“Every religion had to start somewhere, with somebody, right?” shrugs American novelist Hanna Pylväinen. “Faiths rise to fulfil a need – or many needs. I realised that if I was ever going to understand the church in which I was raised, then I needed to understand the social, political and personal conditions required to birth a new and successful religion in the remote, Scandinavian tundra in the middle of the nineteenth century.”
In an attempt to answer her questions about the roots of the Laestadian Lutheran Church – of which she was a member until turning 21 – Pylväinen spent fifteen years researching her third, National Book Award-shortlisted work. The End of Drum-Time is an utterly absorbing fiction which sweeps readers away to the raw beauty of the northern regions of the countries we now call Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. There the nomadic Sami people follow their reindeer herds through the seasons while the passionate missionary known as “Mad Lasse” waves his arms before the altar of his church.
We meet the pietist pastor – based on the real Lars Levi Laestadius – preaching urgent sermons luring the Sami in through the doors of his church. He rails against the evils of the alcohol brought in by the Swedish settlers while his daughter, Willa, tries to keep her gaze modest as she admires the beautiful young Sami man who falls down drunk in the street outside.
Talking to me via video link from her home in New York, Pylväinen still dresses a little like a puritan: white blouse, chestnut hair swirled up into a bun. But there’s nothing confined or conservative about her freewheeling, questing and occasionally sweary conversation. She points out that she also wears earrings – which are banned in her former church, along with makeup, dating, drinking, dancing or listening to music with a beat. Sex before marriage is banned, along with birth control, which explains why Pylväinen has thirteen aunts and uncles and seven siblings. They stood out from their peers in suburban Detroit but church members took a pride in what Pylväinen describes as the “tone of superiority” they got from living “a harder, more intense” life.
“I wish I could tell people that I was a rebel child who saw through all the bullshit from an early age,” she shrugs. “But the truth is that I believed it all so fervently that it kinda crushed me when I started to realise it wasn’t real.”
She explains that, unlike many fundamentalist faiths, Laestadianism put little emphasis on biblical scholarship. “I don’t remember ever being asked to read the whole Bible or memorise verses. Instead the emphasis was on your internal belief, and your personal feeling of faith was prized above all.” She notes that’s “pretty wild and different to rational western emphasis on education and knowledge”.
“It is a religion that asks women to have many children and really sacrifice their bodies”
The most seductive ritual in the Laestadian church saw members of the congregation forgive each other’s sins. “When we did that there was often a lot of crying. It was very cathartic.” Pylväinen looks pained as she recalls that during these rituals she experienced “a feeling that I don’t have any more in my non-Christian life”. She flips up her palms. The Finnish word for this is liikutuksia but there is no perfect English equivalent and Pylväinen stresses that “it can’t exist in me now. But it was extremely powerful like… ecstasy isn’t quite the word but you felt: I’m clean, I’m pure, everything is OK. It’s incredibly seductive, addictive. It’s like a drug – you want to come back for it and back for it. If you’re away from it, you miss it. If you don’t get it, there’s a sense something is wrong with you. A cold sensation like sin clogs up inside of you.”
Although I’m nodding, Pylväinen is worried I haven’t got the measure of this total absolution. “Imagine somebody could just take all of your mistakes, all of your fuck-ups and say: ‘Helen, it’s over. It’s all over, right now, you’re done.’ Imagine!”
Pylväinen tells me it took her a long period of “yes-no-yes-no-ing” to leave the faith. She was bothered by some of the rules. “The gender discrepancy was clear. It is a religion that asks women to have many children and really sacrifice their bodies to that – risk their lives.” She sighs. “I know so many women who were told by doctors: do not have any more children. It will be dangerous for you. But they kept on doing it.” Pylväinen also took issue with her church’s homophobia. Away from her family at college, she realised: “On a more fundamental level I had lost my faith. It was gone and that was that. I am an atheist. It didn’t feel honest to keep pretending.”
Although Laestadians don’t actively shun ex-members as some religious groups do, Pylväinen knew her decision felt like “separating myself from my family on a deep level. It was tough. Really tough.” Could she talk to her parents about her feelings? “No, no!” she winces. “I talked to a therapist. I talked to friends. But they couldn’t really understand because they weren’t from my world. Their attitude was: ‘That shit sounds crazy, sounds good you’re out.’ It was hard for them to appreciate that I was going through a huge period of loss, mourning an actual terror.”
Her first book was a memoir: Unbelieving (2007) but she felt fiction freed her up to be more honest about life in the church in her Whiting Award-winning debut novel, We Sinners (2012), which explored the life of a fictional family in the church. Although Pylväinen had written a memoir as an undergraduate, she found fiction freed her up to tell greater truths. The church community “did not like the book”, she says. “Let’s just say: they did not like it.” But she couldn’t leave the subject alone. “Although We Sinners was set in the present, it ended with a section in the past and left me feeling I needed to go back to the church’s origins. It was as if the further I got from the church in my real life, the more drawn into it I became in my writing.”
In 2009 Pylväinen was awarded a grant to research the Laestadian faith and flew to Finland to meet a leading scholar on the subject. She describes this encounter like something out of a spy novel. “I agreed to meet him in the basement of a strip mall in Helsinki – such a weird set up. I felt paranoid because in the church there are people watching you all the time.” She became uncomfortably aware that her earrings signalled that she was an unbeliever but she couldn’t get a bead on whether he was or not. “With women there are so many coded behaviours. I can tell instantly if a woman is in the church or not. But because men’s behaviour is much less controlled, it’s much harder to read the signals.”
