Novel Review: The Prophets of Eternal Fjord

The Prophets of Eternal Fjord is a long book. It is a long grim book. It tells the story of a seminary student in 18th century Copenhagen who eventually becomes a missionary to Greenland. Copenhagen in the seventeen hundreds is a dirty, crowded city that contends with months of persistent darkness and profound cold. Yet its portion of Prophets of Eternal Fjord is the cheeriest slice of an interminably dour story.

The Copenhagen section is at least lively. All that happens in it is mournful and grotesque. Even the flowering of young love swerves toward the perverse, but it all happens briskly with the aid of enlightening self-reflection on the part of the main character. In this initial stretch of the book it is even possible to be lulled into a complacent sense that you are reading a book deserving of the laurels heaped upon it in its initial European run. It has the moribund humor about society and religion one associates with Voltaire and the oppressive fatalism of Thomas Hardy.

As the Copenhagen section of the book ends and the main character boards a ship for Greenland one might even look at the five hundred or so pages remaining with a twinge of masochistic pleasure, sure the proceedings are bound to get worse, but what if the book maintains its tone of sardonic fatalism and it turns out to be a masterpiece?

It does not and it is not.

Once the section on the boat is over we are thrown ahead in time six years. We are shown the aftermath of the missionary’s time in Greenland, all his sufferings and misdeeds are either spoken plainly or darkly hinted at and we see him as a broken man. This is a credible device that makes quick work of a long passage of largely empty time.

But then we are thrown backward again to his recent arrival and left to parse through the tedious business of watching unfold all the events of which we have just seen the result. This stretches for the length of a reasonably sized novel and one in which the character we’ve come to know disintegrates within a nearly void environment.

This could be seen as commentary on the necessity of other people against whom to define ones self or even a courageously lengthy takedown of political and spiritual colonialism as endeavors that seek to change the outer world but only destroy the inner being. The effect of reading it however is of being lost in a story in which the author lost track of what he was writing or why, and just began using his characters as hat racks upon which to hang elaborate and pointless misfortune.

Again, this might all be salient to the author’s point and message about the emptiness and desultory nature of human existence but it provides no reason why we should be made complicit in the heaping up of misfortunes. Even to the extent that we become just another of the author’s victims and ever finish reading this shambolic and meandering laundry list of miseries.