In Agnes Ravatn’s dark, mesmerising novel, The Bird Tribunal (published in Norway 2013, trans 2016), the natural world both surrounds and drives the tense human drama. Escaping her past life, Allis Hagtorn takes a job housekeeping and gardening for Sigurd Bagge – a strangely silent man living on the edge of a silent forest above an isolated Norwegian fjord. As she sets about trying to bring his disorderly garden under control, she begins to believe that she might also transform herself, that “there was salvation to be found.”
But salvation is no simple matter, and Ravatn’s taut, haunting prose generates a mounting sense of dread. She draws together several strands of myth and gothic archetype, with hints of Bluebeard and Rebecca. But most of all, emanating from the landscape itself, there are the themes and emotions of Norse mythology – salvation and transformation, death, guilt and retribution. The fjord and forest are beautiful but increasingly charged with sinister meanings.
As Allis walks into the “silent forest of roots and pinecones”, she feels almost entirely separated from the outside world: “living here was like ceasing to exist,” except in an increasingly menacing world of shared stories. Bagge recounts his dream of an ominous bird tribunal convening in the depths of the forest, a vision of twelve judges in bird masks sitting in silence and condemning him, charging him with “skemdarvig”, a crime so vile that no atonement is possible. Allis in turn tells him the story of Balder and Loki, of violence, revenge and the potential for evil: “Old guilt… destroyed by fire and swallowed by the sea,” a dragon that “sweeps through the air…with human corpses nestled among its feathers”.
Who are Bagge and Allis in this mythic world? Our sense of foreboding grows as the story is ever more strongly infused by the threatening, hallucinatory imagery of the ancient Eddas. The Bird Tribunal is a fascinating novel that lingers in readers’ minds long after they have finished reading.
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