After getting lockdown stress, Iceland’s PM found a novel solution

This story is part of the September 16 edition.See all 9 stories.

A darkening sky. A middle-aged woman in a duffel coat and orange scarf, a splash of colour to match her trainers. Two tall, slim men, expensively casual. A small ferry heading to an uninhabited island. A squall in the distance.

I have never before been on a murder mystery tour and this one is truly strange. First, we are in Iceland, the safest country on earth. Second, my companions are its prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, and her friend Ragnar Jónasson, the country’s top-selling crime writer, as well as the book’s publisher, Petur Mar Olafsson.

Not only is the likeable Jakobsdóttir, 47, one of the world’s few female prime ministers and very few Green ones but she has also become the first to write a novel while in office. A crime novel, of course, for we are amid the bleak landscapes of Nordic noir. And it’s a bestseller. Reykjavik, co-written with Jónasson, also 47, was the biggest-selling book in Iceland last year.

We land on Videy, an island near Reykjavik where the book’s murder is set (Jakobsdóttir tells me the island’s name means “forest”, though there are no trees). As we battle through driving rain to the shelter of a cafe, I ask the obvious: how did she find the time to write it?

“Prime ministers need time outside work just like any other person,” she replies. “Other people have other interests. I don’t play golf, go fishing or sailing. I just read books, and at this point I wrote a book.”

Many international leaders have literary pretensions (see former British PM Boris Johnson). Some come from literary backgrounds, such as the Czech playwright turned president Vaclav Havel. But most wait until they’re out of office to publish their works; former US president Bill Clinton has since co-written two thrillers. There is, however, a niche line in dictator lit: Saddam Hussein turned out three novels while in power.

There is precedent in Iceland, though. One of Jakobsdóttir’s predecessors, David Oddsson, who was prime minister from 1991 to 2004, wrote two collections of short stories while in office. Perhaps running a country with a small population (about 400,000) leaves space for other activities. Yet Jakobsdóttir, who took office in 2017, is also a mum to three boys, aged 11 to 17.

“But they have a father,” she says, laughing gustily. Not for nothing did Iceland recently top the world gender-equality index for the 14th year running. “In Iceland no one thinks it’s strange,” she adds, slightly testily. “Just as I don’t have bodyguards … and go to the grocery store myself to buy food, so I can also write a book. It’s very different being prime minister in Iceland.”

Iceland Is a book-loving country with a tradition of giving books on Christmas Eve. One in 10 people (including Jakobsdóttir’s brother) has written a book. All those long, dark nights …

Co-writing was Jónasson’s idea. After writing 14 novels and selling more than three million copies, he was, he says, looking for something new. “Writing is a lonely thing and I thought it would be much more fun doing it with a friend.” The pair met on a jury for the best translated crime novel in Icelandic and in February 2020, Jónasson proposed writing a book set in Videy, a place they both love – Jónasson so much that he got married there.

He suggested starting it there in 1956 then moving to Reykjavik in the 1980s, a time of great music and much change in Iceland. “The opening of its first radio and TV station and our hosting of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, the biggest thing to hit Iceland,” he recalls.

“I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’ ” Jakobsdóttir says. “And I thought, ‘That will never happen.’ ” Within weeks, however, COVID-19 struck. Jakobsdóttir had been following the spread of the virus in Italy and Spain when she attended a concert in early March. “Everyone in the audience was coughing and I thought, ‘Okay, it’s probably here.’ ” As the pandemic swept the world, she was consumed with protecting her population, something she did so effectively that Iceland suffered only 33 deaths while managing to keep its schools open.

“I became quite obsessed,” she says. “For the first six months, I didn’t read anything but scholarly articles on COVID and didn’t talk to anyone except coworkers in government and doctors and specialists.

“But then it came over me that this might be the time to write the book. There were no meetings, no travel, no birthday parties, you didn’t go to the theatre or concerts. It was so depressing and I’m a real extrovert, I really enjoy meeting people. And of course I bore the pressure of finding solutions for society, so it was a relief to have something else to focus on. Writing this book saved my mental health.”

Iceland’s PM Katrín Jakobsdóttir: “It was a relief to have something else to focus on,” she says of the novel. “Writing this book saved my mental health.”Credit: FRANCOIS BOUCHON/Le FIGARO/HEADPRESS

Crime was the obvious genre – Jakobsdóttir had written a master’s dissertation on Icelandic crime writing and shared with Jónasson a love of Agatha Christie, to whom their book is dedicated.

