Cecilia Ekback on Landscape and History
‘I have always been fascinated by journeying and exploring new territory, both in the actual and metaphorical sense. Maps especially intrigue me: how can something ‘factual’ also be subjective, so that two people draw two different plans of the same territory? How to draw a new map when you find the old one has become obsolete – what to portray, what to leave out, how to organise your thoughts? Or, even to some extent, what comes first, the map or the terrain… Another large fascination of mine are rocks. I collected stones as a child – had a large suitcase full of them to my father’s despair – and I still can’t stop myself from bending down and picking up many an interesting looking stone. In In the Month of the Midnight Sun, I was, to my great delight, able to work with both these things: maps and rocks.
My first book, Wolf Winter, was set in 1717 on a fictitious mountain that I called Blackåsen Mountain. After finishing, I wasn’t done thinking about that mountain and, as I am fascinated about the impact a place, physical or imaginary, has on people, I was also interested in what this mountain would be like, say, some 140 years later. What would be different? What would be the constant thread of what it was like to live near this mystical place? The inspiration for In the Month of the Midnight Sun then came mainly from a true story told in passing. At a party at my parents-in-law’s house, a man was telling me how, as a young medical doctor, he had escorted a mass murderer from a distant northern village to the closest town for medical evaluation and sentencing. While he was talking, I was feeding my twins who were then a year and a half old, and I didn’t listen closely. I regretted it. In my mind, I kept coming back to that voyage and what it would have been like for him and the perpetrator. I wanted to know.
There were benefits in setting a second story at the same location. I knew the place inside out – its physical presence and its mystical bearing over the inhabitants. But there were difficulties too; Blackåsen is almost a character in its own right and its nature is such a big component of what it is. I struggled with how to describe it a second time without repeating myself. I knew I needed to get access to it in a different way.
The middle of the 1800s is such an interesting period in Sweden. Religion/tradition and Science are almost at war. The industrialisation of Sweden begins relatively late and almost in response to the needs (for timber, mainly) of other, already industrialised, countries. The development happens hesitantly, jerkily, and tears society in different directions. It is clear that modernisation must take place, will take place, but there is much debate as to the pace and by what means. Some welcome the changes. Some long for the uncomplicated past. Many feel an increasing alienation and people begin to ponder concepts such as nation, class and gender. Others speculate and take advantage of changes when the nation removes trade barriers. In this new world, pedigree comes to mean less than who you know and the money you have. Ever since the 17th century, Sweden has been a major exporter of bar iron to Europe from Central Sweden. During the 17th and 18th century the attention is turned to the north where trees to make coal to fuel the blast-furnaces are in abundant supply. And so I let our main protagonist, Magnus, become a man of science, someone ‘without pedigree’, but successful, representing what was ‘new’ about society. I made him a mineralogist – or as we call them today – a geologist, and Blackåsen was given a large deposit of iron.
Magnus did indeed look upon Blackåsen very differently from the way the settlers in Wolf Winter had. As a scientist, he dissected it objectively. He drew maps and analysed. To draw out the societal struggle between ‘old’ and ‘new’, I contrasted him with someone who looked upon the world and maps in a very different manner; a Sami woman named Biijá.
In October 2014, I was having breakfast with my dear friend and geologist Mike Daly at Piccadilly in London. The earlier Sami cult was strongly linked to holy places: stones, wood, an unusual stone or rock, or a whole mountain, and we were discussing what it might have felt like to a Sami person if a geologist arrived, wanting to dig it up. We also talked about how to draw a geological map from scratch and what someone like Magnus would have known at the time. On an impulse, Mike took me to the Geological Society in Burlington House. It was so early they had not yet opened and we waited outside on the pavement – me, worried about missing a flight, Mike, who has certainly travelled more than me, unconcerned – and the wait was well worth it. At the Geological Society, ‘The Map that Changed the World’ (as it is described in Simon Winchester’s book) is available for viewing. It is the first true geological map of anywhere in the world, depicting England and Wales, engraved and coloured, and quite breath-taking. The map is marked 1815 and it was made by William Smith, a canal digger, who discovered that one could follow layers of rocks, across a nation, then further, making it possible to draw the underside of the earth. To think that this was how our geological understanding began, by the work of one man, is amazing. And that was when it came alive for me and fused into one image – the currents of Swedish society, maps, rocks – all in one Godforsaken place: Blackåsen Mountain.’