The Tricking of Freya (review)

The Tricking of Freya is Christina Sunley’s debut novel. Set in the US, Gimli (Manitoba), and Iceland, it is a story of a Canadian family of Icelandic descent, crossing centuries, cultures, oceans, and mental states. In addition to a dramatic family saga, centered more or less on the workings and effects of mental illness, the novel incorporates themes like immigration, dislocation, identity, and the preservation of cultural traditions. It also entails an extensive account of a cultural heritage, transforming, at times, a fictional piece into a seemingly different kind of text. The form of the novel may reveal its vast scope, oscillating between a travelogue and epistolary fiction. It is Freya, the protagonist, one thinks, who keeps all the threads together by diving into the history of a family’s secret.

The journey begins with a present day letter to an unknown reader, ferrying us back to the setting of Freya’s childhood in America, and her first visit with her mother to their relatives in Gimli. By applying the perspective of a child, the narrator creates a generous air of openness—a feeling of unchained perception. Given the nature of the novel’s main subject, the opening chapters could be viewed as crucial for the journey about to take place into the land of mental uncertainty. Due to this air of openness, brought about in the company of a child, the reader is caught off guard and enters the enigma, free of many of the hard-to-shake-off prejudices that still tend to cloud the views of the best of people. Not even Michael Foucault could set the record straight with his Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.

The seductiveness of the child’s perspective in the opening chapters of Sunley’s novel is so successful, that the reader is slow to catch on to the already present signs of an actual and fateful mental disorder. Like the vulnerable child at the center, the reader is swept away by an uncontrollable force. In fact, the gloom of the looming shadow may be present from the very start, soon to affect the life of the young girl in the most painful and long-lasting way. Prior to arriving for the first time in Gimli to spend a summer with her grandmother, Sigga, and her mother’s sister, Aunt Birdie, there is considerable, escalating tension between the two sisters, on the subject of why the mother and the daughter have not visited their family in Gimli since the birth of Freya:

More summers passed, and as each approached I’d hear my mother arguing with Birdie on the phone. “I did not abandon you! I married an American. Really, Birdie. Everything doesn’t have to do with you.” But it did. In the end it did

(21).

Something is broken in the Gimli-family, and as the story unfolds, all rivers seem to flow to an oceanic reality, waiting to be acknowledged by the removal of a veil of secrecy. However, with the piling up of discussion-like episodes on several additional themes, incorporating, it seems, a kind of an introduction to the Icelandic cultural heritage at large, and that from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, Freya’s courageous journey entails too many curves and twists, clouding somewhat the build-up to the novel’s dramatic climax, and delaying for too long the journey’s end. These themes range from an introduction to the Icelandic language and the ancient, poetic tradition (via the obvious reference to Norse mythology, hence, the novel’s title), to fragments on the authenticity of present-day, annual, Icelandic festivals in Gimli. The love Icelanders bear for the most precious mead, poetry, is real. The question, however, is how to address these cultural themes without running the risk of their becoming either superficial or clichés.

Very different from the too direct references to the far from clearcut Icelandic cultural heritage, the novel’s immediate strength is the...