Peter Geye writes with an almost romantic passion about all things wintry. In "Northernmost," the finale in his Eide family trilogy with "The Lighthouse Road" and "Wintering," he takes snow to a religious precipice.
Half the story is again set in the fictitious town of Gunflint in northern Minnesota, in contemporary time; the other (and far more compelling) half is set in Hammerfest, Norway, in the late 1800s.
In Minnesota, Greta Nansen has decided her marriage to Frans, a Norwegian researcher, is over. That she never really loved him now seems obvious; that he's involved with a woman in Oslo should make the split easier, but he wants to reconcile with Greta. Her sanctuary is an old fish house in Gunflint where her great-great-great-grandfather, Odd Einar Eide, earned his living.
It is Odd Einar's story that reverberates with mystery and cold. In 1897, he and another seal hunter are marooned on an Arctic island. After a polar bear kills his companion, Odd Einar perseveres for two weeks in the bitter landscape, fighting starvation, and always awaiting the bear.
Once rescued, he returns home to Hammerfest — and his own funeral. His wife, Inger, is strangely shaken, even resentful at his return. But when a journalist seeks to write about Odd Einar's saga of survival, Inger seemingly warms to this venture, and to him. Here is a complicated and compelling couple.
Through Odd Einar, Geye imbues isolating bleakness with a perverse beauty. When the journalist prods Odd Einar about God in those moments, Geye makes an existential case for snow as a source of salvation.
Odd Einar tries to explain "how I found new peace in that bleakness. It was as if I'd been pardoned from worry and guilt. … Had I put my faith in God, had I trusted in his guidance, I would've perished on Krossforden. Instead I trusted that my death would not matter. That I myself did not matter. And I did that by seeing the hereafter not as a time spent in heaven or hell, but as time I'd spend in the eternal snow."
The expansive transparency of Odd Einar's contemplations contrasts with Greta's insular angst. Aiming to confront Frans in Oslo, she impulsively continues on to Hammerfest. There, she meets Stig Hjalmarson, who plays organ at the church, piano at the cafe, and havoc with Greta's libido.
