Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was: A Novel
by Sjón
Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. 160 pages, $22.
THE WRITER known as Sjón (Sigurjón Birgir Sigurösson), whose pen name is an abbreviation of his given name meaning “sight,” is an Icelandic poet, novelist, and librettist who is perhaps best known for his frequent collaborations with the singer Björk. His previous novels, The Blue Fox and From the Mouth of the Whale, have received accolades, and his new novel, Moonstone, is being praised by renowned writers such as David Mitchell, who called it a “shimmering masterpiece.”
Set in Reykjavik in 1918 as the large Katla volcano in southern Iceland is erupting, Moonstone unfolds against the backdrop of the island being ravaged by the Spanish influenza epidemic, which accompanied the troops home to Iceland after the close of World War I. In this respect, the novel follows in the footsteps of a number of literary greats, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mask of the Red Death” or Aharon Appelfeld’s underappreciated Badenheim 1939, in depicting a world in crisis. In Poe’s case, the symbol of impending doom is the bubonic plague; in Appelfeld’s, it’s Nazism. In Sjón’s novel, the metaphor is AIDS, and he expressly invites comparison with these earlier catastrophes.
The heart of Moonstone (whose subtitle, The Boy Who Never Was, carries a host of significations), however, is identity—gay identity—both the transgressive nature of its longings and its connection to gender. The novel begins with the sixteen-year-old narrator, Mani, literally hiding in the shadows as he services an older gentleman for pay. Young Mani is an outlier in Icelandic society, an orphan whose outlaw sexuality puts him at odds with the prevailing heterosexual culture, and whose gender-fluid concept of himself also challenges society’s beliefs. Attending a screening of the silent movie epic Les Vampires, Mani is captivated by the film’s star, Musidora, and imagines that he sees her doppelgänger in the audience. It is never quite clear whether “Sola G—” actually exists or is just a figment of Mani’s imagination, but she is clearly a stand-in for his subconscious desires, a challenge both to society’s laws and to its traditional notions of gender.
Louis Feuillade’s 1915 French film, Les Vampires, is not about actual vampires but is instead characters who prey upon society by perpetrating a “plague” of break-ins, thereby continually flaunting the rules of that society. Thus, the author underscores the point that, merely by being gay in Reykjavik in 1918 and acting upon those desires, Mani is a kind of criminal himself: “But the boy is sixteen now; he does what he likes. If he wants to hang himself with a silk scarf that is fragrant with the scent of the motorcycle girl, Sola G—, that’s just what he’ll do.” Mani continues to earn money by servicing older gentlemen, even as the volcano keeps erupting, and people get sicker and sicker from the Spanish flu. Indeed, much of the population seems to have become sick after attending the screening of Les Vampires at the local movie house. Mani himself becomes infected, leading to some of the more surreal passages in the book, and it must be said that at times Moonstone can be somewhat opaque. And yet, once one gets a general sense of what the author is about, the difficulties disappear. Take the image of the moonstone, which appears to Mani in a fever dream: “A rock the height of a man, made of moon-pale stone, stands in the middle of the floor.” The moonstone, too, seems to be a stand-in for Mani, whose identity exists only as something reflected upon him by others, an entity that receives its light from another body.
At the risk of ruining the ending, let me say only that the book is very much about imagination and transcendence, and gathers much of its poignancy by presenting one man’s search for the self against the backdrop of a world that’s rapidly being destroyed. Moonstone is a slender but beautifully wrought novel, rich with meaning and interpretations that reward the reader’s patience. In one passage, the author describes Mani as “a shadow that passes from man to man, and no one is complete until he has cast him.” Sjón has achieved a tremendous feat of empathy and understanding by creating him. In the end, he is a character that moves out of the shadows to cast considerable light.
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Dale Boyer is the author of the novel The Dandelion Cloud.
