Blowing hot and cold

The landscape is treeless and windswept but spectacular, with volcanoes, glaciers and geysers, the climate and cuisine nearly always disagreeably challenging: it is sometimes hard to explain the affection and loyalty Iceland has inspired in so many visitors, from Auden and Isherwood in the Thirties to the academic and novelist Sarah Moss in 2009. She too was drawn back when, long after a memorable gap-year visit, she took a job at the university and returned to live there with her family.

My family also lived in Reykjavik, back in the Sixties, when my father was posted there as ambassador. Holidays with our Icelandic and American friends were good fun. This is what I remember: my hair, frozen and clinking around my ears as we walked home from the hot outdoor pools in mid-winter; riding at a fast trot on ponies with wide backs as comfortable as armchairs over the lava fields and across rushing rivers; camping under the midnight sun near a volcanic site rightly called Myvatn (midge lake); skating in the dark on the lake in central Reykjavik — you could be blown right across just by holding your coat open.  

Much has changed since those days. The country has suffered a spectacular financial collapse, known there as the kreppa. Reykjavik, back then a small town of concrete or wooden houses with bright corrugated iron roofs, is now ringed, like Miami or Marbella, with speculative blocks of luxury flats, which stand empty and unfinished.

How was it that a nation of austere, hard-working, saga-reciting farmers and fishermen took so readily to the crazy borrowing and lending of recent years? Sarah Moss doesn’t quite answer that question, but in this absorbing account of her year in Reykjavik following the crash (and coinciding, too, with the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull), she sheds light on the strangeness of the country for an outsider as well as on the Icelanders’ ongoing trauma.