Sjón, Moonstone:: The Boy Who Never Was

Reading Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was in 2021 was an uncanny experience. Written in 2013 by renowned Icelandic author Sjón and translated into English by Victoria Cribb in 2016, the short novel seems premonitory of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Moonstone is about another pandemic, and not always the one it seems to present center stage; several epidemics lurk in the shadows of the novel and in the fringe communities of twentieth-century Iceland.

Set primarily over three months in the winter of 1918 in Reykjavík, Moonstone tells the story of sixteen-year-old Máni Steinn (mána/stein, moon/stone) Karlsson, who lives with his great-grandmother's sister and has sex with "gentlemen" for money. Máni's two passions in life—a girl named Sóla G and cinema—occupy most of his time, and he seems unconcerned and unaffected by the momentous events taking place both in Iceland and elsewhere in the world, including the independence referendum ratified with Denmark, the world war, and the "Spanish flu"—until, that is, the epidemic reaches the shores of Iceland and transforms the lives of the remote community.

True to the historical documents, Sjón notes the probable arrival of the influenza to Iceland aboard the passenger ship Botnia,¹ and Reykjavík is soon transformed:

An ominous hush lies over the busiest, most bustling part of town. No hoofbeats, no rattling of cart wheels or rumble of automobiles, no roar of motorcycles or ringing of bicycle bells. No rasp of sawing from the carpenters' workshops, or clanging from the forges, or slamming of warehouse doors. No gossiping voices of washerwomen on their way to the hot springs, no shouts of dockworkers unloading the ships, or cries of newspaper hawkers on the main street. No smell of fresh bread from the bakeries, or waft of roasting meat from the restaurants.

The doors of the shops neither open nor close—no one goes in, no one comes out—no one hurries home from work or goes to work at all.

No one says good morning. No one says good night.

(49)

As the disease tears through the city at an alarming pace, reaching its peak within a month, cinemas become a hotspot for the virus to spread, and elderly women become absurd symbols of hope and posterity:

The streets yawn, empty of people, except for glimpses here and there of the odd shadowy figure out and about. These are the old women, bundled up in black clothes, wearing shawl upon shawl to keep out the chill. They have given room to so many ailments in their day that the scourge now making a meal of their descendants can find no morsel worth having on their worn-out old bones.

(50)

Reading Moonstone in 2021 takes us on a strange journey through the looking glass back to 1918 and to 2020, but also forward, to a world shaped by pandemic disease.

Moonstone interweaves sexuality, humor, anxiety, and irony to depict the transformational effects of seemingly insignificant events upon both individuals and history. In doing so it highlights the bias of hindsight that not only crippled Reykjavík in 1918 but paralyzed the world in 2020. Sjón's subtle use of foreshadowing (Bernstein 1994) is a reminder of the conflicts of uncertainty, fear, and pathetic indifference that enabled the COVID-19 pandemic to spread and disrupt lives on a global scale. As Máni loiters outside a hotel in central Reykjavík, for example, he overhears a group of young men from the College for Marine Engineers discussing cases of influenza aboard the Botnia: "the same influenza that swept through the country last summer" (23). Máni himself was affected by the virus the previous year, and while it was an unpleasant experience, it would hardly generate irrational fear: "He was sick as a dog for five days, with a headache and a high temperature, a cold and an upset stomach" (23). As one of the young men displays a ring his sister brought back from Odense aboard the...