Linn Ullmann: An Island of Her Own

Linn Ullmann has written three previous books, all with a spare prose style that is quietly complex and which masks great depths. Her latest book, A Blessed Child, is a tragic tale of a family on a small Baltic island, Hammarso. There is a father, Isak, who has three daughters with three different mothers, and each summer these daughters all stay with him on the island.

Many have detected similarities here with Ullmann’s own childhood, as she is the daughter of the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, who had 9 children with 6 women, and lived on Faro, a small Baltic island.

But the comparison is too simplistic – Ullmann says that Isak ‘was always my Prospero’ and he is clearly fictional, and well realised too. But, like a modern Prospero, he has a great deal of influence, but abandons it in the end. Why he does this is part of what the book is about. It’s focused on Isak’s daughters though, especially the eldest, Erika, and her friendship with a misfit called Ragnar. For Ragnar, this leads to trouble.

“One of my first ideas” Ullmann says “was ‘can I write a book where I’ll have a boy kind of running through the pages?’ I’ll have him running from the beginning to the end”. It’s an eerie image. “When you see somebody running on the street,” she says, “running very fast, there’s something not quite right about it.” This bad omen underpins the book, which eventually reveals the reason Ragnar is running. The counterpoint to this is Erika’s long journey, as a grown woman, to visit her father on Hammarso where he has decided to kill himself.

As Erika makes her journey, and the scenery begins to change, she starts remembering the island. “It was my first turn at really writing about landscapes and time passing. The sternness and strictness of this landscape, the pebbly beaches and the green, ominous, Baltic sea” says the author. One of her most distinct comments though, was that “I think writing is a lot about light actually, metaphorically or allegorically; but I really mean it, I mean that light, how light falls on a room can make everything so different”. It’s evident in the book. There is a heat wave early on, and everything slows down. “The summers are the island dressing up, but the real island is what you get in the winter,” Ullmann says. “The island as a force in itself is very important to me. And I grew up in this kind of landscape”.

There’s obviously a very well-defined sense of place in the novel, and it’s greatly linked to the story. Her previous book, Grace, was a conversation piece, largely a two-hander between a husband and wife, and surprisingly powerful for that. But A Blessed Child is more like a five-act play, a tragedy played out within a family who are within a small community, in an unforgiving landscape. And once tragedy occurs, can anyone achieve forgiveness? Read the book, and judge for yourself.