In April 1944, a Nazi commander on the island of Crete was somehow mysteriously and miraculously kidnapped right under the nose of the Germans. No shots were fired, there was no bloodshed and no sign of a struggle. General Heinrich Kreipe simply vanished. During WWII, Cretan resistance to the Nazis was augmented by the Special Operations Executive (otherwise known as "The Firm"), Churchill's secret arm of the British military, made up of lone fighters, "poets, professors, archaeologists — anyone who'd traveled a bit and knew is or her way around foreign countries." Dropped behind enemy lines to wreak havoc, these "lethal shadows" fought in tandem with the audacious, all but shoeless resistance. (Weapons of choice: sickles, axes and garden tools.)
McDougall summons up an entertaining cast of characters: a one-eyed archaeologist named John Pendlebury, the penniless young artist Xan Fielding, and wandering playboy-poet Patrick Leigh Fermor. Then there are the home-grown resistance fighters, daring men with nicknames like "The Clown" — a shepherd turned bandit — the "wind boys" and Scuttle George.
By profiling these atypical commandos, McDougall redefines the heroic ideal, establishing heroism as a skill set rather than a virtue. "For much of human history," he writes, "the art of the hero wasn't left up to chance; it was a multidisciplinary endeavor devoted to optimal nutrition, physical self-mastery, and mental conditioning." Crete, it turns out, has a nickname: "the Island of Heroes." There's a label that occasionally gets slapped on works like these. I'm sure you've heard it before: "This book," reads the label's inevitably bold lettering, "is not for the faint of heart."
It's put there sometimes by censors, more often by sensationalizing marketers, and it always aims to warn you about things like Amelia Gray's Gutshot — a book brimming with blood, sexual deviance, mucus and madness. A book, in other words, that won't fail to make you shudder once or twice.
Allow me, then, to layer on a warning of my own: A label like that one won't quite fit. "How are you meant to behave?" asks Jón Gnarr in his autobiographical novel The Indian. "What are these invisible rules that I don't know? What is 'normal'?" It's possible that Gnarr, the punk rocker turned comedian turned mayor of Reykjavík has never known what normal is, and thank goodness for that.
He won election as the leader of Iceland's largest city after jokingly promising, among other things, to construct a huge statue of his longtime friend Björk, the singer-songwriter, in a harbor. (The statue — never built, sadly — would have shot lights from its eyes.) After shocking the Icelandic political establishment by winning the race, he became a popular mayor; early in his administration, he led Reykjavík's gay pride parade while wearing drag.
It's tempting to think that Gnarr doesn't care what people think; his entire career seems to be a testament to that. But in The Indian, a chronicle of a young boy's early childhood in a Reykjavík suburb, Gnarr paints a beautiful but disturbing portrait of a misfit painfully aware that he's not like anyone else. "I'd like to be a part of things. It's just that I'm a bit weird. I'm not like the others," he writes. "I feel bad about myself. I don't feel good inside. I feel so bad that I get tears in my eyes when I think about it. So I don't think about it. Everyone gets tired of me sooner or later."
The Indian is technically fiction, but Gnarr makes it clear it's based solidly in reality. "It isn't totally true, although there aren't any total lies in it either," he writes in an author's note. "But all memory is fiction. Our brain is the greatest master of deceit in the universe." Whatever the proportion is, it works, and either way, the book goes a long way to explaining the wild, exuberant phenomenon that is Jón Gnarr.
The narrator of the novel, also named Jón, is the youngest child of an older couple; his mother is a conservative cafeteria worker, and his father is a devotedly Communist police officer. Jón takes on the role of class clown early in his schooling; he makes jokes and puns which delight his classmates and annoy his teachers. It's not really intentional, though: "The words repeat over and over inside my head; I get them in my brain and cannot get them out except by saying them out loud," he writes. But he pretends it's on purpose, realizing that it's "better to be a comic than a moron."
Now, that's not to say that this collection of stories makes for a comfortable read, exactly. Just about the whole collection, each story no more than a handful of pages, finds most of its characters defined by the extremity of their situations — or quirks, or insecurities — yet they deal with it all as a matter of course. A postal worker can't speak more than a few words at a time without vomiting bile into an empty soda bottle, but his co-workers figure he's just got a chewing tobacco habit. A couple's mutual castration is taken as typical, just another of those compromises that make for a happy relationship. And a Christmas-themed joyland may sit at the end of a local firing range, but luckily, they've got a protocol in place in case of injury:
"Cast members are permitted to treat wounds in the spirit of Christmas, for example by compressing a blood-soaked trouser with holly leaves while singing 'Silent Night.'"