‘Lutheran, drab and remote’?: Reykjavik
When the four of us went to Iceland in May, I of course expected wonder: otherworldly landscapes, absorbing culture, uber-cool yet deeply authentic everything.
I expected wrong.
Instead of the interior of a Sigur Ros song, we found ourselves in Portrush mid-February: cold, windy, unkempt, forlorn. In fact, it was all a little ordinary – the very opposite of the mystery and majesty I thought I was in for.
We went to Iceland and didn’t find it. So when I got home, the investigation began.
I started with Sigur Ros, the focus of my ire. Who else had done more than the world famous ‘post-rock’ band to project the contemporary image of Iceland as a blend of cutting edge-hipness, ancient insight, and mad beauty? I had learned on our trip what a savvy, sarky lot those Icelanders are and began to think that Sigur Ros had in fact been cynically manufactured by some mogul of the Icelandic tourist office – a Simon Cowellsson, if you will – to lure gullible, authenticity-starved tourists like me and sex up the Icelandic brand. How had I not seen it?
But when I watched Heima back – the film of a string of free concerts they played around their homeland in 2006 – I was surprised to see the melancholic banality of the place right there on show. True, it’s a little hidden amongst all the pretty children, stunning music, and enviable jumpers, but it is there.
Ten episodes of Trapped also resonated. The crime noir makes no attempt to convey mystique or pleasure of any kind (though I did hear Sigur Ros on the soundtrack at one point). Instead we get corpses, more jumpers, and a remote town that appears un-liveably grim and un-stimulating.
That town brought to mind somewhere we briefly passed through one windy day, Grindavik . The guidebook talked up a harbour-side cafe. I’ve seen some truly godforsaken villages – I grew up in the west of Ireland – but Grindavik takes the biscuit. I’d call it a ghost town but that would imply there were at least ghosts in it. Ghosts would have warmed the place.
The road to Grindavik
Then I hit the books. First was Letters from Iceland (1937), a strange little travelogue written by the poets WH Auden and Louis MacNeice after a trip to the island in 1936. In the 1967 preface, Auden writes:
‘In my childhood dreams, Iceland was holy ground; when, at the age of twenty-nine, I saw it for the first time, the reality verified my dream; at fifty-seven it was holy ground still, with the most magical light of anywhere on earth.’
Yet the book paints a less romantic picture. Auden’s first impression of Reykjavik is ‘Lutheran, drab and remote’. Indeed – the architecture, especially, is dire, and clearly little improved since the 1930s (the impressive new glass concert hall, the Harpa, only makes everything else look worse). Corrugated iron, brown and grey pebble-dash walls, boxyness; Belfast is Vienna or Paris compared to Reykjavik. All that aesthetic unpleasantness and they weren’t even communists – it’s hard to account for. We stayed in an Air BnB apartment that was, like everything else, contentedly lodged in the 1970s.
A lot of time in Letters from Iceland is spent in soggy hardship, fighting terrain, boredom and weather. We didn’t do Auden and MacNeice’s pony trekking but we took a few long drives. One led us to Seljelandfoss waterfall. A lovely route, allegedly; we couldn’t see more than ten metres in front of us the whole two hours thanks to the fog-mist-cloud. Five minutes in the rain to photograph the waterfall and we drove straight back to Reykjavik, regrouping in a Pizza Hut all-you-can-eat buffet.
I also came across Iceland Defrosted (2013), a travel book by Edward Hancox. What vision of the eponymous pile of rocks would he give us? Ah, the blurb: the book is a ‘love letter’ to Iceland, and no doubt, here is a man fully inhabited by the magical notion of Iceland – much as I wanted to be.
It’s an enjoyable book but his love for his adopted spiritual home really is unconditional. When he arrives in one barely-existing village, his ‘heart dropped’ for it seemed so ‘completely isolated, so utterly desolate, so hopelessly damned’. Ha, at last, I thought, a cold stab of reality! But two pages later, he drives off resolved that Djupavik is in fact ‘utterly beautiful, completely different and consistently beguiling’!
