The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  ‘My wife has certainly grown up with these beliefs and seen lots of things. I had to sleep on the floor of a youth hostel once because she said the room was full of people and I had to prove they weren’t real.’

  ‘But what about you?’

  ‘It’s not for me to say whether things are right or wrong.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  He paused.

  ‘I’ve seen hardly anything,’ he said.

  Chapter 5

  Steam

  I RENTED A car for a couple of days and headed out of Reykjavik. It was a drive unlike any other I had ever experienced. Finally, I got Iceland.

  Within just a few miles of the outskirts of the capital, I found myself in a frigid moonscape of craggy, grey, moss-covered lava, and then, moments later, driving through the Scottish Highlands. This is how it is in Iceland: one minute you are amid heather-covered mountains kissed by heavenly shafts of chiaroscuro, the next you are crossing the Gobi. Turn a corner and you pass through the gentle, grassy undulations of Teletubby Land, before they give way to the granite mountains of Mordor, complete with twenty-storey waterfalls. Then, just as suddenly, you are on the moon (in fact, they rehearsed the Apollo moon landings here). The weather changes even more frequently.

  I drove onward until the terrifying majesty of Vatnajökull hove into view. This is Iceland’s largest glacier, 8,300 square kilometres and one kilometre deep. Lonely Planet tells me that it is three times the size of Luxembourg, which is only really useful if one has a decent grasp of the size of Luxembourg, which I don’t. Even from many miles away your eyes widen at the scale of it as it sprawls over the mountains like a great, frosted muffin-top, its white icing oozing down the valleys.

  Vatnajökull reaches the sea and crumbles into hundreds of icebergs at Jökulsárlón Bay. As they proceed at a dignified pace into the Atlantic, these bus-sized clumps of ice glow blue, as if lit from within. It is like watching dozens of really cool vodka bars pass by. I stood for over an hour, jacketless beneath a blazing blue sky, the only sounds a Stockhausen symphony of creaks, graunches and tinkles from the ice.

  I picked up a piece of ice the size of a dinner plate. It was flawless, like glass, and I licked it. It just seemed like the thing to do.

  At Gullfoss, Iceland’s largest waterfall, the elements took a turn for the apocalyptic, with driving wind and rain augmenting the massive spray from the billions of gallons of water that cascade here every hour. It was quite a heart-stopper. I also made the pilgrimage to the geysers at Geysir and stood right beside the legendary Strokkur to experience one of the most thrilling natural phenomena in the world.

  Typically of Iceland – where safety rules are for sissies – there is only a token low rope just beyond the edge of Strokkur, and no supervisors or safety attendants to save you from the scalding water’s ejaculations. This means that, entranced by the steaming blue pool – around two metres in diameter and bringing to mind a giant nazar – the geyser virgin can find himself lured perilously close to the action; closer still as the waters commence bulging compellingly upwards. This, I discovered, is the first sign of an imminent eruption, but it lulls you slightly by sinking back down into its bottomless well. It turned out Strokkur was, literally, gathering steam before detonating 35 metres into the air in a great white column of scalding water. The first time this happened it sent me scurrying away in fear of my life, my arms flailing hysterically. To be honest, it had the same effect the second and third times as well. After the fourth and fifth (Strokkur erupts every four minutes or so) I felt confident enough to stand by nonchalantly as new arrivals went through the same shock-and-awe learning process.

  As I drove from one once-in-a-life-time geological miracle to another over the course of the next two days, I couldn’t help but reflect on the impact Iceland’s landscape and climate must have had on its people. Theories about how the topography and climate of a country or region shape the character of the people who live there have been mooted since Herodotus’s time (he claimed that Greece provided the optimum environment for nurturing the perfect human). A couple of millennia later, Baron Montesquieu assured his readers that France, in fact, had the ideal geography. Geographical, or climactic, determinism isn’t a terribly fashionable theory these days for good reason: it has been used to claim that people from warmer climates are inherently ‘lazy’, for instance; but I did find myself drawn again and again to the idea that, for most of the Nordic peoples, for most of their histories, climate and geography have been the predominant long-term influences on their mentality and culture.

