This tale of 17th-century witchcraft has an unnerving narrator like no other

FICTION
The Wax Child
Olga Ravn, trans. Martin Aitken
Viking, $35.99

Inspired by a series of real-life witch trials, The Wax Child reimagines the lives of several women accused of loving Satan more than the average God-fearing woman in 17th-century Denmark ought to.

As in Olga Ravn’s other novels – The Employees, a cleverly dystopian memo from an AI-led future; My Work, a fragmentary depiction of the psychic disorientation of motherhood – the familiar world is a veritable rabbit hole. Tumble down, and you discover that everything you thought you knew hides a more sinister essence.

Christenze Kruckow, a noblewoman with no desire to marry, is accused by the mistress of her manor, Anne Biller, of witchcraft. The suspicion is prompted by Biller’s tragic experience of childbirth: 15 babies, all of them either stillborn or dead shortly after entering the world. But Christenze’s real crime lies in her preference for horses, women and wine over the love of a good man. Conveniently for her accuser, the court of public opinion also serves as prosecution, appeals tribunal and prison rolled into one. Hearsay rules. Whatever the town suspects, the town verifies.

Christenze promptly flees to Aalborg, where she falls for Maren Kneppis. She, Maren and a bevy of other women gather to gossip, cast spells and generally have a fantastic time. When pastor Klyne, the abusive husband of a friend, accuses Christenze and her gal-pals of Satan’s temptations, her run-in with the law begins.

Spoiler alert: in Denmark circa-1600, the criminal justice system is more concerned with the first half of its name than the latter part. Still, spoilers aren’t really possible here. And spoilers are moot when your novel is narrated by an all-knowing wax child.

Crafted by Christenze, central to the women’s spells, the wax child sees past, present and future. Delivering impressions that might normally be confined to an individual character’s narration, the child offers Ravn a handy narrative device, allowing her to freely roam throughout the universe of her novel.

Yet the wax child is a paradox. If Christenze is not a witch, how is such a child possible? As in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw or fellow Dane Carl Theodor Dreyer’s uncanny film masterpieces of vampires, witches and persecution, Ravn refuses to let the reader definitively say what is sorcery and what is only paranoid suspicion. It’s possible that the witches and their malignant powers are both real and imagined, the product of a society haunted by the same demons we might invoke today to try and explain the impossible. Cats converse with swine, spiders emerge from children’s mouths – and yet, Ravn seems to ask, is this really any stranger than kings conjuring state borders from thin air? More bizarre than oil, gold and territory being extracted from their rightful custodians?

With a historian’s zest for detail, Ravn describes the sorcery that led to imperial expansion. Copenhagen is proclaimed the country’s first capital and borders between Denmark and Norway are erected. Ships are sent to India and Norway. New territories are established and laws against the most pernicious evils of the day enacted. A trading monopoly with Iceland? Very much in. Witchcraft, promiscuity, costly weddings, drunkenness, opulent fashions and inns? Not so much.

Ravn has adapted handwritten sources from Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Library and the University of Oslo’s Trolldomsarkivet, along with Nordic folklore, 15th-century grimoires, court documents, theology, and letters written during the northern European witch trials. Martin Aitken provides a further layer of translation, transforming Ravn’s Danish into something that reads at times like the King James Bible: passive tensed, conspiratorial, patterned with rhythmically dominoed “ands” that make the story of Genesis sing.

If Robert Eggers doesn’t option the screenplay for The Wax Child soon, someone else surely will. Ravn hides the devil in both the sacred and the profane details of existence. In one memorable scene, a woman is described as being emptied, her day belonging to the children she raises (“She saw herself in the polished stone and saw her mother’s face”). It’s an elliptical but unmistakable critique. Existence’s domestic aspects are revealed for how unsettling they can be, Ravn’s impressionistic language helping bring the otherworldly into conversation with the earthbound. When Galileo’s eye lands upon Jupiter’s moons while women burn, we know Walter Benjamin wasn’t wrong in suggesting that every document of civilisation is also one of barbarity.

Early in The Wax Child, Ravn makes reference to Elsinore, where Shakespeare’s Hamlet exacted revenge. As below, so above: I couldn’t help also thinking of Macbeth, the king whose toil and trouble lay, not in witchcraft, but the will to power. After all, the trope of the witch trial is an all-timer: salacious fact-finding and a gift for conjecture aren’t far removed from the ingredients required to prosecute organisations and individuals today. Begging forgiveness on behalf of a beleaguered humanity, you’d be tempted to paraphrase Ravn and say: we knew so little about the Devil back then. Now, everyone knows so much about him.

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