Review of The Wax Child by Olga Raven – A profoundly magical story | books

HeyOn June 26, 1621, in Copenhagen, a woman was beheaded – unusual, but only in the manner of her death. According to one historian, during the years 1617 to 1625, a “witch” was burned in Denmark every five days. The first time this happens is in Danish author Olga Raven’s fourth novel, in which the condemned woman is “tied to the ladder, and the ladder is pushed into the fire.” Her daughter watches her fall, her eyes “strangely orange on the inside. Then they explode in the heat.”

The child in turn is watched as a wax doll that sees everything: everything in this scene, and everything everywhere, across all space and in all time since it was formed. He sees worms digging in the soil in which he was buried. The streets of the world in which I was made. It inhabits the bodies that walked those streets: “And I was in the king’s ear, and I was in the king’s mouth, and I was of the king’s age and the mercury of his liver, and I used to listen.”

On a basic level, the wax baby is a useful narrative device. But it also complicates everything. The temptation, from the distance of the twenty-first century, is to assume that the charges against so-called witches are unfounded. But in this case, a well-known case in Denmark, the charges involved making babies out of wax – and Ravn begins with Christenze Kroko, a real-life Danish noblewoman who was accused of witchcraft three times during her life, for making a baby out of wax.

In the 17th century, magic was as much a part of the fabric of life as Christianity, albeit more underground. Raven intersperses her narrative with spells taken directly from the Black Books and grimoires. It is strange, but really only in the way that the deep beliefs of another time and place are strange; Strikingly, they are often not intended to cause harm, but to ward it off: attempts to neutralize anger, whether the sick person may live or die, or to want others to be kind.

Then there was the everyday magic, which was perhaps the most threatening to the authorities: women working together, gutting fish, and raking wool; Women protect each other and try to intervene when one of them, Elizabeth, is beaten by her husband. The magic of friends, the magic of laughter, dancing, love and a shared glass of wine. “Will you come with us to the Lucia Festival, Elizabeth? Magic is possible. Laughter is possible. There is a way out, Elizabeth, there is a way out…” She’s not entirely innocent, of course, and she’s not all sweet. The Lucia Festival takes place on a midwinter night when dark spirits are said to wander. Baby wax sharp with nail and hair trimming and metal clips.

There is an argument that this kind of collective feminine magic is a form of psychological liberation in a world where this has been difficult to achieve; It certainly stands in stark contrast to the general patriarchal narrative under which women are judged. They reviewed their books on demonology, and he read: A woman is more easily tempted by Satan, because she is weaker than a man in body and spirit. When a woman thinks on her own, she thinks evil …” Christinezi and her friends have no chance.

On the surface, the three Raven novels translated into English so far are very different; Wax Child was preceded by the wonderful International Booker-shortlisted Staff, set on a 22nd-century spaceship, and My Work, a contemporary autobiographical novel about motherhood that shares much of the preoccupation and tone with Rachel Cusk. But they’re all novels of ideas—and it’s not the same as being abstract: one of Raven’s great strengths is that she harnesses near-everyday life (breastfeeding, fish guts) into existential breadth, often in the same sentence. So the staff’s goal was to think about what the land means to us; What is man, what is love, what is worth living for? My work has embodied the fundamental self-alienation many women have when they become mothers; How a mother is made in the process of giving birth, and how a writer can be made in the process of writing about birth. In the movie The Wax Child we see how the so-called witch is created with a wax child, or surrogate child; How can the act of bearing witness also be an act of creation.

Raven began as a poet, and even in English this lineage is clear. Her work emphasizes that knowledge resides in things, and understanding through smell, taste, blood, and intestines; Through metaphor. “How do I know this?” The waxy baby demands at one point. “It’s like a wound inside me to know that.”

Sometimes, this bodily knowledge begins to bring about a kind of shifting and all-encompassing synaesthesia. The wax child says: “I see the king by the scent of the eye.” “I listen, I hear time like the clearing between the trees.” The novel is full of things, and with the power of things; Spells can be said to work by harnessing this power. Satan’s accusations refer to the misuse of things: “wax, thread, scissors, coins, nails, hair, foreheads of the dead…”

At its best, The Wax Child is evocative, beautiful, terrifying, and profound. “It is the darkest of times, December. From the curvature of the earth, the minutes run like drops of day.” Other times, there is too much research out of sight; The novel can seem elliptical, even confusing. One misses the space, clarity and freedom of employees. But maybe that’s the thing about weaving spells. Also about the hair: demanding it makes perfect sense, and you start to have a lot in common with witch hunters.