On 26 June 1621, in Copenhagen, a woman was beheaded – which was unusual, but only in the manner of her death. According to one historian, during the years 1617 to 1625, in Denmark a “witch” was burned every five days. The first time this happens in Danish author Olga Ravn’s fourth novel, the condemned woman is “tied to the ladder, and the ladder pushed into the bonfire”. Her daughter watches as she falls, her eye “so strangely orange from within. And then in the heat it explodes.”
The child is watched, in turn, by a wax doll who sees everything: everything in this scene, and everything everywhere, through all space and all the time since it was fashioned. It sees the worms burrowing through the soil in which it is buried; the streets of the world in which it 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 in the king’s loose tooth and in the quicksilver of his liver, and did hear.”
On a basic level, the wax child is a useful narrative device. But it also complicates everything. The temptation, from the distance of the 21st century, is to assume charges against so-called witches to be baseless. But in this case, a well-known one in Denmark, the charges included the making of wax children – and Ravn begins with Christenze Krukow, a real Danish noblewoman who was accused of witchcraft three times during her lifetime, making this wax baby.
In the 17th century magic was as much a part of the warp and weft of life as Christianity, if more secret. Ravn intersperses her narrative with spells taken directly from “black books” and grimoires. They are strange, but only really in the way that the deep beliefs of another time and place are strange; it is striking how often they are not about causing harm, but warding it off: attempts to neutralise anger, divine if an ill person might live or die, or will others to be kind.
And then there are the everyday magics, which to the authorities were perhaps most threatening of all: of women working together, gutting fish, carding wool; women protecting each other, trying to intervene when one of them, Elisabeth, is beaten by her husband. The magic of friends, of laughter and dancing and love and a shared glass of wine. “Will you come with us to the Lucia fest, Elisabeth? Magic is possible. Laughter is possible. There is a way out, Elisabeth, there is a way out …” It isn’t entirely innocent, of course, and not all of it is kind. Lucia fest happens on a midwinter night when dark spirits were said to roam; the wax child is sharp with nail parings and hair and scraps of metal.
There is an argument that this type of feminine group magic is a form of psychological release in a world where this was hard to come by; it certainly stands in stark contrast to the public male narrative according to which the women are tried. “They consulted their books of demonology, and there read: The woman is more easily tempted by Satan, for she is weaker than the man in body and soul … When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil …” Christenze and her friends don’t stand a chance.
On the surface, Ravn’s three novels translated into English so far are quite different; The Wax Child was preceded by the brilliant International Booker-shortlisted The Employees, set on a 22nd-century spaceship, and My Work, a contemporary autofiction about motherhood that shares much in preoccupation and tone with Rachel Cusk. But all are novels of ideas – which is not the same as being abstract: one of Ravn’s great strengths is her harnessing of the close quotidian (breastfeeding, fish gutting) to existential vastnesses, often in the same sentence. So The Employees aimed to think through what Earth means to us; what is it to be human, what is love, what is worth living for? My Work enacted the fundamental self-estrangement, for many women, of becoming a mother; how a mother is made in the act of birth, and how a writer can be made in the act of writing about birth. In The Wax Child we see how a so-called witch is made along with a wax baby, or substitute child; how an act of witness can also be an act of creation.
Ravn began as a poet, and even in English this lineage is clear. Her work asserts that knowledge inheres in objects, comprehension through smell and taste and blood and guts; through metaphor. “How do I know this?” demands the wax child, at one point. “It is like a gash in me to know it.”
At times this physical knowledge begins to achieve a kind of all-pervading, shifting synaesthesia. “I see the king with the smell of the eye,” says the wax child. “Listening, I hear time as a clearing among trees.” The novel is full of things, and the power of things; it could be said that spells work by harnessing this power. Accusations of devilment cite the misuse of things: “Wax, thread, scissors, coin, nails, hair, the foreheads of the dead …”
At its best The Wax Child is richly evocative, beautiful, creepy and visceral. “It is the darkest of times, December. From the curvature of the earth, minutes run like droplets from the day.” At other times, there’s a bit too much research just out of sight; the novel can feel elliptical, even baffling. One misses the space, the clarity and freedom of The Employees. But maybe that’s the thing about weaving spells. About poetry, too: demand it makes neat sense, and you begin to have too much in common with the witch-hunters.