Customer Reviews

The atom station

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In the Atom Station, Halldor Laxness demonstrates the skill and complexity that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel tells the story of a simple lass from the north of Iceland who comes face to face with the duplicity of politicians who sell out Icelandic sovereignty for the sake of a nuclear station during the cold war. She also comes to some realizations about herself and the importance of social class and knowledge and how these interact in today's modern world. The novel will be of very special interest to those with some knowledge of Iceland and its history. For those without such knowledge, the novel will compel you to learn more about this fascinating country and its wonderful author laureate, Halldor Laxness.

For the first two thirds of the book, we are cast headlong into a confused world of materialistic politicians, posturing socialists, and over-precious intellectuals. This mirrors the perplexity that the young Ugla finds when she leaves the North of Iceland to live in Reykjavik as the serving girl to a powerful member of parliament.

I could have laid the book aside, but I had read Laxness before and was curious to see where he would take me. Ugla becomes pregnant and returns to her family in the country to have her child and think things through and, in her words, "to become a person." From crazy Reykjavik, we suddenly find ourselves in the clear light of the great Sagas of the 13th century. Here there are no harsh moral judgments; and even the Lutheran pastor refers to Gunnar of Hlidarendi in NJAL'S SAGA as being on the same plane as the Good Book.

As a hardened Saga fiend, I was enthralled. Here was an Icelander saying that the answer to the topsy turvy world of Cold War Europe was to look at the past and within onseself -- to follow the God who, by definition, was the one left over when all the other ones have been named.

Ugla finds her way in the end -- even if she traced a great circle in the process. Like G K Chesterton, Laxness is a great optimist; and he left this reader with a smile and the resolve to read more of his works.

Halldor Laxness, the prodigal son of Icelandic literature, made a distinct stylistic change with this novel, moving from long post-Naturalist tragedies of the outlying regions of Iceland to a fast-paced and often funny romp through Reykavik.

This novel tells the story of the protest surrounding the founding of an American military base in Iceland. The story is told through the eyes of a young, naive servant girl from the country, who, shortly after moving to the city, finds herself surrounded by poets, protesting Socialist students, and Icelandic and American government officials. The girl loses her innocence but gains, not knowledge of the world, but rather entry to the modern world.

Laxness is one of the largely-ignored greats (possibly doomed to obscurity by winning the Nobel prize for literature), and this novel is a fantastic entry into the canon of postmodern literature.

It's good to see a reprinting of this novel. In the 1960s it was on the reading list of foreign literature for Australian high schools and universities as the issues it raises were very relevant then and remain so now for Australia and other nations.

It needs to be said that this is a comedy, but a dead-pan comedy just as the author's Independent People is a dead-pan tragedy. There are no jokes or witty repartee here; Scandinavian humour can be very dry. This novel is a political satire that relies on irony which can be hard to fathom unless you understand the context. Not that you have to be an expert in Icelandic politics to understand it - Australian, New Zealanders and Canadians will all appreciate it, as will most Europeans.

The satire is disguised as a coming-of-age novel. The novel is set in 1949. Iceland has just gained its independence from Denmark, but it is also the beginning of the Cold War. The Prime Minister has granted the US the right to establish a strategic bomber base in Iceland - the "Atom Station" of the title. The heroine is a young woman who has just reached the age when she can leave her parents and live an independent life but the only job available to her is as a servant...the metaphors are not difficult to fathom.

While it is sometimes claimed that the novel is anti-American, the few Americans who appear are friendly and generous, but have little interest in Iceland. The author's real venom is reserved for America's friends, personified by the Prime Minister.

He is anti-Communist. Not because Communists are the enemies of freedom but because they are the enemies of the wealthy. He is a man of moderate politics, not because he believes in democracy but because he has no beliefs, apart from a sense of entitlement. He is not in fact very loyal to the US, but he can be bought and the US is happy to buy him. There is not much loyalty in his household; his wife wants to leave him, and Iceland, for a richer man in the US. He tries to embrace (literally, figuratively) the heroine because she is young and has new ideas and a vision, which he lacks. His only virtue is that, in Boss Tweed's words, "He's an honest man; once he's bought he stays bought".

The Left are personified as a group of beatniks. Aware of the latest ideas and music they are good company and witty conversationalists. Supposedly delude by ideology, they have the most clear-sighted analysis of the situation, but they have no chance, and little ambition, to take power.

