The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen review – a sweeping Sámi epic

Reindeers migrate in The End of Drum-Time. Photograph: Gary Latham/Getty Images

Hanna Pylväinen’s engrossing novel The End of Drum-Time brings to light the world of the Sámi – who with their reindeer herds inhabit the northern regions of the countries now called Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia – as they coexisted and clashed with Scandinavian missionaries and settlers during this turbulent time. Lars Levi Laestadius, who plays a central role in this story, was a historical figure, a Lutheran minister, himself part Sámi, who worked to convert these nomadic people from their traditional religion and way of life. Pylväinen, who was raised in the American midwest in a sect that evolved from Laestatius’s movement, drops the reader immediately and arrestingly into a bitter northern climate that she makes intimate and familiar through the richness of her descriptions and the honesty of her characterisations.

It calls to mind the great novels of Thomas Hardy – Pylväinen understands, as Hardy did, the cost that transformation exacts

“Mad Lasse”, as the minister is known for his fervour, attempts to pull his parishioners away from the evils of the alcohol introduced by Swedish settlers. His daughter Willa falls in love with a young Sámi man, Ivvár, himself the son of an important figure in his community, Biettar. In a sense the novel is a Romeo and Juliet love story: one in which whole cultures, rather than specific families, are at odds. Pylväinen, who spent six months living with Sámi reindeer herders in Finland to research this novel, grounds this opposition in her characters’ lives. When Willa’s younger brother Lorens is deathly ill with what seems to be consumption, a Sámi healing woman, Old Sussu, comes to tend to him, making her traditional ministrations as the family recites the Lord’s prayer: “Willa said it with them but she couldn’t have said where she was in the prayer, which line was next.”

When the Sámi leave the settlement with their reindeer – migrating along with the animals, with whom they are interdependent – Willa leaves with them and is swept into a new life: “Sometimes she wanted to weep from the relief of reprieve from the parsonage … the smoky indoors, the fear that her life was always already known to her.” Through her outsider’s eyes the reader sees Ivvár and his people: what they have lost, and what they are trying to hold on to, against impossible odds. In 1852 the border between Norway and Finland/Russia (as it was then) was closed, disrupting patterns that humans and reindeer had followed for millennia. Ivvár tells Willa the stories that have been passed down to him, of communion between human and beast and land, and he tells her too of the destruction that has been wreaked by incomers – how the Christians took away the drums of the noaidis, or shamans. “They burned the drums, or brought them to their homes and put them on their walls, I don’t know. The time before this, we call it drum-time. The time after this we call, when one had to hide the drums. The end of drum-time.”

Pylväinen conjures all these lives with great depth and power as the novel moves inexorably towards a brutal climax. She creates suspense through her atmospheric language but also through her understanding of and sympathy for the landscape and people she is depicting. She has said that this novel grew out of the work she did for her first novel, We Sinners, a contemporary consideration of the Laestadian sect; her commitment to her material is evident in every line.

The End of Drum-Time calls to mind the great novels of Thomas Hardy – for Pylväinen understands, as Hardy did, the cost that transformation exacts, and her writing echoes his empathy for all who came under his gaze. Like Hardy too she depicts seismic changes in culture and industry in a way that is never heavy-handed, always fully lived through her characters, in their bodies and hearts and minds.

• The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen is published by Swift (£15.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.