A Poet Newly Revealed

Sartain continuedfrom previous page the house above, he could easily be describing the complex structure of Icelander itself, just a quick demonstration ofthe layered postmodern sensibility to be found in the book. In Icelander's narrative structure, there is an overarching frame-tale that brackets the book's two focal stories. The frame-tale for Icelander describes the book as a found text of unknown origin, possibly authored by the late, great New Cruiskeen author, Magnus Valison. Edited by the immanent Valison scholar, John Treeburg, Icelander contains contextualizing footnotes throughout the novel, as well as an afterword, "Concerning the Origin and Authorship of Icelander," that reveals more about Treeburg's biases than it does about Icelander. The first of the book's primary plots is told through the eyes of Our Heroine, whose name represents a not-so-subtle clue that her plot is the one of central importance. Our Heroine is the daughter of the famous archaeologists, detectives, and explorers Jon Ymirson and Emily Bean, whose exploits form the basis for Magnus Valison's "magnum opus, the twelve-volume novelization of [Emily Bean's] diaries , which he matter-of-factly titled The Memoirs ofEmily Bean." Unlike her parents. Our Heroine is an adventurer only by circumstance, not by choice, and wishes only for the retiring life of a professor at the New Cniiskeen University, out of the limelight of international stardom. However, her placid world is thrown back into tumult again at the beginning of Icelander as she is dragged back into a life ofintrigue following the murder of her friend and confidant, Shirley MacGuffin. Icelander's secondary plot involves the MacGuffin murder, but as its Hitchcockian name suggests, the murder is less important than the driving force it lends to the narrative. Even though MacGuffin's untimely demise is a preoccupation for the present -action of the book, Icelander is really about the lives and interactions of its characters, which include MacGuffin's husband, detective Blaise Duplain, a pair of bumbling "philosophical investigators" named Wible and Pacheco, and a bothersome gossip columnist, Constance Lingus. All get harnessed into Icelander's intricate plot by the force of the murder, which may or may not have something to do with MacGuffin's final unfinished work, an attempted literary reconstruction of a Thomas Kyd version of Hamlet that predates Shakespeare's. The novel intricately weaves in and out of different perspectives and narrative voices. The novel's first part is exclusively restricted to Our Heroine, told in third person, the novel's second part jumps from character to character, all told in first person, and the final part of the novel returns to Our Heroine's restricted perspective, but now is told in first person . Throughout, the book's ostensible editor, John Treeburg, provides editorial commentary through his footnotes and Afterword. Confused yet? You have every right to be, but have faith, gentle reader. In the hands of a lesser author, this bewildering cacophony of narrative voice, disparate plotline, and postmodern sensibility would be a dangerous brew destined to come out flat and opaque at best. But in Long's hands, the nearly unthinkable happens, as he successfully ties together all these separate threads into a story that has narrative coherence and brings the reader along with humor, wit, and intellect . Along the way he peoples the journey with fun and interesting characters, as well as intriguing side plots — some real, some fictional—such as Hamlet's contested authorship and origins, the nature of the much-argued split of Norse mythology into two pantheons (the Aisir and the Vanir), and the existence and history of Vanaheim, a long lost underground society in Iceland. The book is intensely metafictional, constantly making references to Long's literary predecessors, but it is never bogged down by these references. For instance, Nabokov makes an appearance in Icelander as the author, Magnus Valison, who has a pair ofbooks anagrammatically titled Ripe Leaf and hallo after Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) and Lolita (1955), respectively . Wible and Pacheco, Icelander's other erstwhile investigators , seem to have attended the same detective school as Douglas Adams's befuddled sleuth. Dirk Gently, of Dirk Gently 's Holistic Detective Agency (1987...