Expectations. We’ve all had them, shattered them, met them, exceeded them, fell short of them. Great, meek, lazy, comfortable, ambitious. Our reading, the entire reason any of us are here on this site, is laden thick with expectation. We expect a book to value our time, we expect a book to deliver on its premise, we expect a book to fulfil the promises of its genre (hence reviews, promotional blurbs, and genre respectively). I walked into a library with no expectation beyond figuring out how to get to the third floor, I picked up a book with no expectation beyond satisfying the curiosity the title inspired in me, I checked it out with no expectation beyond exploring the themes and historical setting mentioned in the summary. My expectations, my string of internalised and automatic promises, turned into a month of enraptured reading and a book whose cover was speaking a different language than the text within.

Which is all a very dramatic way of saying that the promotional hook of The Prophets of Eternal Fjord by Kim Leine (translated from Danish to English by Martin Aitken) in no way prepared me for the opening chapters, more or less the rest of the novel. The sex! The crime! The religious trauma! The heartache! All before we even meet the promise of the blurb on the back of the book. Greenland is nearly forgot in the chauvinistic escapades of our protagonist as he establishes a character we will not truly begin to know until we are swept onto a boat and then through time to be greeted by a dead widow and a priest desperate to shit himself. I loved every moment and wish dearly that I could stop you here, right now, and hand you a copy of the book should you be unfamiliar with it. I risk ruining the grand magic trick Leine performs and it’s a performance deserving of your attention and eventual praise. Selfishly, I want the rest of this review to be a shared revelry between us as I almost feel silly in exposing my celebrations to an audience unfamiliar with the occasion.

Let’s celebrate anyway.

Literature critical of colonialism has a flavour; a bitter umami drawn up from the pulped roots of violence and guilt that we can’t shed as the sins of the father never left the cultural zeitgeist being slung to. The late 18th century, the primary stage of The Prophets of Eternal Fjord was ripe with the inevitable conflicts between Europe and those Europe decided were lesser, but plenty of uprisings on the home front keep the historical window nice and busy. So busy that many of those conflicts fall through the cracks as they attempt to cross oceans and seas, turning into, at best, a footnote in the Americas or not getting so much as a word at all. Leine seeks to fill one of those cracks with a story, driven by characters that you’ll never be able to love nor hate, set in colonial Greenland.

As I stated earlier, we don’t get to Greenland for quite a while. We spend a thick chunk in Denmark, settled in with Morten Falck, the priest that will be our anchor in Greenland. He’s a reluctant priest, a criminal medical student, and taken with such a curiosity of sex that we can’t help but realise that this entire book will be hinged on the intimate proclivities of Morten and people just like him. Which, as soon as we step foot in Greenland, is a threat realised. Straight off the boat we’re greeted with the knowledge that the previous priest of Sukkertoppen killed himself and before we can explore how Falck takes this, before we can see him settle in, meet the community, or so much as breathe a meaningful breath, we are shoved forward through the years to an image of him desperate not to shit his pants atop a cliff.

Everyone hates Falck, heaps of people are dead, and he skirts around the community like a criminal before being cornered in the outhouse by authorities that could ruin him. And before we get to know this situation any better, we are thrust back in time.

Playing fast and loose with chronology is a mainstay of the novel as we are never comfortably set in any one timeline for very long. The chapters jump forward and back with little warning but with a fair amount of sense. Several times we are put into the boots of a character that we haven’t inhabited before and we aren’t made aware of this until the implication and context catches up to the reader. It keeps us unsteady, constantly guessing at where and who we are at any given time, even with the convenient dates that come packaged with each chapter. Along with those dates is a commandment from the famous Ten and it usually cues us into the theme the chapter is going to obsess over even if that isn’t always obvious. In the same way that Prophets is interested in messing with times, it’s also interested in messing with religion. We see some tried and true tropes of religious literature, morally bankrupt priests, a clear indication of the lack of God, and the predatory nature of colonial conversion, but unlike many novels of this type we also see some good. The power of a community that shares compelling values, the peace that comes with religious experience (real or imagined), and the direction a religion can provide to the lost. None of it is ever as unambiguous as I’ve made it seem here, the settlement on the titular Eternal Fjord (a rival to the Danish settlement and a catalyst for much of the narrative) is clearly portrayed as being the ideal expression of a church in the confines set by the novel, but it displays many of the same issues as the ordained European missionaries.

Much of those issues stem from the men of both the colony and the settlement being unwilling or unable to listen to women that clearly care about them as much of the conflict comes from the connection between the evils of colonialism and the evil of horrible men. Morten Falck, on the surface, seems a better man than most and I think it’s safe to say that we may figure that’s why we are inhabiting him with more frequency and intimacy than other men in the story, but it’s easy to come to that conclusion when other men violently rape, often incestuously, and take such pleasure in beating and berating the women in their lives. Morten Falck is a lighter in a forest fire and even with the intense heat around him we can still get burned if we’re not careful with how close we get to him.

We also need to be careful with how much we trust the narrative as a whole. While rooted steadily in the third person, the novel is not giving us anything remotely resembling objectivity, but instead enjoys the delicious fruit of free indirect discourse. This gives the characters and writing so much life, but it also leads to situations where the native Greenlanders are portrayed as the Europeans would see them. There are heaps of descriptions where the disgust of an individual is passed as the truth of the rhetoric and even if the reader doesn’t poke that particular tick with a sharp enough stick, there’s still enough of a hole to know that something isn’t quite adding up. Which is the exact space I love to exist in when I’m reading. I love puzzling together characters through various temporal lenses and staying up lying in bed pondering over whether or not someone is good or whether I can actually trust what I’ve just read is a pass time that eats a bit too much into the hours I could be sleeping. This complication in the narrative is what drives the book, even after we leave Greenland (for we do leave Greenland for a while) this complication follows. Morten seems to be convinced as this point in the novel that he has left that behind and is travelling home in Europe to escape the complications that he thinks are endemic to Greenland and his conviction that this is true bleeds into our own reading experience. The entire novel is constantly recontextualising itself up until the final words which pull Leine’s favourite trick on you just as you’re convinced you’re safe from it.

The characters never grow dull and have such vibrant arcs and development that the thick book passes much quicker than it would seem and those characters are the true focus. Morten Falck is just the beginning, just the glue and catalyst that holds everyone else together in the narrative. I struggle over how much to give away and readers who are more accustomed to a review that gives more plot and narrative details away may find my writing disappointing. Indeed, I am not writing this for the person who hasn’t read The Prophets of Eternal Fjord, but for the person who hasn’t. Both may gain value, I hope, but what I truly want you to gain is a new book marked as “read”.

The trip through how religious trauma breeds sexual trauma and how European expansionism does nothing but paint progressively uglier portraits even with nuanced first contact is one that will haunt you. The dire warnings of sins before each chapter do more than haunt the characters, we are the ones reading them, after all, not them.

But the only sin you need fear is of allowing this novel to pass you by. So said God on her tablet and so too shall you upon turning the final page.