When Sally Magnusson decided to write a novel it was perhaps inevitable that she should turn for inspiration to her father’s native country. Iceland, after all, is the land of the sagas and Magnus Magnusson grew up with them. What she came up with was a story that few people outside Iceland know anything about: a 17th-century act of piracy, when Arab raiders sailed their galleys into Icelandic waters and seized 400 men, women and children — 1 per cent of the population — to take back to north Africa as slaves.
The book is based on the real story of one Icelandic woman, taken with her husband and children and forced into slavery in Algiers. The character is owned by a Moorish potentate with whom she falls in love. The love story in The Sealwoman’s Gift is her invention. The rest is based on fact.
“The great joy for me was uncovering this whole episode I knew nothing about, and I was pretty sure that no one else south of Iceland knew about it either,” she said.
“It was a hugely traumatic event in 1627. The pirates arrived in three galleys. They took about 400 people, most of them from the tiny Westman islands, and only 27 ever came back. It was ten years of agony in the history of Iceland, which only had a population of around 40,000.”
Well before black slaves were taken from Africa and the West Indies by Britain and America, Arab pirates in their well-rigged galleys were raiding European countries and seizing people on the coast to take back to Algiers, Morocco and Tunisia.
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“Thousands were taken from France, Italy, Spain and Britain. Cornwall was specially vulnerable,” Magnusson said. “But for a tiny country like Iceland to lose 400 was staggering. These were the poorest, and they didn’t have a voice. And if you don’t have a voice then history forgets you — they were erased from the collective memory.”
As a TV broadcaster for more than 30 years and the regular presenter of Reporting Scotland, she is one of the most familiar faces on television.
Magnusson, 62, is married to the award-winning director Norman Stone, with whom she has five children. She began her career as a reporter for The Scotsman and has since published biographies, children’s books and a moving account of her mother’s descent into dementia. This is her first venture into fiction for adults.
She based her book on the real facts about one woman with four children, who was taken captive but did eventually return to Iceland, though without her children. Magnusson imagines that she worked for a Moorish owner who treated her relatively well.
In a latter-day version of Scheherazade, the Arab woman in One Thousand and One Nights who saves herself from execution by telling stories, Magnusson’s heroine, Asta, holds off her boss’s advances by reciting Icelandic sagas.
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“I focused on a woman who plausibly could have had that life,” she said. “There certainly were concubines, but my heroine mother of four in her mid-thirties would not have been prime concubine material, which allows me to speculate that it was not all about desiring her body.
“The man who owned her was a Moor, originally from Spain, and was based on a genuine historical character, Ali Pichilin, who owned slaves and galleys. I liked the idea of creating someone at least with civilised pretensions, and seeing how that could be made into a love story.”
Torn between her longing to return to Iceland and the growing realisation that she is falling in love with her owner, Asta finally succumbs to Ali after hearing that her beloved daughter has been bought as a concubine and is leaving for Istanbul.
“I liked the idea of a love affair based on argument and saga-telling,” Magnusson said.
“I liked the idea of playing with the Scheherazade idea but I wanted to be serious about Icelandic history, which is held in very high regard, and I wanted to get it right. However, I also wanted to write a page-turner. I had to hold her off for quite a time, but she does go to bed with him. One paragraph of sex was quite enough.
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“To have the moment of sexual congress to come at a time of greatest emotion and loss and anguish for her and to have it a time when he had waited so long that it mean something, that seemed to me a dignified way to deal with it.
“In the end, my heroine does decide to go back to Iceland. If you’re going to write a novel you’re going to have drama and tension, and it seemed to me that the fact she arrived home without her children was the key to understanding some of the conflict that must have gone on for her. I heard one thing in Iceland, and only in Iceland can you hear gossip from the 17th century, which said that she found it difficult when she got back. To spend nine years in Algiers aching for Iceland, and deciding in the end to go back despite falling for someone else, and then to find home cold and dreary in comparison to the warmth of Algiers, that, I thought, would be interesting.”
So does Magnusson think that the literary life will draw her away from television?
“Well, I’m not going to give up the day job,” she said.
“I don’t imagine that I’m going to do my present job for ever, but I’ve always been a news journalist, and I enjoyed putting my toe in the water [as a novelist]. I don’t regret going into broadcasting for a minute, but what I’m enjoying now is just shifting the balance a bit, at this late stage in my career.”
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And if she has learned one thing from studying the experiences of 17th-century women, it is that some things don’t change all that much — women are still struggling to gain equality.
“I enormously admire those women who have taken a public stand on equal pay,” she said. “For me to dig deep in the 17th century and discover what women’s lives were like then was to see, in a sense, the long-ago roots of some of the things that women are still trying to do today. We owe our 17th-century ancestors a bit of a fight, in the lives of women everywhere.”
The Sealwoman’s Gift by Sally Magnusson is published by Hodder next month
Q&A
What is the book on your bedside table?
Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break, and I have just started Rob Roy by Walter Scott.
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Dolce & Gabbana or Marks and Spencer?
More likely to be Zara in Glasgow. What I wear on TV is like a uniform — I have to buy the clothes myself.
What disc would you take to a desert island?
Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, which is a sublime piece of music.
Who would you take on a one-way trip to Mars?
My husband, because at least I know how to stop him snoring.
What is the best advice you have ever had?
In the book I quote the saying: “A man shall not limp while both his legs are the same length.”