IN MODERN Western societies where migration and mobility are part of life for many if not most people, “home” is not without complex connotations. Where is home? Can only one place or community be home? And how does home become home?
In Always Home, Always Homesick, Hannah Kent entices us to come with her to Iceland, the country that, for her, became home. Yes, she takes her readers “down memory lane”, back to the days when this all-Australian teenager arrived in Iceland, randomly, so it seems, chosen for her as the destination of a Rotary youth-exchange programme.
What emerges, however, is not a version of “my teenage diaries”, but something much more profound: the gradual move from looking for the experience of a different world to finding not only dark winters and “brutally beautiful landscapes”, but remarkable and welcoming people — something of home.
Always Home, Always Homesick is, however, far more than a travel log. Kent’s first novel, Burial Rites, helped to put Iceland and its people on the mental and imaginary maps of many people, and, after its publication, Kent was made an Honorary Citizen of Iceland. Her book is also a story of becoming a writer, of finding a story to tell — or, rather, being found by it.
In her case, it was that of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in Iceland: a story that has long haunted the population and was never quite told, but was always there in the nation’s subconscious. Kent recounts her own love story with Iceland from those early days to the writing and publication of Burial Rites, and beyond.
The book is indeed a love letter, beautifully written without being gushing, recounting personal experience, not least that of a teenager arriving in a strange place for the first time. Evocative descriptions of people and landscapes paint pictures in the mind’s eye: “The glacier rises as we draw closer. It is so white under the force of the unclouded sun, I squint. The sky cuts a raw blue behind its mass. . . I cannot fathom how a place of boiling heat and rupture is held between such gargantuan squats of ice. It feels elemental, as though I am watching the earth create itself.”
In the form of a love letter, it is an exploration of what being home, leaving home, and coming home can mean, perhaps most movingly expressed in the final thanks to Heidi, the author’s wife: “Home is where you are.”
Dr Natalie K. Watson is a theologian and writer based in Peterborough, and an honorary lay canon of Peterborough Cathedral.
Always Home, Always Homesick: A love letter to Iceland
Hannah Kent
Picador £16.99
(978-1-0350-6627-8)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29