  Standing next to Strokkur, I even managed to convince myself of a causal link between the geysers and the Icelanders’ economic buccaneering. They had become so emboldened by the sheer fact of their survival on this fiery, bubbling, exploding island that they believed they could master any mysterious, destructive forces the world could throw at them, whether they be violent geothermal activity, ferocious climate, or the international money markets. If you can eke out an existence on this pyrotechnical lump of barren rock, few external challenges are likely to daunt you.

  I was still perfecting this theory when I arrived at yet another of the country’s spectacular geological sites, Thingvellir, a great granite scar across the land, 30 miles east of Reykjavik. This narrow canyon provided ancient Icelanders with a natural outdoor arena for their first parliament, the Althing, the oldest in the world. Since 930, they have gathered here to thrash out the legal and political destiny of their country, as well as to celebrate and commemorate. It is a sombre, forebidding place: between 1602 and 1750 there were 30 beheadings, 15 hangings, 9 burnings at the stake, and 18 women drowned here, mostly because they’d been found guilty of incest.

  Oddly, though, this granite rift valley didn’t present me with any more evidence for my geographical-determinism theory. Instead it struck me, as I sat in my car waiting for the rain to die down, that what we had here was a symbol for a very different theory about the Icelanders and their crazy debt spree.

  My guidebook explained that this awful fissure is where Europe and America meet: the Eurasian and American tectonic plates are slowly drifting apart at this point at a rate of about a centimetre a year. This tectonic tug-of-war between east and west is, of course, the reason for Iceland’s very existence, but it is also, I decided, sitting there in my fogged-up rental Astra with a smoked puffin sandwich on my lap, the perfect metaphor for what went wrong with Iceland in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

  We have established that Icelanders are, essentially, western Norwegians with a touch of Celtic blood. So how come, when they were tempted with easy money from the international markets, they proved unable to exercise the strict fiscal self-control that their Norwegian ancestors have displayed with their recent oil wealth? Could it be that the Icelanders, for all their Lutheran, social-democratic, Nordic roots, had their heads turned by the free-market-capitalist American dream?

  The Americans arrived during the Second World War and set up an airbase at Keflavík, just outside Reykjavik. As historian T. K. Derry put it, ‘The war brought undreamed-of prosperity to the Icelanders – from high-priced fish exports, from construction work on airfields for the Americans, and from services of all kinds for American forces that at times amounted to as much as one-third of the native population.’ Up until they left in 2007, tens of thousands of US airmen passed through Iceland. The influence on such a small population must have been considerable, not just in terms of the money spent and infrastructure built, but culturally, spiritually even. This has been the case wherever in the world the Americans have set up air bases: in the Philippines, Thule in Greenland, or Okinawa, Japan (where, for example, the influence of the American diet has seen the Okinawans go from being the healthiest, longest-living people in the world, to having the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the country).

  Could America be the real pernicious influence that turned the Icelanders into a nation of irresponsible high rollers
? If so, how do you like them apples, Michael Lewis?

  Terry Gunnell pointed out that, for the last half-century, American culture has had as great an influence on Iceland as anything from the east. ‘I do think that’s another card in the economic crash,’ he agreed. ‘They learned this notion of the American Dream. That anyone can get rich quick.’

  As we’ve seen, the country’s economic collapse has its roots in the fishing quotas of the early 1990s, but the Icelandic government led the country down several other US-style free-market paths. Income tax was reduced to the lowest levels in the Nordic region (22.75 per cent), there was whole-scale privatisation – including, most fatefully, of the banks – and the likes of Oddsson and Haarde became enthusiastic disciples of US neo-liberal economist Milton Friedman. The feeling was mutual: Friedman’s son David once wrote: ‘Medieval Icelandic Institutions . . . might almost have been invented by a mad economist to test the lengths to which market systems could supplant government in its most fundamental functions.’ That was back in 1979, but his words would prove prophetic.

