A nun in Iceland

Icelandic author Olaf Olafsson makes reading his novels a challenge, as in Touch, a book that wowed me a couple of years ago. In The Sacrament (2019), an earlier novel, there is more of the same. Time jumps around, so the reader is never sure what is happening now and what happened way back when. Quotation marks are used sparingly. Much of the narrative is obscure.

Yet Olafsson proves worth the trouble.

Sister Johanna Marie, a French nun, is sent back to Iceland for a second time, two decades after her first visit, to conduct another investigation. Her main qualification as an investigator seems to be that she learned the Icelandic languages from her Icelandic roommate, Halla, when she was in college.

Because Catholic priests and nuns are not allowed to marry, the priesthood sometimes draws homosexual men, partly the reason for the problem the church has had with priests and choir boys. And this is why Johanna is sent as an investigator to Iceland. But does a nun's life also attract lesbians? This is true in Johanna's case, and each time she visits Iceland she has Halla on her mind.

Will she and Halla reunite? That is but one of the novel's mysteries. Also, will misbehaving priests ever face justice? Why did a priest fall to his death from a bell tower during Johanna's first trip to Iceland? And what happened to the boy she rescued from a locked closet?

Olafsson's novels may be puzzles, but they are a joy to solve.