly cold oval rock where a third of a million souls eke out a living. Within my own lifetime Iceland has made the front pages exactly four times: the Cod Wars of the 1970s; the setting for Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s arms-control talks; an early casualty of the 2008 crash; and as the source of a volcanic ash cloud that disabled European aviation in 2010. Blocs, however, whether geometric or political, are defined by their outer edges. Just as Orientalism seduces the imagination of a certain type of Westerner, to a certain type of southerner, Iceland exerts a gravitational force far in excess of its landmass and cultural import. Pytheas, the Greek cartographer who lived around 300 B.C. in a sunbaked land on the far side of the ancient world, he felt this gravity, and put you on his map: Ultima Thule. The Irish Christian hermits who cast themselves onto the sea in coracles, they felt this pull. Tenth-century refugees from the civil war in Norway, they felt it too. It was their grandsons who wrote the sagas. Sir Joseph Banks, enough Victorian scholars to sink a longship, Jules Verne, even Herma

The UFO-shaped lights of the House of Literature blink on.

“Writers don’t write in a void. We work in a physical space, a room, ideally in a house like Laxness’s Gljъfrastei

HOLLY’S BEEN RENTING her apartment since June, but she’ll be moving back to Rye in a couple of weeks so it’s minimally furnished, uncluttered, and neat, all walnut floors and cream walls, with a fine view of Reykjavik’s jumbled roofs, sloping down to the inky bay. Streetlights punctuate the northern twilight as color drains away, and a trio of cruise liners glitters in the harbor, like three floating Las Vegases. Over the bay, a long, whale-shaped mountain dominates the skyline, or would, if the clouds weren’t so low. Цrvar says it’s called Mount Esja, but admits he’s never climbed it because it’s right there, on the doorstep. I biff away an intense wish to live here, intense, perhaps, because of its utter lack of realism: I don’t think I’d survive a single winter of these three-hour days. Holly, Aoife, Цrvar, and I eat a veggie moussaka and polish off a couple of bottles of wine. They ask me about my week on the road. Aoife talks about her summer’s dig on a tenth-century settlement near Eglisstaрir, and nudges the amiable but quiet Цrvar into discussing his work on the genetic database that has mapped the entire Icelandic population: “Eighty-plus women were found to have Native American DNA,” he tells me. “This proves pretty conclusively that the Vinland Sagas are based on historical truth, not just wishful thinking. Lots of Irish DNA on the women’s side, too.” Aoife describes an app that can tell every living Icelander if and how closely related they are to every other living Icelander. “They’ve needed it for years,” she pats Цrvar’s hand on the table, “to avoid those awkward, morning-after in-Thor’s-name-did-I-just-shag-my-cousin?moments. Right, Цrvar?” The poor lad half blushes and mumbles about a gig starting somewhere. Everyone in Reykjavik under thirty years old, Aoife says, is in at least one band. They get up to go, and as I’m leaving first thing in the morning they both wish me bon voyage. I get a niece’s hug from Aoife and a firm handshake from Цrvar, who only now remembers that he brought Desiccated Embryosfor me to sign. While Цrvar laces up his boots, I try to think of something witty to mark the occasion, but nothing witty arrives.