  I had expected Iceland to be some kind of microcosm of Scandinavia. Icelanders look like Norwegians and speak Old Norse. They have a modern welfare state, high levels of education, equality, democracy, robust knitwear and the same hang-ups about the sale of alcohol, with their government-run alcohol shops staffed by the same species of disapproving elderly women as you find in Norway, Sweden and Finland. The young men smoke pipes, which I always find strangely reassuring. But the modern-day Icelander, with one foot in Scandinavia and the other in the Wild West, has evolved into something quite different from customary notions of what it is to be Nordic. Beaten and battered by the elements, cowed by the landscape, subjugated by a reasonably kind but still condescending colonial power, and then given a glimpse of a very different way of life by their American guests, the Icelanders have morphed into a curious hybrid.

  As a result, their genetic homogeneity and small, tightly connected population didn’t translate into trustworthiness, accountability, openness, a strong civil society, long-termism, individual self control – all of those things that have made the Nordic countries so successful. Instead, their genetic disposition towards high risk and a historic lack of Protestant inhibitions created the perfect climate for a corrupt, nepotistic, anti-democratic economic free-for-all. The same short communication links that enable quick decision-making, and which should have fostered trust and responsibility, still allowed for quick decisions, but also for certain people to bypass accountability and crush dissent. Deals were done outside of the usual democratic channels. Palms were greased, naysayers silenced, and it all happened so very quickly.

  So what does the future hold for Iceland? The country finds itself sitting on the global naughty step with its pocket money confiscated. It doesn’t have much of a manufacturing industry, and there aren’t enough fish in the sea to pay back the money it owes. The Icelanders are looking, instead, to the fearful energy that rumbles beneath their feet.

  The most famous tourist attraction in Iceland is the Blue Lagoon – the eerie, milky-blue, geothermally heated outdoor bathing pools in the middle of an otherwordly lava field forty-five minutes outside Reykjavik. I’d always assumed these lunar-like ponds were a natural phenomenon, like the coloured lakes of Flores in Indonesia; certainly the company that owns them does nothing to correct such assumptions. But in fact, the Blue Lagoon’s warm waters and supposedly health-giving silica mud are the discharge from the nearby Svartsengi geothermal plant, which began operating in the 1970s (I guess, ‘Come, bathe in an industrial waste product!’ is not all that enticing a proposition for tourists). The waste is rich in salt, algae and, above all, silica, which is said to be good for various skin conditions. These days it is packaged and sold in the Blue Lagoon store as an upmarket face cream.

  The air temperature was around freezing when I visited the Blue Lagoon, so I trotted briskly from the warmth of the communal changing rooms, throwing off my towelling dressing gown and plunging into the 38-degree water as quickly as I could. The water only came up to my thighs and so, to minimise contact with the chilly air, I was forced to adapt to an awkward crouch-walk, my toes wriggling in the gloopy silica mud that covers the bottom of the pool. It was also very crowded and much smaller than it looks in photographs, but, after duck-walking over to the the less occupied parts of the pool, I soon realised why there were fewer people there: the water was scorching hot, unbearably so in places. Looking down, I was taken aback to see that I had turned the colour of boiled lobster. I rapidly crouch-walked in the opposite direction. None of this seemed terribly relaxing to me.

  The Icelanders have been exploiting the thinness of their earth’s crust for centuries, and today virtually all of their homes are heated geothermally. With the hope of making fast money in the world of finance gone, the Icelanders are turning to their geothermal energy. Though the holy grail of being able to store electricity, or send it via an oft-mooted cable to the UK and Europe still eludes them, there is increasing optimism that clean tech industries might offer one way back from the brink for Iceland. Icelanders are also beginning to export their geothermal know-how to other ‘thin-crust’ areas like Indonesia and East Africa, and there are ambitious plans to triple geothermal output in the hope of attracting more companies like Google, which already has a base here.