The car park at Seljelandfoss
A big theme for Hancox is the extraordinary creativity of the Icelanders, and he gives us a flavour of Reykjavik’s fabled music scene and nightlife. Fair enough, the latter were not on our family holiday-type itinerary – I’m sure it’s all terrific – but for all the hype about Iceland’s hipness and artiness, I’d have expected it to make its presence felt a little more. We saw some hipsters. I think that was it.
In between all this I reread the Lonely Planet guides, the fat one that goes in your suitcase and the small one that goes in your pocket. They had much on Icelandic history and culture which is undeniably interesting – on paper. Their insider observations (‘Icelanders drink a lot of coffee’, ‘Icelanders like to socialise in the swimming pools’, ‘you’ve got to try a hot dog’) get a little wearisome and are not terribly evident or useful when you are actually there. At least they are frank about the price of things, and the weather.
The weather, could it really all boil down to this? Did we just get a bad week – otherwise I’d be gushing about Auden’s ‘holy ground’?
Anything you’ll read or see about Iceland will acknowledge the devilish weather – in Trapped, the elements are the whole premise – though of course you’ll generally see Iceland photographed in the summer sun. The weather thwarted one of our main intentions: to see some wildlife. Iceland’s whale-watching and puffin tours are apparently unmissable (unlike the actual whales, which are apparently quite missable), and we’d got an appetite for this from an engrossing BBC nature documentary, Iceland: Land of Fire and Ice. The puffin trip was cheaper and shorter so we went for this.
Two days we turned up at the harbour but the boat wasn’t running due to bad weather. I was sad not to share the sighting of this wonderful creature with my little ones. Beautiful and rare, right? A unique part of this magical and surprising island of the north? Nope. Apparently Rathlin Island is coming down with them.
But the main reason I’m inclined to blame the weather for our underwhelming is that we did have one sunny day out of seven, and it was sublime and enchanting.
It was our first day, when we made what turned out to be possibly the best family decision of recent memory: hit nature and not the shops, and do the patently uncircular Golden Circle, the famous tourist route which takes in the three key sights within a day’s drive from Reykjavik: Geysir, Gullfoss, and Thingvellir (we just had time for the first two).
Gullfoss
It was wonderful – Gullfoss especially, a two-levelled waterfall that goes into a gorge. I won’t wrack my brains for the appropriate superlatives but I definitely had one of my ‘excited’ moments. We knew then that even if the next six days were a disaster, the trip had been worth it.
And there were other bright spots, three things in particular that I loved about Iceland.
The first was the relative absence of class and materialism. Auden described Iceland as ‘the only really classless society I have ever encountered’. I couldn’t discern haves and have-nots though presumably wealth disparity exists to some extent. There was also a complete absence of tipping, an awful practice which always seems to me to indicate an unfair and unequal society. Social security and healthcare are famously high quality.
The second was the effortless and completely clean geothermal energy. The rest of the world really should be seething with jealousy at this.
But the greatest gift we received from Iceland was skyr, the high protein, low-fat yogurt/soft cheese which is deeply satisfying and which I now eat by the bucket. Well, I eat the ‘Icelandic-style yogurt’ sold in Tesco – the proper Icelandic stuff has so far eluded us, though the internet says it can be found in some shops.
So in conclusion – what? What does this all mean? Does ‘Iceland’ not exist or did we simply miss it? Why has this weird island been troubling me?
Well I know the answer because I had an epiphany a few weeks ago.
The trouble with Iceland is this:
It’s too much like home.
Just change the ‘c’ in Iceland and what do you get? Exactly – another craggy island in the North Atlantic.
The green hills, the crap towns, the undersized cafes, the pale-skinned and weather-beaten locals, the dry wit, the ocean’s dominance, the mystic beauty in good weather and the brooding and boredom in bad; no, Ireland doesn’t do volcanoes but the two islands have a lot in common.
Iceland – our neighbour and our cousin – induced in me the love-hate angst which is always bred by the familiar. And I confess that (and no offence to Iceland though that puffin has probably flown by now) I returned home with a whole new appreciation of my own green isle.
And yet and yet and yet – a place which has kept me thinking about it for the last many months can’t be all bad. I’m still eating my skyr.
And I’m oddly sure I’ll be back to search again.
David Mitchell 