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A few years ago, by lucky chance it happened that a business trip of ours to Toronto (a favourite city of mine) coincided with a fairly large public book festival; by even luckier chance, the park in which most of the festival was happening was only a couple of hundred yards from the hotel in which we were staying. Several Ontario skiffy writers had taken a tent/booth together to display/sell their books, so we linked up with them by prior arrangement and went out for a meal with some of them in the evening. We also, of course, wandered around the scores of tents seeing what Canadian publishing had to offer -- something miserably difficult to find out from within the US.
Naturally, we came away with a few books. Well, okay, more than a few . . .
One of these was a novel by Leena Lander called Cast a Long Shadow (as Lankeaa pitkä varjo 1986; trans from the Finnish 1995 by Seija Paddon). Lander is clearly a highly respected novelist in her native Finland; to my shame, I hadn't heard of her before, but I've just discovered that movies of two of her novels are coming out in Scandinavia this year, one of these novels being the 1990 book Tummien perhosten koti (The Home of the Dark Butterflies), apparently her big breakthrough novel and translated into eight languages . . . one of which is not English, alas.
Cast a Long Shadow could be described as a historical novel, I guess, in that almost all of its narrative fleshes out a series of genuine historical events -- the imprisonment, torture and execution of seven women in the Finnish island region of Aland in the 1600s on charges of witchcraft. In a way, though, it seems to be more a contemporary novel, in that the reason for all the historical recounting is that the magistrate responsible for those trials and executions, Nils Pilsander, is in quasi-ghostly form attempting to justify his behaviour to the novelist, Leena Lander, who has decided to write about him. In other words, while the book's plot is obviously the string of historical events, what pushes us along the trail of that plot is the modern-day dynamic between the novelist and her character. And, just as the novelist's estimation of Pilsander ebbs and flows -- much of the time she regards him as a nuisance for continuing to pester her when there are other things she could be doing with her life rather than be tied to her typewriter -- so does ours.
What is unsettling about Lander's depiction of Pilsander -- or, to stay within the conceit of the novel, about Pilsander's depiction of himself -- is that this is no medieval torturer-brute we find talking to us. Instead, he's a rather diffident, seemingly moderately educated, certainly well intentioned individual who is trying to muddle through the maze of life as best he can, administering justice with the most fairness he can achieve and certainly as much mercy as seems advisable. In his account of the womens' trials and torments, the magistrate shifts much of the blame -- either justifiably or otherwise -- onto a local pastor, Kjellinus, enlisted to assist him with the theological aspects of the investigations but soon revealed as a sadistic inquisitor of the vilest type. Lander suspects that the shade of Pilsander is attempting to use Kjellinus as a scapegoat, and this becomes our suspicion too . . . which makes it all the more horrific to contemplate why it should be that such a cultivated, moderate, essentially benevolent individual should be led by his own logic to believe it justifiable to torture and kill innocent women -- and much of the time he's as accepting of their innocence as we are. Part of the reason is ignorance, of course; another part is dark superstition, fueled by the despicable writings of such holy-zealot psychopaths as Kramer and Sprenger in their Malleus Maleficarum (1486; The Hammer of the Witches).
And perhaps this is the moral to be taken away from Cast a Long Shadow, which is not a novel for the faint-hearted: that words aren't just passive objects printed on a page or floating in the air. They inspire human beings to do things -- and sometimes these deeds are profoundly vile. Whatever the nature or motivation of witch-hunters or inquisitors, of brutes and torturers, all too often what's driving them to their actions are the words emitted by supposedly well educated, supposedly intelligent others from the safety of well appointed lives that are a comfortable distance from the world's realities. We have plenty of Kramers and Sprengers in the world today -- far, far too many -- who're only too happy to foments hatreds among the ignorant and who yet, like Pilsander, attempt to absolve themselves of blame for any consequences of their demagoguery.
Cast a Long Shadow is a curious novel that I'm not going to forget in a hurry. It seems to be the only novel by Lander to have been translated into English -- thank you, Second Story Press of Toronto, that there's at least one. For the most part Paddon's translation moves along pleasingly. Let's hope that, with the movies coming, there'll be further Lander translations.
