My Soul to Take by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

On the cover, Yrsa Sigurdardóttir’s My Soul to Take bills itself as “a novel of Iceland”. In this mystery novel, the second in a new series by the Icelandic writer, the dialogue is so stilted that it feels at times like the characters themselves do not know what they are saying, like characters in film strips that you would show in a high school health class.

There are many reasons why the plot of My Soul to Take is unsatisfying, but the main problem is the pace. My Soul to Take plods along so deliberately that it becomes a mighty struggle for the reader just to turn the page. The get-on-with-it pace of My Soul to Take makes the reader feel like a pallbearer at the novel’s own funeral.

My Soul to Take kicks off with a “prologue” in 1943, in which an unnamed adult male assailant leads a little girl into an underground bunker of some kind and locks her in, presumably leaving her for dead. In the present day, we find that the peninsula where this atrocity took place is now the site of a hotel resort that caters to wealthy dabblers in spiritualism (a séance takes place there just before the action begins) and homeopathic medicine. The architect of the resort is found murdered in a nearby cave, her head bashed in with a rock; the police suspect Jónas, the owner of the resort. He and Birna, the architect, were having an affair recently that Birna broke off, and Jónas can’t explain a text message sent from his phone asking Birna to meet him at the same cave where her corpse would later be found.

Fortunately for Jónas, however, his attorney, Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, happens to be on the scene. Thóra is a practiced sleuth who immediately gets to work figuring out what really happened. And as soon as she does, the novel takes a turn for the truly insufferable. As a detective, Thóra draws every inference and reaches every conclusion so effortlessly that she fails to help the novel generate any suspense. As a character, she is an anonymous mystery-solving machine who makes no impression, besides when her smugness becomes grating. Even a visit by her son and his pregnant teenage girlfriend late in the game can’t make Thóra feel like less of a cipher — amazingly, however, Thóra is not the novel’s most irritating character.

That dishonor goes to Matthew, the German boyfriend of Thóra’s who comes to the peninsula for muddled, arbitrary reasons. In effect, he provides her with a wise-cracking sidekick and useful-for-exposition-purposes sounding board for Thóra’s various theories about the case. As a character, Matthew is as interesting as a walking, talking stick figure (although a walking stick figure actually sounds much more interesting than Matthew, come to think of it), and, as Thóra’s love interest, the pair generates about as much as heat as an Icelandic glacier in the dead of winter (not to be confused with Iceland’s famous heat springs).

All of the elements are there for a fascinating and entertaining mystery. A ghost, a dead fox, a left-wing politician with a possible Nazi past, an advanced new model dildo, a national champion canoeist, and a series of very obscure inheritance disputes all figure in the solution. Yet as much as this last sentence sounds more like jacket copy for the latest sub-Pynchon postmodern vaudeville than for a straight-ahead mystery, Sigurdardóttir’s refusal to exploit any of the rich potential in this material is mystifying. My Soul to Take is as dull and drab as if it were its own outline.

Most steadfast of all is the novel’s unwillingness to exploit any of its supernatural elements for suspense, philosophical edification, or comedy, even though the potential is there for all three of those and more. The characters frequently claim to hear the voice of a baby crying on the peninsula at night or when there is heavy fog. Immediately before the story begins, a séance takes place at the hotel where all of the characters are staying. Would it have been too much to ask for there to be a séance that we, the readers, get to see as well? Maybe a séance where the spiritualist contacts the murder victim and asks her to name her killer? A moment in which Thóra, Matthew, and the police must put aside their rationalist prejudices in order to solve the crime?

Far be it from me to impose my own expectations on any novel, even My Soul to Take, and then reject the novel based on the disappointment of my own expectations. Every novel deserves to be read on its own terms. But still: this is pushing it. The fact that there is mention of a séance and that we never actually get to see a séance in the story is Chekhov’s gun sitting around onstage for an entire play without being fired.