The Colony of Good Hope by Kim Leine (tr. Martin Aitken)
Review by Eleanor Updegraff
In May 1728, a Danish ship, the Morian, sets sail from Copenhagen. On board, besides the crew, are a number of soldiers, a handful of clergymen and traders, and a ragged band of recently released convicts, male and female, who have been hastily married in a mass wedding ceremony. Nominally in charge of this unusual operation is Major Claus Pors, instructed by King Frederik IV of Denmark and Norway to establish a colony on the icy shores of Greenland.
So begins Kim Leine’s The Colony of Good Hope, a sweeping historical novel that explores the grim early years of Greenland’s colonisation by Denmark. Even before the Morian has found safe harbour, its passengers have been beset by misfortune: storms brew, fights break out, a young woman suffers violent seizures. On shore, things are not much better: neither the land itself nor the people who live there particularly seem to welcome their arrival – including the unnervingly sanguine yet violently Lutheran missionary, Hans Egede, who has lived on the island with his family for several years. Inflexible with their customs, driven apart by petty arguments, and mindful all the while of their mission to convert the population and plunder the island’s natural resources, the newly named colony of Good Hope slides precipitously into catastrophe.
Storms, sickness, madness and death make for pretty nerve-straining reading, especially over more than 500 pages. This is a fact of which Leine seems almost painfully aware, as he tries to lighten the relentless misery with moments of comedy that verge on slapstick: Governor Pors’s obsession with his cannon (innuendo intended), or an absurd drunken duel involving a retractable rapier. Scenes such as these work well in Martin Aitken’s slick translation – his deliberate peppering of the text with Danish words and antique phrases additionally adds a strong sense of setting – and seem almost written for the screen instead of the page, as do the sadly occasional yet vivid descriptions of Greenland’s wild beauty. But the harsh conditions with which the helpless Danes find themselves confronted are, Leine gives us to understand, superficial. Just as they fail to dig proper foundations for their accommodation, they will be undone by their inability to see what lies beyond the surface.
Could they see, they would be party to the lives of Greenlanders like Aappaluttoq, or ‘the Red One’, a shaman who is a sworn enemy of Egede after the priest underhandedly adopted his son, Paapa. Baptised Frederik Christian and brought up in the Christian faith, Paapa finds himself between two worlds, viewed as an outsider by the colony and a stranger by the Greenlanders for whom he now translates Egede’s sermons. The position is untenable – even his father’s determination to win him back wanes over the years – but this makes the young man one of the most interesting characters in a novel which is, at heart, about the great divides not only between cultures but also between sons and fathers, about the needless suffering wrought by ‘the grand design’ of colonialism and how many voices were suppressed in the subjugation of entire countries.
Suppression of voice is indeed one of the most unsettling aspects of The Colony of Good Hope, which flits nonchalantly between third- and first-person narratives to create a mind-boggling patchwork of characters (a cast list is helpfully provided). While this certainly compounds the sense of chaos within the fledgling colony, it never really gives us chance to get to know any one figure and, combined with the vast narrative scope, contributes to the suspicion that the novel is at times over-reaching. With the exception of Aappaluttoq and Paapa, the Greenlanders are almost entirely silenced, while the few women in the novel are handed bit parts that leave them rather two-dimensional. Take Sise Petticoat, a former prostitute, who for unclear reasons claims she can’t have sex with her husband unless he pays her first. Or poor jomfru Titia, the Governor’s housekeeper, who is believed to be possessed by the devil and consequently abused from all quarters. Hans Egede’s wife, meanwhile, though a woman of remarkable fortitude, has the manuscript of her book about Greenland stolen by her own husband, who later publishes it under his name.
Any of these would be a worthy story in its own right, yet the narrative is so wide-ranging that few, if any, individual lives can be explored in depth; we come closest to Governor Pors and Hans Egede, extracts from whose diary preface each chapter. Such a focus on the white man’s narrative can be somewhat discomfiting to read – and yet, one hopes, Leine is making a point about this unhappy period of history. With its broad scope, myriad voices, interrogations of faith and nudges towards the subtext, The Colony of Good Hope seems not only to want to cast the reader back into the eighteenth century, but also to hold a mirror to the colonisers and their terrible delusions of grandeur.
The Colony of Good Hope is published by Picador, 31st March 2022