  The grand vision is for Iceland to become the world’s ‘green data hub’, home to the servers housing all our digitised information. The IT industry currently accounts for around 2 per cent of the world’s energy consumption, and the larger the demand for servers, the larger the demand will be for sustainable, non-polluting power to run and cool them. Already the Icelandic economy is showing signs of having turned the corner towards renewal: growth is outstripping the European average, unemployment is down, and the budget deficit is under control. Letting its banks fail turned out to be not such a bad call after all and, though it was morally questionable, it certainly helped that the Icelanders have so far simply refused to pay their multi-billion euro foreign debts. At least they avoided a national default.

  I suspect it is going to take more than a few quietly humming computer servers to restore Iceland’s morale. ‘Very few people are proud Icelanders today,’ the writer Sindri Freysson told me when we met in Kaffibarinn, back in Reykjavik. ‘We are beating ourselves up for allowing this to have happened. The sense of national identity has been tarnished.’

  Meanwhile, a thousand miles or so east, the Icelanders’ ancestors were about to face an identity crisis of their own, a crisis on a far greater scale, and of a far deeper consequence, than anything merely financial.

  NORWAY

  Chapter 1

  Dirndls

  THE LAWNS OF Slottsparken are packed with picnickers and partying Norwegians. The sky is an unblemished blue and, as always in Scandinavia, somehow higher-seeming than any sky anywhere else in the world. In the near distance a stout figure in a top hat is waving from a balcony.

  Today, here in Oslo, we are basking in a rare alignment of good fortune: it is Syttende Mai – 17 May, Norwegian Constitution Day, which this year has fallen on a Sunday blessed with spectacular weather; and last night Norway, represented by a Minsk-born violinist singing a pathologically catchy song inspired by Norwegian folk music, put to rest the country’s nul points nightmares of the past with a landslide victory at the Eurovision Song Contest.

  Oh, and let us not forget, these are the richest people on earth. Which is quite a cherry.

  I have joined the crowds lining the streets of central Oslo to watch the annual parade of local schoolchildren meander through the city to the royal palace. King Harald V, in top hat and tails, his bearded Crown prince son Haakon, and sundry other spare parts from the Norwegian royal family, are greeting their people from the balcony with nods and waves.

  They seem pretty satisfied with their lot today, the Norwegians, but elsewhere in Scandinavia Norway’s Constitution Day is viewed with not a little condescens
ion. The eminent Swedish ethnologist Åke Daun once described Norway’s 17 May as a ‘national delirium’. Talk to Danes and Swedes about the day and they will roll their eyes and chuckle as if to say, ‘Those Norwegians aren’t like us. Very nationalistic. Rather stuck in the past. Still, they’ve got all that oil so they can do as they please.’ Some actually come right out and say all this, adding that the Norwegians are right-wing, reactionary, insular, nationalistic flag-wavers (this from Danes who, as we have heard, will stick their national flag in the cat’s litter tray given the appropriate feline-orientated anniversary).

  Part of the problem lies, I suspect, in how the Norwegians dress for their special day. They are a bit special, the Norwegians, and 17 May showcases this specialness in abundant ways magnificent to behold. It is the fancy dress party to end them all.

  Soon after leaving my hotel at 9 a.m., I begin to encounter them en masse: men, women, children and, in some instances, their pets, all decked out in regional costume. These include heavily embroidered dirndls,1 shawls, neckerchiefs and frock coats in black, red and green; shiny top hats; hobnail shoes with silver buckles; bright-buttoned breeches; crisp white blouses with pirate sleeves; horseshoe hats and natty knickerbockers – all of which eccentric get-up is collectively known as bunad. Babies wear lacey bonnets; dogs wear red-white-and-blue ribbons; taxis, trams and prams, too, bear the national colours. There are nautical uniforms and marching bands, and flags, of course, fields of them, big and small, held aloft and fluttering in the light spring breeze.

  I should make it clear that we are not talking here about one or two enthusiastic odd bods in the crowd, like the ruddy-faced man at a royal pageant wearing a Union Jack suit, or dressed as Uncle Sam at a veterans’ parade. A very large proportion of both those in the parade and spectators, are sporting some manner of elaborate eighteenth- or nineteenth-century rural garb.