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Yrsa Sigurdardottir: The Undesired
Nov. 27th, 2018 11:59 pmIn The Undesired, Yrsa Sigurdardottir demonstates once again that she is a master of a very particular genre, the eerie, part crime, part horror novel.
The Undesired opens with the death of the main character, Odinn. He is intoxicated, brain overwhelmed by carbon dioxide, half-aware that he and his daughter are sitting in a running car in a shut up garage filled with exhaust fumes. He struggles to remember where he is, and why, what is happening to him and Run. Just as the answers coalesce in his mind, as he begins to realise how this has come to be, the fumes overcome him. He will think no more.
We then travel backward in time, to a point some time before the deaths, to follow the unwinding of the life of Odinn Hafsteinsson. Odinn is an engineer by training, but he works for the State Supervisory Agency. He’s been assigned to take over an unfinished project from a recently deceased colleague, assessing whether any of the surviving children who had lived in a now closed home for delinquent boys - a home where two boys had died in suspicious circumstances - suffered harm or abuse that the state might be liable for.
Odinn is also a single father. His marriage ended a number of years ago, and he has been a weekend father for most of this time. But his former wife, Lara, died in an accident - a fall from a window in her flat - and now he is raising his eleven year-old daughter Run. He’s been in a state of shock, not really acknowledging that she’s dead, and to try to bring himself to face reality, he forces himself to read the police files on her death that he was given after the investigation was closed - only to discover that there were some unanswered questions, and that some of the witness testimony suggested that Lara had been arguing with someone just before her death. But investigation could find no one other than their daughter Run who could possibly have been in the flat, and she had been asleep when the police had brought her grandmother - who lived close by - to be with her when they went into the apartment.
The second viewpoint character is Aldis, whose sections are set in the 1970s, when the Krokur home was open, and Aldis worked there as a domestic. The environment she describes is cold, grey and isolated - a farm on a peninsula well away from the city, run by a cheerless, uncharitable couple who concealed the death of their newborn, fatally deformed child. Most boys who arrive here have the life and hope drained from them - no schooling, no recreational activities, just work on the farm. Aldis is not happy there either - her employers are unpleasant, there’s no social life, and she has been hearing odd noises, seeing strange things that she can’t quite make sense of.
Then a new resident arrives. Einar, older than many of the youths - older, in fact, than he should be, to be sent to a youth care facility rather than being dealt with as an adult - is intelligent, prone to breaking the rules, and just a little bit mysterious. Aldis, who is barely a year or two older than Einar, feels strangely drawn to him, and they begin an affair.
As one expects in a novel by Sigurdardottir, there are unexpected connections between characters, and between past and future. The events that took place in the lonely care facility, including the death of the two residents, have an all too disturbing bearing on both Lara and Odinn’s deaths, one that only becomes fully clear at the very end of the novel, when we discover the deep and enduring pain that set these events into motion, and we realise that the cycle has not yet run its course.
The Undesired opens with the death of the main character, Odinn. He is intoxicated, brain overwhelmed by carbon dioxide, half-aware that he and his daughter are sitting in a running car in a shut up garage filled with exhaust fumes. He struggles to remember where he is, and why, what is happening to him and Run. Just as the answers coalesce in his mind, as he begins to realise how this has come to be, the fumes overcome him. He will think no more.
We then travel backward in time, to a point some time before the deaths, to follow the unwinding of the life of Odinn Hafsteinsson. Odinn is an engineer by training, but he works for the State Supervisory Agency. He’s been assigned to take over an unfinished project from a recently deceased colleague, assessing whether any of the surviving children who had lived in a now closed home for delinquent boys - a home where two boys had died in suspicious circumstances - suffered harm or abuse that the state might be liable for.
Odinn is also a single father. His marriage ended a number of years ago, and he has been a weekend father for most of this time. But his former wife, Lara, died in an accident - a fall from a window in her flat - and now he is raising his eleven year-old daughter Run. He’s been in a state of shock, not really acknowledging that she’s dead, and to try to bring himself to face reality, he forces himself to read the police files on her death that he was given after the investigation was closed - only to discover that there were some unanswered questions, and that some of the witness testimony suggested that Lara had been arguing with someone just before her death. But investigation could find no one other than their daughter Run who could possibly have been in the flat, and she had been asleep when the police had brought her grandmother - who lived close by - to be with her when they went into the apartment.
The second viewpoint character is Aldis, whose sections are set in the 1970s, when the Krokur home was open, and Aldis worked there as a domestic. The environment she describes is cold, grey and isolated - a farm on a peninsula well away from the city, run by a cheerless, uncharitable couple who concealed the death of their newborn, fatally deformed child. Most boys who arrive here have the life and hope drained from them - no schooling, no recreational activities, just work on the farm. Aldis is not happy there either - her employers are unpleasant, there’s no social life, and she has been hearing odd noises, seeing strange things that she can’t quite make sense of.
Then a new resident arrives. Einar, older than many of the youths - older, in fact, than he should be, to be sent to a youth care facility rather than being dealt with as an adult - is intelligent, prone to breaking the rules, and just a little bit mysterious. Aldis, who is barely a year or two older than Einar, feels strangely drawn to him, and they begin an affair.
As one expects in a novel by Sigurdardottir, there are unexpected connections between characters, and between past and future. The events that took place in the lonely care facility, including the death of the two residents, have an all too disturbing bearing on both Lara and Odinn’s deaths, one that only becomes fully clear at the very end of the novel, when we discover the deep and enduring pain that set these events into motion, and we realise that the cycle has not yet run its course.
