In the arctic borderlands in the 1800s Finns and Swedes have come to live among the Sami. Missionaries and traders, they have brought alcohol and Protestant teaching. ‘Mad Lasse’ is what the locals call the preacher, and mostly they keep their distance, staying with their reindeer out on the tundra, following their ancient customs.
Some, though, have been awakened. Hanna Pylvainen’s novel opens with Biettar, a Sami widower, brought to church by an earthquake – by a voice he heard among the tremors. In his fur trousers, stinking of smoke and reindeer, he falls to his knees before Mad Lasse, declaring himself with God.
So the preacher exerts his pull, but then so does the trading post next to the church. Its shelves are stocked with brannvin and vodka, and its proprietor is all too willing to allow Sami debts to rack up ahead of the annual reindeer cull. Before his conversion, Biettar drank away most of his herd there. His son, Ivvar, seems bent on drinking away the rest – until, leaving the post one morning, losing his footing and slipping on the ice, his hand is caught by Willa, the preacher’s eldest daughter.
Their flirtation is beguiling. Each as cautious as the other, each as smitten too, what starts as an unlikely friendship spills into something irresistible – and dangerous for both. When church and family step between her and Ivvar, Willa flees for the tundra, just at the start of the reindeer migration.
The girl’s induction into the Sami allows Pylvainen to show this world to the reader without the grind of exposition. Through Willa’s eyes, we experience the harsh beauty of the land and life; but through Ivvar’s, we see how difficult it will be to support this new love. Willa is an incomer with no herd to merge with his own.
Willa doesn’t know it, but she has been taken in by her rival. Risten had wanted Ivvar. Her family herd is one of the largest, and their marriage might have saved him from destitution. So this is a tale of impossible love, and a very good one too: our sympathies are tugged this way and that with great and delicate skill.
But it also explores the impossibility of borders, of settlement in nomad lands, of painful, inevitable change. The End of Drum Time is a novel of large ideas and beautiful details. Pylvainen’s characters are alive, her prose deft, her story’s conclusion sad and satisfying – uplifting too, against the odds. I’m already looking forward to her next.
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