The Sea Road

by Margaret Elphinstone

Genres: Historical Fiction
Pages: 256
Rating:

Synopsis:

A haunting, compelling historical novel, The Sea Road is a daring re-telling of the 11th-century Viking exploration of the North Atlantic from the viewpoint of one extraordinary woman. Gudrid lives at the remote edge of the known world, in a starkly beautiful landscape where the sea is the only connection to the shores beyond. It is a world where the old Norse gods are still invoked, even as Christianity gains favour, where the spirits of the dead roam the vast northern ice-fields, tormenting the living, and Viking explorers plunder foreign shores.

Taking the accidental discovery of North America as its focal point, Gudrid's narrative describes a multi-layered voyage into the unknown, all recounted with astonishing immediacy and rich atmospheric detail.

Margaret Elphinstone’s The Sea Road is a retelling of the story of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, a woman who appears in a couple of the Icelandic sagas, including Eirik the Red. She was one of the early converts to Christianity, so this book takes the format of the story she tells about herself to a fellow Icelander who is a priest, Agnar, who is tasked with recording her strange story. They’re both the major characters, although we only actually “hear” Agnar in the prologue and the epilogue.

Part of the format works quite well, but the conceit of Agnar writing absolutely everything Gudrid says — even idly chitchat between the two of them — doesn’t quite work, especially since he doesn’t also record his answers. At times, Elphinstone seems to have found the format too limiting, and adds in sections in italics that I think are meant to show us what really happened, outside of Gudrid’s knowledge and without her mediating it. That felt kinda clunky to me.

That said, for the most part I thought this worked really well: Gudrid is a pretty warm character, and the way that warmth and vitality draws Agnar in is pretty good. It extrapolates the sagas into a story that lives and breathes, bringing vivid realism to Gudrid’s relationships with her husbands and her feelings about them, her experiences with her children, and the remarkable events she witnesses, all mingled together and remembered by her as something that happened long ago. I really liked it, and thought it did a good job with the material (though purists would never be happy, and those hoping for pure historical fiction would be disappointed, since there are ghosts mentioned several times).

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)