This is a fascinating novel that covers a huge amount of ground in a shockingly small space, but is likely to be disregarded by most because of the quick and frustratingly vague way in which it ends. It's wonderfully built out of a conglomeration of worries, most of which are worries because they aren't easily explained but only spur larger worries when they are. Plenty of them are inherently female, neatly explaining without preaching how the world works differently for women. In many ways, it reminded me of 'The Night is Not for You', though Eman Quotah's novel takes a different approach to a similar core.

Iðunn wakes up tired all the time and seeks medical help. Her muscles are strained, her joints stiff and her eyes don't want to open. She sleeps, it seems, but she doesn't get any of the recuperative effects from it that we tend to subconsciously rely on to get us through life. Blood tests don't show anything wrong. This is an Icelandic novel, so the fear behind unexplained symptoms isn't financial as it would be here in the United States. It's more about the tie between kennitala and electronic ID, a peculiarly Icelandic privacy concern. Friends have suggestions: do yoga, eat meat, walk more. So she buys a pedometer. Again, privacy is her focus, turning everything off but the core function.

While Iðunn has Icelandic worries that may be different to how we might react (or then again may not), the core worry is universal. She isn't well but there's no obvious reason for it. So she worries. She sees a doctor, but he's male and dismisses her worries. The chapters are short, so we don't dig particularly deep into the routine nature of women being dismissed in medicine, especially by old male doctors, but it's raised and valid. While she does switch to a young female resident, Ásdír by name, who understands far better, she can't find the answer either. So she worries, even if it isn't ALS after all.

There are moments where she gets somewhere, but they only escalate the worry. Initially, it's the unexplained nature of her tiredness that's the worry, but then she notices an unreasonable count on her pedometer. The device resets at midnight but one day it displays 47,325 steps when she can only account for about six thousand. That's scary. Assuming that she's sleepwalking, she takes the basic precautions and they're quickly countered. Yes, video footage confirms that she is walking in her sleep but she appears to be awake and aware, as if it's a different person using her body. And this night she hides her sleeping pills and blocks the camera.

We're still early in the novel at this point, but I don't think I can go much further without spoilers, except for a few crucial details I've skipped over thus far. We learn early that Iðunn had a sister, a couple of years older, called Ingunn, but she's dead. We assume that it was tragic but we're never let in on the details. There's a man who appears in early chapters looking oddly at Iðunn, but he's someone who dated Ingunn and knows she's dead, so is surprised to apparently see her again. We presume from this that they were twins. He's Már and he starts to date Iðunn too.

The only other major character is Stefán, a married man from work she was having an affair with until she broke it off. It's suggested that he can be violent and he certainly doesn't want to leave her alone, so he shows up every once in a while sending her messages that she ignores. Talking of violence, there are also suggestions that whatever Iðunn is doing at night includes violence. One morning, there appears to be blood on her fingers. On another, she wakes up with a black eye. It's yet another escalation in the worries weighing Iðunn down. What could she be doing at night?

Hildur Knútsdóttir has a singular style. This is a short novel that is finished in under two hundred pages, but they're spread over exactly a hundred chapters, so it's easy to imagine how short they often are. It's possible that chapter eighty-three is the first to make it past four pages. Chapter eighteen is one page. Chapter nineteen is one paragraph. Chapter twenty-one is one line. There are seven chapters in eight pages from eighteen to twenty-four. Initially, these chapters start on the next page from their predecessors, but there's a point where blank pages start to be used, as if we need a break after what we just read. At one crucial point, there are two blanks.

As you might think, this makes 'The Night Guest' a quick read. Two hundred pages isn't that long to begin with, but there's one point where there a mere fourteen lines of text are spread across thirteen pages, so I'm guessing this is technically a novella by word count. That fits the fashion in which it's told too, with only one principal character, a couple of others who recur and a sprinkling of supporting characters who show up maybe once or twice and don't reappear again. Much of the story is told in Iðunn's head as she worries, which makes the result creepy and claustrophobic. She can't even trust her own body. Without that, what can we trust?

There are two problems that many readers will call out but I'll only sympathise with one of them. The first is that there's animal abuse here. It's neither frequent nor gratuitous but it's there and it's arguably all the more powerful because it isn't frequent or gratuitous. To me, it carries more of an impact because Iðunn is a cat lover in the same situation we are right now. She doesn't have a cat at this point but many neighbourhood cats visit her regularly and she relishes her time with them. She even describes Mávur as her oldest friend. Some readers can't take animal abuse even in fiction and those readers are not going to like this. I'm a cat lover but I was OK with it. It's done well.

The other is the ending. There's certainly an ending but it's so quick and so vague that it's hard to understand what it means. There are two obvious possibilities for me, which would give the novel entirely different impacts. However, I can see a string of other possibilities too, based on earlier hints that passed fleetingly and were not otherwise followed up on. I'm fine with leaving endings open so that we can bring our own interpretations, but this is an extreme example. It's almost as if Hildur Knútsdóttir was writing this without concern for length but then realised she'd reached chapter ninety-four and decided that one hundred would be it. Those final six chapters use seven pages and that's all she wrote.

Frankly, I wanted a lot more. Another ten chapters, or maybe twenty, if we're stubbornly staying at a page each, could have wrapped up a bunch of loose threads and given us a more trustworthy ending. Sure, we could still be left with a choice between literal or psychological. That's fine. But we'd be able to justify that choice based on data, which we currently don't have. At this point, we kind of have to guess what Knútsdóttir had in mind and that doesn't seem right. What that does to the novel as a whole is to knock off at least a star and maybe more, depending on how cheated we feel by the ending. It's a peach up to chapter ninety-four. After that, well... ~~ Hal C F Astell

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