The Wax Child

The stage for Olga Ravn’s latest work is the town of Aalborg, in 1620s Denmark. Our strange narrator is a doll made of wax, with strands of human hair pressed into the soles of its feet. This wax child recounts the goings-on of its surroundings as told to it by birds, by the soil, by the teeth in the King’s mouth. Ravn has created an entrancing voice in this narrator, so inhuman in its point of view and yet so humane in its observations.

Most of all, the wax child concerns itself with its mistress, Christenze, and the women she loves. As the fist of Christianity tightens around Denmark, Christenze and those like her struggle to reckon with a narrowing culture: ‘Is that what harmful magic is? Was that heresy? …Forgive us. We knew so little about the devil in those days, now everyone knows so much about him.’

Written in parallel with a play by the name of HEX, the novel is based on an infamous set of witch trials in Denmark’s history. The author pays tribute to these women, using their true names and archival research to weave together something of who they were. They are revived with captivating prose that reads as much like an incantation as it does a story. The novel’s relation to the theatre is hard to miss – it is almost a shame not to hear some passages read aloud – but it is no less powerful on the page.

Ravn brings to life a time long past, where witchcraft appeared as much a daily reality as carding wool or carpentry, but it seems no mistake to offer us this story in our current moment, where rumour and heresy are treated as real once more.