THE Laestadians, a small group of Christians tracing itself back to the 19th-century Lutheran Pietist revival under the leadership of Lars Levi Laestadius, a pastor of the Swedish Lutheran State Church, who worked north of the Arctic circle and was himself partly of Sámi descent. At the centre of this beautifully reimagined family saga are Laestadius’s daughters Willa and Nora, in whose story of life and love the encounter between the Sámi people and the “settlers” is played out.
It is the story of the encounter between two different cultures in the face of modern state power seeking to gain control of the age-old traditions of a people whose livelihood are their herds who graze without respect of borders. Laestadius’s converts are few, but one of them, Biettar, turns from drink and himself takes up preaching. Willa falls in love with his son Ivvár and joins the Sámi clan and their life of moving around with the herds.
Nora, on the other hand, marries Henrik, the storekeeper, who sells liquor to the local people on credit. Frans, Henrik’s uncle and the dean of the area, arrives to recover the debt owed to him, and events come to a head when he sets out to arrest some of the leaders of the Sámi and, in an act of wanton violence, destroys their herds. Drum time, the traditional life of the Sámi, disparagingly called Lapps, has come to an end, as two ways of life clash and choices have to be made.
The End of Drum Time has been called epic, but this saga of two families is told with great sensitivity and Pylväinen does not attempt to cast any of the protagonists as heroes. Each has their own trajectory of tragedy in them. Nor does she seek to impose modern understandings of the romantic on a setting that defies that concept. Yet there is beauty in the way in which she draws her readers not only into a forbidding landscape, but also into human encounters between two worlds between which it is almost impossible to move.
The End of Drum Time is a fascinating novel, gripping at times and slowing the reader down into a different rhythm of life and some probing questions of what converting and belonging might mean.
Dr Natalie K. Watson is a theologian and writer based in Peterborough.
The End of Drum Time
Hanna Pylväinen
Swift Press £14.99
(978-1-80075-436-2)
Church Times Bookshop £13.49