Review time! with ‘The Exile’

“You hover like a hummingbird, haunt me in my sleep; you’re sailing from another world, sinking in my sea”

The Exile was originally published in the Netherlands in 2019, but now it’s here, so let’s check it out! This is by Eric Kriek (who also adapted it with Sean Michael Robinson, who also lettered it with Graham Miller and Frits Jonker), and it’s published by Living the Line.

Kriek sets the book in Iceland around … let’s say the middle of the tenth century, as it’s not too long after Iceland was settled by the Norse but after the Althing, the parliament, had been established in 930. It doesn’t matter too much, but I like to be a little accurate! Hallstein Thordsson, who was exiled seven years earlier, returns to Iceland so he can start his life over and try to reclaim some of his inheritance – he doesn’t know when he returns that his father has died, but he finds out soon enough. Unfortunately for him, a man who has good reason to hate him is unhappy that he’s back, and this leads to violence, naturally. It’s a tale as old as time!

Kriek does an excellent job telling the story slowly, leading up to the final confrontation, so that we both anticipate it more and also understand the many connections on the island between all the participants. He gives us a cast of characters at the beginning, which is nice but not really necessary, as the actual story does such a good job showing the way all these people are connected. Hallstein is tormented by dreams of his past, which eventually allows us to see exactly what he did and why he was exiled, and Kriek begins the book with one of those, so it gets us into his head right away. Before he can re-enter Icelandic society, we meet a woman, Solveig, and her son, Ottar, who live alone on a homestead. Someone is stealing the trees on their land, and Solveig believes it is Einar, who is courting her. We learn that she is very recently widowed, but Einar doesn’t want to give her any time to mourn, and it’s implied that he wants her land (which, of course, he does). Einar’s father, Ragnar, is a big deal on the island, and we see him at home with his son, discussing Solveig and her land and ignoring Vigdis, his daughter and Einar’s sister. Solveig sends her thrall, Cormac, to her father’s homestead to bring back some men to help her defend her land, and her mother sends her brothers, Toste and Toke, along with Cormac to help, as Solveig’s father is not completely in his right mind and her mother tends to run things. Hallstein returns to all of this, and we discover that Solveig is his stepmother – she married his father – and that he was exiled for killing Einar and Vigdis’s brother, whom he was close friends with. So Einar and Vigdis hate him, and they both take steps to get their revenge. Meanwhile, the plot to take Solveig’s land is a bit more far-reaching than just Einar and his father, so Solveig and Hallstein must find a way out of that, as well.

There’s a predictable tragic momentum to the story, but that’s fine – Kriek has complete control of the storytelling, so while it’s predictable, it remains compelling. The plot works, sure, but Kriek does some nice work with some themes he’s playing around with. The class prejudices are firmly in place, as Einar comes from a more socially powerful family while Hallstein is denigrated because his father was not married to his mother, who was an Irish slave (so he’s not even a “pure blood” Norseman, although that’s not really a part of the book, it’s just implied a bit). So when we see a bit about the murder, that comes into it. There’s the idea of men’s utility tied directly to their prowess at war and whether that’s something that’s a great idea, as Hallstein was always a good warrior and he has become even better during his exile, but Solveig wants to keep her young son – Hallstein’s half-brother – from the bloody life of a warrior. The sexist attitudes of these kinds of society is the biggest theme that Kriek brings in, and it’s pretty fascinating. Einar, of course, wants to marry Solveig because she has the best land on the island (which is why someone – Einar, perhaps? – is stealing her wood), and when she asks him to wait, he subtly threatens her by telling her how hazardous the world is, and of course she won’t be able to defend herself because she doesn’t have a man. Einar and Ragnar completely ignore Vigdis, who can’t challenge Hallstein to a duel because she’s a woman, so she starts to take matters into her own hands in a bit of a “womanly” way. Meanwhile, Solveig’s mother is the “power behind the throne” with regard to Solveig’s infirm father, and when Einar tries to stir things up with Hallstein, she’s the one who is able to defuse the situation and get Einar to agree to submit the matter to the Althing. Vigdis goes to her grandmother for help with her revenge scheme. Finally, Einar’s mother has left her father and joined the Church, one of the only places a woman in the medieval era could have a measure of independence. Kriek does a very nice job giving us all these kinds of women and how they are able to survive in this society. He also implies some of the rapacity of religious institutions – the nascent Christian one on the island, naturally, but also the more amorphous Norse religion – as the Church plays a small but crucial role in how the story unfolds. So while the plot is churning along and you can kind of see what’s coming, Kriek does a lot of nice work with the themes. The only real issue with the plot is that Kriek brings in a tiny bit of magic that does not fit at all, and it feels like too much of a deus ex machina. It’s a bit frustrating. It doesn’t ruin the book, and it does tie in with one of the themes that Kriek is dealing with, but it’s a bit weird.

Kriek’s gorgeous art is a big reason for the book’s success, as well. It’s moody and, well, Scandinavian (vague, I know, but that’s what it feels like!), turning Iceland into an inhospitable yet bleakly beautiful place, one that feels destined to defeat the ragged settlers clinging to it with a great deal of stubbornness (it didn’t, we know, but it seems like it could!). Kriek uses a lot of blacks and negative space, and he never uses holding lines, so the art has an ethereal and even otherworldly feel to it, making Iceland more of an entity itself than a landscape. The beautiful brush work turns the hills into roiling waves, threatening to overwhelm the people, and Kriek’s figures, with their lush hair and beards and stark clothing, feel like they’ve sprung from the earth itself and are still, in some way, a part of it. When Hallstein dreams of the past, Kriek uses reds to amazing effect, turning his dreams into visions of violence from which he can’t escape, and the fact that the people involved in his crime all have red hair (a choice by Kriek, obviously, but not outside the realm of possibility if the characters were real) links them to the violence as well. The rest of the book is in blues, cooling the pages so that Iceland’s lack of warmth feels like something that drills deep into the people, turning them into ice and stone. There are small moments of tenderness, but they feel like anomalies in the frigid lives of the Icelanders, and therefore a bit more tragic. The art fits in very nicely with how Kriek is telling the story, which shouldn’t be surprising but is still nice to see.

The Exile is not a happy tale, but it’s unhappy in interesting ways, ways that shed some light on a society that, even though it’s not as “civilized” as ours, doesn’t feel too different from the modern world. It’s a beautiful and haunting book, so if that interests you, give it a look!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