Moonstone: the boy who never was – Sjón (2013 trans. Vicotoria Cribb 2016) 144 pages

I really loved Sjón’s novella The Blue Fox when I read it back in 2016, and since then I’ve failed to pick up anything by him at all. Moonstone was good choice for a return as I found this novella lyrical and involving.  

(I should warn anyone picking up this novella that it opens with a very explicit scene, and given that one of the characters is referred to as ‘the boy’ I thought I’d been plunged straight into the details of a sexual assault. Thankfully that was not the case.)

Máni Steinn Karlsson is living in Iceland in 1918, a time of profound change. The Katla volcano erupts:

The volcano is painting the night sky every shade of red, from scarlet through violet to crimson, before exploding the canvas with flares of bonfire yellow and gaseous blue.

The influenza epidemic takes hold:

“The young people glance around, and only now does it dawn on them how many members of the audience have been taken ill: every other face is chalk-white; lips are blue, foreheads glazed with sweat, nostrils red, eyes sunken and wet. Silence falls on the gathering.”

and Iceland votes to be independent from Denmark.

Máni is an outsider, raised by a foster mother, isolated at school and gay at a time when this was illegal in Iceland. He escapes to the cinema, and through this new medium become fixated with Sóla G, a young girl around his own age:

“It was when the girl stood up to leave that it happened. The instant her shadow fell on the screen they merged – she and the character in the film. She looked around and the beam of light projected Musidora’s features onto her own.

The boy froze in his seat. They were identical.”

As Máni carries on with his life through these extraordinary circumstances, he is brought closer to Sóla G and to the dangers of living in ways that society deems unacceptable, the least of which is his love of cinema.

Sjón’s writing is crystal clear and beautifully evocative. He balances reality and fantasy with delicate precision, each blending into the other, without ever losing his characters or the impact of his story. [Slight spoiler in the next sentence, please skip if you prefer!] The metaphysical ending may not be to everyone’s taste but I thought it worked perfectly and found it truly moving.

“He’d had no inkling that when the pestilence took hold Reykjavík would empty and convey the impression that nothing was happening at all; that the town would become an abandoned set that he Máni Steinn could envisage as the backdrop for whatever sensational plot he cared to devise, or, more accurately, for the kind of sinister events that in a film would be staged in this sort of village of the damned – for these days the real stories of being acted out behind closed doors. And they are darker than a youthful mind can begin to imagine.”