“I started reading Agatha Christie when I was 10. I had finished all the Nancy Drew books and Enid Blyton – I know I can’t mention her but that is what we read,” she says, referring to attempts to cancel the latter children’s author because of her un-PC views. “Then a librarian suggested Murder on the Orient Express. It was like a holy moment for me.”

Jónasson loved Christie’s books so much he translated 14 of them before writing his own crime novels, the best known being his Dark Iceland series.

It fascinates me that crime fiction is so popular in a country where two murders in a year is considered a crime wave. “It’s a very new thing that it’s popular in Iceland, but we’ve been writing it since the early 20th century,” explains Jakobsdóttir. However, crime writing was not considered fully respectable, and when Jónasson’s first book, Snowblind, was published in 2010, his publisher was so concerned that it was described on the cover as “suspenseful” rather than crime fiction. “The feeling was if you set a crime novel in Iceland it would be sort of a joke, as it could never happen here,” he says, laughing.

The Scandi noir boom was starting to shift opinions, though, beginning in 2005 with the worldwide bestseller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by the Swedish author Stieg Larsson, and the Danish TV series The Killing. “There’s this perception of Scandinavia as this peaceful, pristine society with freshly fallen snow and everyone running around enjoying themselves,” Jónasson says, “and I think people get enjoyment in reading about the dark side.”

Reykjavik is very much in the Christie mould; no grisly details, more a highly readable whodunnit with a series of red herrings that certainly kept me guessing. Intriguingly, the darkest part of the novel is its backstory of patriarchy and old boys’ networks. Is Iceland not the gender paradise we imagine?

“Politicians don’t enjoy a lot of job security, so it’s good to have a plan B when you’re fired.”

Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Iceland’s PM

Jakobsdóttir sighs. “It’s a privilege to be a woman in Iceland compared with the rest of the world, but we still have loads of work to do. We still have a gender pay gap, which is unacceptable, we have gender-based violence ... So us being world leader tells a story that we have been quite progressive, but also that the world isn’t doing very well when it comes to gender equality.”

Gender issues were one of the reasons Jakobsdóttir entered politics, along with the environment and her anti-war stance – her first political act was demonstrating against the Iraq war in 2003, blocking the street outside the prime minister’s office. She never imagined then that she would end up inhabiting it. Previous jobs included playing a femme fatale in a music video by the Icelandic band Bang Gang. For much of the interview she is so friendly I forget she is prime minister, apart from her frequent tapping away on her phone, presumably resolving affairs of state. Indeed, it’s quite hard to understand how she has the post, given that her party, the Left-Greens, has only eight of the 63 MPs in the Althing, the Icelandic parliament. “Thank you for reminding me,” she says with a laugh.

She heads a coalition that includes a right and centre party, testament to her charm and negotiating skills. “It’s very complicated, but it can be complicated with just two parties – just look at what happened in the UK,” she says, shrugging. One complication is that her party opposes Iceland’s membership of NATO. Whaling is another contentious issue, Iceland being one of the few countries that still hunts whales commercially. Her government recently announced the suspension of this year’s hunt.

She does not like questions on these matters, and for a moment her charm slips: “I thought the interview was about literature.” So I segue from whales to the process of co-writing. Many will wrongly suspect that Jónasson wrote the whole thing, but it was very much a partnership. “We wrote the synopsis together first and the plotline,” Jakobsdóttir says. “Then we wrote different chapters.” Veering wildly off the gender-equality piste, Jónasson adds: “Chapters that describe a lot of cooking and women’s clothing are more likely to be Katrin.”

The process became more complicated as COVID receded and Jakobsdóttir began travelling again. So there will be no more books, she says – at least for now. “Politicians don’t enjoy a lot of job security, so it’s always good to have a plan B when you’re fired.”

It is nearly time for our ferry back to the mainland, so we brave the elements to go outside to see the church and the graveyard that feature in the book. It is truly miserable standing in the wind and rain. “And we have two million tourists,” she says, laughing.

Then she looks out to sea. The waves are now so high that our little boat is being tossed, almost perpendicular. “We might get stranded and have our
own sequel …”

This is an edited version of a story first published in The Sunday Times Culture Magazine. © NEWS LICENSING

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