Pylväinen got the same skin-prickling sensation when she went north to visit Laestadius’s old parsonage which is now preserved as a tourist attraction. “I went to poke around but I had this nervous feeling the whole time. I kept thinking: this place is why I exist. This is why four generations of Finns came to America and kept marrying each other and staying within the same church.”
But the trip also brought revelations. The novelist admits she had “come to think of the religion as a powerful colonising force that comes in and takes away everything Sami – just evil”. Instead she learned that Laestadius was himself of Sami descent. He used Sami words in his sermons and encouraged the Sami to preach among themselves. His faith did reduce rates of alcoholism and reindeer theft among his new parishioners. But he also ended many of their traditions; “the end of drum-time” is the phrase they use to describe the arrival of Christianity in their culture.
Through friends she found Sami who were willing to let her come and spend time with them. She learned how to build a lávvu shelter, how to lay out wood for a fire and spread juniper branches for bedding, as well as many of the old rules, such as which way to turn a tea kettle to “keep the luck in” or how you have to finish your coffee down to the last drop.
Although by then she was living in New York and her regular life couldn’t have looked more superficially different to that of the Sami, she recognised some of their ways of thinking. Like the congregation of her youth, the Sami prized feeling over knowledge. “So they would check the weather reports but that didn’t dictate their behaviour.” They lived an intense, raw life in which individual will was surrendered to nature. “I’d ask what we were doing the next day and they would look at me as if to say: how can I possibly know? They have a saying: ‘Let the reindeer decide’.” She laughs. “Substitute reindeer for God and that’s the same philosophy I grew up with.”
Pylväinen’s descriptions of Sami life in The End of Drum-Time are detailed and alluring. “The desire to romanticise is rational because it is romantic,” she says. “There were moments when I was writing about the landscape and was swept away… it’s a geography which leaves you reoriented, your needs are very small and yet your feelings are powerful.”
Her first encounter with reindeer was less idyllic. “I was invited out to see some calves – who doesn’t want to meet a baby reindeer, right? – and they took me to a little pen of six-month-old calves. They were very cute. Soft. Making their little grunting noises. Then these men jumped the fence and started shooting them in the head with nail guns. The calves fell to the ground in front of me. There was no warning that this was going to happen, so I wasn’t prepared. Then they dragged them away and I realised the whole area had been set up for slaughter. They were collecting blood in buckets. I was nervous and anxious but I watched them cutting the carcasses open and I helped them to pull the fur off the muscles… I had to know how it all felt.”
Earrings are banned in her former church, along with makeup, dating, drinking, dancing or listening to music with a beat
This was also the unlikely moment when Pylväinen first tuned into Sami romance. “While I was tearing this fur from the calves I realised the guy running the slaughter was flirting with the woman collecting the blood in a bucket. You don’t need to speak a language to feel flirting. It was in the air along with the slaughter. I thought: ‘Oh my god, you can flirt with blood all over your hands. Of course that is possible. This is normal to them – they’re getting some meat to eat.”
Pylväinen’s decision to write about the Sami threw up questions of cultural appropriation. Her worries about it provoked “a very western response: research! I read about colonialisation. I taught a class at Princeton where we looked at the work of writers who had written about characters who didn’t share their race. I really went in. In Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda’s book The Racial Imaginary they argue that we shouldn’t be talking about who has the ‘right’ to write about people of different racial backgrounds. We should be asking: why do you want to write about this? So let’s say you’re white, you need to ask: what is it about your whiteness that’s imprisoning. I took this to heart very deeply.” She realised she didn’t just need to try to understand the Sami, she needed to understand why she was writing about them and own that.
Initially, The End of Drum-Time was written purely from the point of view of Laestadius’s daughter, Willa. “That was the moral high ground, right?” says Pylväinen. “That was the place from which I wouldn’t be tarred and feathered on Twitter. But if I did that, I would have been making the Laestadian church a white church again – I was recreating the whole problem.” Instead Pylväinen took a risk and went with an omniscient narrative voice, reaching into the hearts and minds of her Sami characters too.
“In the end the novel had to be about the question of identity and the role of stories in that,” she explains. “I knew I had to be very direct about the politics of identity. I couldn’t get away with skating around it. I needed to own my telling of the story by using omniscience to tell people what I’ve learned. I used the narration to acknowledge what I don’t know and the spaces into which I cannot go.” She pauses. Although her Sami adviser felt her book “does justice to the injustice of my people” Pylväinen is still “honestly curious to know if I will regret writing this in twenty years. Maybe it is a mistake and I shouldn’t have done it.”
The End of Drum-Time is not being published in Finland, which is a sign that Pylväinen is on thin ice. “It’s a political thing, that Finnish publishers haven’t bought and translated it,” she says. “The generous reading would be: they don’t think it’s a good idea for an American to write about the Sami. The ungenerous reading would be that they don’t care about Sami representation in their literature. I don’t know.” She smiles warmly, relaxed about letting her readers decide. “All I can know is that I thought very long and very hard about this story and I followed my own moral compass. In the end, the plot followed the reindeer.”
Helen Brown is an arts journalist writing regularly for The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Financial Times and The Daily Mail
