Book Review of the Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson

 

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An absorbing novel about Viking myths in an ancient landscape.

  

The landscape is that of Orkney and it’s inextricably bound with the surrounding seascape and a past so distant that Viking myth turns out to qualify as modern re-invention.

A Surrey librarian in her late fifties learns that she has terminal cancer and decides that, rather than struggling hard to stay alive, she will die on her own terms after answering some questions about her childhood, in Orkney. “Helen” sells up everything connected with the English life she built for herself after being “exiled” at age fifteen, rents a flat near where she grew up (mostly in the library when things were bad at home) and goes there with the idea that when the times comes, she will freeze herself to death on a hillside rather than submit to what she sees as the pointless torture of end of life care. The only person she actually recognises is “Thorfinn,” who worked as a book-stacker in the library in his teens and once asked her out, unsuccessfully initially but forty-two years have passed and he still has hope.

At some other time and place, which somehow connects to Orkney in the present day, “Hel’” a half-beautiful, half hideous “monster” is betrayed by the Norse gods and exiled to the underworld, to take charge of departed souls who aren‘t going to Valhalla (almost everyone who dies, in practice).

Importantly, the historical site where Hel’ meets and collects souls is a neolithic burial mound which predates Viking culture by several times as many years as Viking culture predates ours.

The Norse gods mostly fear Hel’, but for the wrong reasons. Hel’ and Helen have things to learn from each other and that will be transformative.

And Helen finds that she can tolerate Thorfinn helping her, though it takes her rather longer to accept that he loves her and she actually wants him to love her. Hel’ learns to rediscover her role in really ancient neolithic myth: she is not the cruel and repulsive monster the Norse gods make her out to be.

This is a lovely story about finding peace as well as love, even in one’s last days. After the din and clamour, the sheer orchestrated panic, of the covid years, this is the sort of peace and love denied to so many. Thousands died with no-one allowed to hold their hand or say a soothing word. This is what they should have had.

This book doesn’t so much fill a gap in the market as a gaping hole in modern society’s soul.

The Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson is published on the 6^th of November 2025 by John Murray Press.

Book Review of “I Am A Cat” Volume One by Natsume Soseki, translated by Nick Bradley

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This is a new translation of a Japanese satirical novel published circa 1905.

It is mostly about the relationship between a not-very important Japanese academic and a stray cat.

If we can judge a civilisation by how it treats its most vulnerable members, perhaps we can at least partly understand a nation by how it views its cats. Although the translator has focused on the author’s relationship with English and The English, he does have fun with German tourists too, and that is interesting for two reasons:

In 1905, the slogan which Imperial Germany used to define the role of women was known as the three Ks: Kinder, Küche, Kirche. This was widely but somewhat irreverently extended to: Kinder, Küche, Kirche, Katze.

Two of the female Japanese characters in this novel, the pair who look after “Miss Calico,” certainly see this as a duty. The other female Japanese characters are largely cat-neutral or even anti-cat.

I Am A Cat may be the first Japanese novel of its kind, but there was an English translation of a German novel, from about a century earlier (before Germany was a country, let alone an empire) about an academic’s relationship with a cat, seen in the opening passages as terribly elderly and needing to have his face dipped in a saucer of cream to make him take some nourishment. (The reviewer is trying, but failing, to remember either the German or the English title.) So, this is a genre and a basic premise which was established in German literature before the Victorian cat-craze in England, which Soseki took with him back to Japan.

But the execution of that premise is all Japanese, as far as one can tell: the male academic and his friends are very rude to nearly everyone and especially unkind to women. They enjoy misleading people in a way which makes the victim seem, and feel, extremely foolish. Soseki projects this behaviour upon the character of The Master (of the cat and little else) which is based on himself, but the cat finds it offensive and perhaps so does Soseki.

Some of the shaggy dog stories are simply too long and bullying, but the reason why this classic novel gets four stars rather than five is that the “uneducated” human characters are given Dick Van Dyke-level Edwardian Cockney accents which strike a bit of a bum note. This may, however, accurately convey the way Soseki wrote the original dialogue.

I Am A Cat by Natsume Soseki and translated by Nick Bradley is published in the UK by Vintage Classics (Random House) on the 4^th of September 2025