The conservatives are personified by the farmers. These old-fashioned patriots are disturbed by the thought that their homeland has left one empire only to become part of another. They try to find inspiration in the ethos of the sagas, but admit that only the Nazis truly followed this path - not much of a moral compass there. The rural landscape is littered with abandoned tumble-down buildings and deserted churches.

And so the heroine has to find her own way in life. The author gives us no explicit clues as to what that should be, but you should be able to read between the lines.

As a final note, with the end of the Cold War, the US closed down the "Atom Station" and has downgraded its embassy to a consulate. Iceland was never more than a pawn in the game. Having carefully followed the advice of the free-market economists the nation was sent bankrupt. The growing public mood seems to suggest that perhaps the path obliquely suggested in this novel is the one to follow.

The Atom Station is a scathing satire of the political mores in a very isolated society. Laxness makes bitter fun of the upper classes' petit-bourgeois snobbery, the blatant opportunism and short termism of the country's leadership, the backstage dealings, the unhealthily close alliance between business and politics. That was in the late 1940s. Sixty years later Iceland does not seem to have been able to escape that predicament. Laxness writes about the phony businesses with impressive front ends, befuddling investors and customers with hot air: "F.F.F.: in English, the Federation of Fulminating Fish, New York; in Icelandic, the Figures-Faking-Federation. One button costs half an eyrir over here in the west, but you have a company in New York, the F.F.F., which sells you the button at 2 kronur and writes on the invoice: button, 2 kronur. You make a profit of 4000%. After a month you are a millionaire." This is a prescient account of the basic mechanics behind Iceland's recent meteoric rise and equally dramatic economic collapse, leaving the country at the mercy of its international creditors. Today, Keflavik's US air base - the "atom station" in Laxness' novel - is no more. The Americans pulled out a couple of years ago. But the issue of Iceland's sovereignty is not of the table. It's not about being a forward base in the Cold War anymore, but the prize has now become the country's significant reserves of hydro-electric power. The Icelandic government's policy of selling off these reserves to the lowest (!) bidder, i.e. to extremely energy intensive industries such as aluminium refineries, is as controversial today as the establishment of a US air base was in the 1940s. Andri Snaer Magnason "Dreamland - Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation" (sadly only available via amazon.co.uk) is recommended reading to understand the deeper ramifications of this dispute. It is amazing how politics in such a small country continue to be driven by deeply atavistic reflexes. So Laxness' satire is still as topical as when it was written.

This book is a biting satire on world and Icelandic policies and on Capitalism and Communism. It lays bare the world's blatant immorality.

Against the will of the `populace', the corrupt Iceland establishment agrees to sell the whole country to a superpower who wants to build an atom station on the island `for use in an atomic war'.
For H. Laxness, `there is no such thing as morality'. In a context of any warmongering, there is only one overall immoral commandment: `hate one another in the same way European nations used to do before the concept of nationalism became obsolete and East and West were substituted in its place. The battlefield covers all lands, all seas, all skies; and particularly our innermost consciousness. The whole world is one atom station.'

H. Laxness sees no future for Capitalism (the wealthy few against the poor many): `no one imagines for one moment that it is possible to save Capitalism. (It) will drag world civilization down with it.'
Its foremost proponent, the US, has only one policy: `the dollar shall conquer'. It even exports fish to the greatest fish nation in the world: `Portuguese Sardines imported from America, the only fish which could scale the highest tariff walls in the world and yet be sold at a thousand per cent profit in the greatest fish country in the world, where even the dogs walk out and vomit at the mention of salmon.'

But also Communism is rejected. As the main character in this book, a maid in a wealthy family, states: `I betrayed the party'. What she wants is to be `a person among persons. Neither an impaid bondwoman like the wives of the poor, nor a bought madam like the wives of the rich; much less a paid mistress.' In one word: she wants freedom.

This book, written in 1948, didn't loose one bit of its human and world relevance.
It is a must read for all lovers of world literature.

Halldór Laxness' post-WWII satire The Atom Station has many parallels to the current Kreppa (crisis) in Iceland. As the story begins the country is in turmoil, there are demonstrations in the streets, and foreign powers threaten Iceland's recently won independence. Ugla (the name translates as "owl") is a young woman from the rural north, who finds employment as a housekeeper at the home of Búi Árland: Businessman, Doctor of Philosophy and Member of Parliament. In Ugla's eyes Búi's wife and children are spoiled rotten, symptomatic of the degenerate modern life in the city. When asked as to why she is in Reykjavík, Ugla says that she has come "south" to learn how to play the harmonium for church services back home. As the story progresses, however, she reveals that her real longing is to "...become a person, to know something, to be able to do something for myself..."

