The Call of the Cormorant by Donald S. Murray (2022)

 This is a book which is in some senses local to me. Shetland, where I live, is mentioned a few times, and the author lives here. It's also set, in its earlier sections, in Faroe, which is not too far away, and similar in a range of ways. I don't know the author, but could come across him at any time, given the small population here. Which brings up a standard difficulty when one has criticisms and lives in a relatively unpopulous community. Due to proximity, should one just shut up, and look to "propriety"? Or conversely see this journal for what it is, and speak? That's preferable to my thinking, but I know I need to be meticulous - and would like to think I am that habitually, anyway. Choice made...and hopefully not regretted. The subject matter of this book is a chap called Karl Einarsson, an Icelander/Faroe Islander, most of the meat of whose life was lived in the first half of the twentieth century. The book is a novelisation of his life, and has as a subtitle An Unreliable Biography: the author is at pains to point out in notes that it's a work of imagination, not only through choice, but also because of a paucity of available facts. Looking at what information there is, and reading between its lines, Einarsson emerges as highly evasive and highly eccentric. He harboured all sorts of ideas and identities: St Kilda was the only remnant of Atlantis, which had its own language (which he presumably invented); he, despite never having been there, was its self-styled "Count"; he also adopted the title Emperor Cormorant XII of Atlantis; was known under several other pseudonyms, including academic ones; having moved to Germany before the Second World War, he broadcast for the Nazis to his old homelands; after the war, he befriended Nobel winner Halldor Laxness, by whom some of his ideas and exploits were recorded. All this points to someone with significant pathology, very unlikely to be pinned down, except wholly in these terms. And that leads to a first criticism - the character here is, in his youth, a fairly average boy, who is mysteriously seen as a bit of a blowhard by some of those around him, but never really shown to us to be. Almost as though the oddness perhaps couldn't be depicted? It would certainly be a tall order for a writer; one would need virtuoso skills to do it convincingly, and perhaps Murray shied away instinctively. But it would have been there, in reality, and isn't here. Which makes the work of imagination which is this life quite a bit less convincing. An essential element is missing. When this Karl goes on to Denmark as he gets older, leaving the restrictions of Faroe behind, we get the slight shifting of axis so that some of the real character's later excesses can begin to be explored. But because of its earlier absence, his oddness is not compassed even in this section. He's made instead into more of a manipulative and evasive conman, though how that change comes about from the earlier ordinary boy is not overtly covered. It just happens to happen. Karl the boy here and Karl the man here don't really relate to each other. Two unreliable biographies. Proof of this pudding comes when the real Karl's written works are mentioned. Their nature does not match his as depicted here, like a fundamental disjunct. Other sections of the book come from Karl's sister Christianna, and tell a parallel story which stays in Faroe, detailing her falling in love with a shipwrecked Hebridean sailor, eventual marriage to a local, frustrations and dissatisfactions, unrequited love for another, and horror when she hears Karl's voice on the radio from Germany. These are far more anchored somehow, and it's a fastening we need, I think. We would no doubt have needed this strand even if the depiction of Karl had been a unified and convincing one, it would have formed something for that craziness to push against. There is, unfortunately, another criticism here: Christianna's voice is largely the same as Karl's. They have the same method and manner of investigating their inner workings and revealing their concerns. So, a little flat and underimagined to some extent. There is a last concern with this book, and it lies in the nuts and bolts of the writing. Firstly, Murray has the tendency for malapropism in similes: when the "constant" praise of his work by colleagues, necessarily episodic, is "rattling away like the drum downstairs", when someone with snow-white hair shifts their head, and "looks for all the world like a flurry of sleet or a blizzard", when the smells of a Copenhagen neighbourhood are "as regular and persistent as waves that crashed against the coastline of my home island", and many another example, one's confidence in the author flags a little. Secondly, there are enough typos and missing minor edits here (repeats of the same word within one or maybe two clauses, for example) to underline the need for these skills at publishing houses. The publisher of this is quite tiny. But there is also a proofreader mentioned in the acknowledgements - hmmmm. So, a plentifully fascinating subject, not well reached; it still has colour and interest, which go some way towards compensation.