The Colony of Good Hope
When the King of Denmark colonises Greenland in 1728, he forcibly marries military prisoners to street women, then sends them to service a settlement from which riches might be gathered and the heathen converted. It turns out that the Greenlanders are far better at survival and spiritual flexibility than the Danes. What promises to be a cosmic conflict between Christian ideology and heathen darkness, played out between the local shaman, Aappaluttoq, and the black-coated Lutheran priest, Egede, turns into unforgiving animosity when Egede takes and keeps the shaman’s only son. Their battle is driven by the shaman’s grief and Egede’s self-righteousness.
Leine’s narrative, woven from archival and biographical research, is complex so we must trust the thread which he throws us, for this story has few straight lines. We experience the miasmic settlement from multiple viewpoints. The reader becomes Aappaluttoq, travelling in different characters’ pockets, passing from one to another without warning.
The Greenlandic light, its mists and waters, are visceral, as are the colonists’ spiritual and physical torments. The name of the colony becomes increasingly ironic as the colonists all hope for different things. Their narratives immerse us in the casual cruelties of the 18th century, where deprivations and exploitation, especially of women, lead to physical and psychological breakdown.
This is a rich novel of ideas to be enjoyed by readers who share Leine’s interest in the language of spirituality, in how the soul might reside in a name. The shaman’s name is always misconstrued. Luther’s German is set against Latin spells. Danes and Greenlanders ask common-sense questions of Christian philosophy, which exposes the inventiveness required of doctrinal inflexibility. Leine tests the boundaries of best intentions and customary evils, between ordinary human obsessions and insanity, in a world struggling with enlightenment. The evocation is harsh, beautiful, and unflinching.