She takes "lessons" from a strange "organist" and his suspect circle of "friends." These lessons are as much about the way the world works as they are about music. Ugla also encounters a "cell" of Communists, further raising her awareness. Meanwhile, Búi hosts U.S. military men and members of parliament during negotiations to "sell the country" for an "atom station"- an event which did, in reality, lead to the existence of a U.S. military base in Keflavík for nearly sixty years.

All this inter-twined plot gives plenty of room for Laxness to explore the social issues of the day. Many of them, such as fraudulent deals by sham Icelandic businesses, read as if they were torn from today's headlines. Ugla's faith in the values of her rural upbringing is challenged, but she is ultimately faithful to them by her refusal to become Búi's mistress. Her decision to start a family with the somewhat shady man who fathered her child, while possibly not the best choice (although he is a Northerner as well), is a life of her choosing.

This book isn't on the epic scale of some of Laxness' other works, but I found it to be an enjoyable read- and much better the second time after I had gotten a little more background on its setting and themes. It has a much faster pace than most of his other novels, the whole story unfolds in less than a year. Laxness again shows sensitivity and insight in handling a female protagonist, and while Ugla is hardly the heroic figure portrayed in his earlier novel Salka Valka, her character has real depth. I've found myself quoting this book on more than one occasion. It might be a bit bewildering at times for the beginning Laxness reader, but it is a solid effort by a truly great novelist.

The Atom Station is a highly entertaining work by the great Icelandic storyteller Halldor Laxness. The heroine of the tale is Ugla, a plain speaking country girl from the North who is working as a maid in the house of her Member of Parliament. In the privileged, eccentric household she is the one character who stands out as real. Incapable of displaying the submissive obedience expected of her by the mistress of the house, Ugla soon falls out of favour with her. 'This woman has given me nothing but insolence ever since she came into this house, full of some sort of northishness as if she were my superior,' complains the lady to her husband, who has a warmer view of Ugla. The country girl's influence is a positive one on the children of the disfunctional household, who come to respect her authority and down to earth ways. Exposed to and baffled by the political world around her, Ugla is rather untouched by it, as if by a fantasy. She becomes pregnant and returns to the north country and her father's horse farm, where life has real meaning. Halldor Laxness writes the tale with humour and a sense of longing at times. His heroine stands head and shoulders over the mad characters she encounters in the city, like the calm hub in the centre of a strangely turning wheel. This reader for one couldn't help but fall in love with her. A great read.

One should not read this book before getting acquainted with the sagas, if you read only one, then try Njal's Saga. Laxness tries to convey to us the destructiveness of globalization long before it was called by that name, the destructiveness of making a liquid market in everything, putting a price on everything, eliminating all stability formed by old tradition. The girl in the story is the voice of the past, the voice from the sagas, and you cannot hear this voice at all if you have been programmed, indoctrinated by the ideology of neo-classical economic theory (the 'religion' of totally unregulated free markets, which are now known anyway to be dynamically unstable). Other books for some perspective: Berger's Pig Earth, Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld, Ross's The Annexation of Mexico. Also strongly recommended: Laxness's Independent People. Like John Berger, Laxness points out for us the destructiveness of unregulated 'development' and suggests that the antidote lies in something that most of us have'forgotten' about the past, about human relations as human relations rather than human beings as 'rational agents' in the neo-classical economic theory implicitly assumed true by the IMF, The World Bank, and The EU, the disastrous philosophy of totally unregulated free markets that has been swallowed hook, line and sinker by recent US leaders. If you wonder why the world is in crisis, look for the answer in the assumptions that are taken for granted by the leaders, the assumptions that they don't question.

I read Halldor Laxness' Independent People and loved it so much that I ordered all the out of print books by him I could find-- and The Atom Station, conveniently in print and available through Amazon Books. I hated "Station." I put it down 1/3 of the way through and have felt no need to pick it up. This is the first time I can remember doing this in a lifetime of compulsive reading. Laxness experimented with a new style in this one-- demonstrating that experiments sometimes fail. I found his parody obnoxious, his politics overwhelming, the characters unengaging, and the tone of the book irritating. I gave it a "3" because its not pulp-- it's intelligent. Original. Unusual. Maybe someone will like it. He's really a great writer!!!