Saga

Title: Saga: A Novel of Medieval Iceland

Author:Jeff Janoda

Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers (2005)

Genre(s): Fiction, Historical Fiction

Length: 353 pages

Synopsis: Life is hard in medieval Iceland.  The earth is rocky and difficult to farm.  The winters are long and dark and bitter.  The people are hard too, as they must be to survive in such a place; men, and women too, use their influence to their own greatest advantage..  Saga presents the tale of one valley and the chieftains that rise and fall from power there.  Inheritance and murder, legal maneuvering and cold-blooded revenge, ghosts, gods, and the ever-present, whispering elves combine to tell a story that is both immediately accessible, and yet just a bit out of reach, a saga of another time and another place, remembered in the telling.

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion: The word "subtle" is not exactly the first to my mind when someone mentions vikings, and yet this tale has shown a great capacity for it.  At its most crude and basic, we have here a fight over farmland, and yet Janoda was deepened the tale to include so much more.  It's as much a novel of political intrigue, familial ties, and courtroom drama as it is a violent viking vendetta (if I may be superfluously alliterative).  "Never kill more men than you can afford to pay for," a character says at one point, and it's quite true throughout the story.  Relatively little blood is shed, but the conniving machinations of the various chieftains in this story are quite gruesome enough.  There are faint elements of the supernatural: malicious little elves flit at the corners of vision, and several deaths have a rather otherworldly bent, but this is not a fantasy.  Here we don't have horned-helmet wearing, dragon-ship sailing Norse raiders.  These are Icelandic farmers, solid, dependable, and utterly ruthless.  Intriguing though the premise is, the story itself is somewhat slow and methodical, grinding relentlessly forward like an Icelandic glacier.  It's never quite slow enough to be dull, but at the same time, one can't help but feel as if the story hasn't quite gotten started yet, even well into the book.  It's as though we're waiting for that one moment when the tale stops being back-story and becomes the narrative we feel we're expecting, but it's not a moment that ever really comes.  By the time I finished, I realized I never did get the story I was expecting, but the one I got was certainly worth the read.