RED MILK

A young man slides into neo-Nazism in post–World War II Iceland.

The discovery of the protagonist’s body in an English railway car on Page 1 sends an unmistakable signal that this will be a grim book. But this slim novel—the account of a young man’s budding career in nationalist politics in late 1950s and early '60s Iceland, cut short when he dies of cancer at age 24—offers little insight into what brought Gunnar Pálsson Kampen to his ignoble end and even less drama in its telling. There’s nothing about Gunnar’s childhood in postwar Reykavík hinting that through his teens he’ll gradually be transformed into an activist spreading falsehoods about “global Zionism” and defending the “right of the Aryan to cultivate his heritage.” The novel’s epistolary middle section traces Gunnar’s growing attachment to far right ideology through the 1950s, as he connects with real-life characters who include George Lincoln Rockwell, longtime leader of the American Nazi Party, and Nazi sympathizer and spy Savitri Devi, both of whom spent time in Iceland during their lives, without revealing any clear reason for his growing obsession over the hold he claims the “Synagogue of Satan” has on the world or his motivation to create a political party he calls the Sovereign Power Movement in a country whose Jewish population would barely fill a small chapel. In an afterword, Sjón admits he put aside any attempt to “employ pathos or myth” and that what he was “looking for instead was what made my character normal, to the point of banality.” The flaw in that approach is that it turns Gunnar into a character who lacks sufficient depth or interest to engage the reader’s emotions, for good or ill.

The attraction of right-wing European nationalism in one man’s life receives superficial treatment in this dark story.