The Wax Child

"I don’t like that description. I mean, the events are horrific, but this is not a horror novel. These are real historical events featuring real women. Olga addresses this in the acknowledgements: the book is based on witch trials that began in the late 16th century and continued into the 17th century. As in England, a lot of women lost their lives. Olga Ravn condenses this period of time and draws nine or ten of these real women into one storyline to create a really vivid set of characters: their lives, their preoccupations, their concerns. At the same time, Olga makes the witching doll, or the ‘wax child’ as she calls it, the point of view character. It’s an amazing writerly feat to create a consciousness out of an apparently inanimate object. To give it consciousness, sentience, a sensibility, and to carry that off for a whole novel. Some people might find that horrifying. I just thought it was magical. I use that word cautiously. The book is set in a time where there was real belief in sympathetic magic. In other words, people believed you could influence events or other people through objects that had some connection to the person or event. So the story opens with the creation of the wax child: I am a child shaped in beeswax. I am made like a doll the size of a human forearm. They have given me hair and fingernail parings from the person who is to suffer. I was borne by my mistress for forty weeks under her right arm, as if I was a proper child, and my wax was softened by her warmth. A bit later on, she says: No one listens to a thing I say. Although I speak all of the time. And throughout the story, that’s a theme that’s returned to over and over again. You can hear the resonances with some of the other books we’ve been talking about: how important speech is, how imperilling the lack of speech is, what happens even when women do speak up, and that they’re guilty until proven innocent. So the wax doll carries all of that. The doll is able to report on the thoughts and beliefs and actions and the life circumstances of this group of women who become the subject of a witch hunt. The doll is also able to look back in history and to look some way forward into the future. It knows what’s in the king’s mind, the Danish king who ultimately orders the witch trials to go ahead. It knows what’s in the mind of the witch hunters. All of this is rendered in this just extraordinary prose. It’s a very, very profound book. There are obviously horrible elements in it. The wax child itself says: I was made as an instrument to do harm. It’s upfront about that. But there aren’t many examples of harm being done via the doll, whereas what is much clearer is the harm being done to the women. And you’re on the edge of your seat throughout, because of course to be caught with a witching doll is absolutely incriminating. (Unlike in England, where women and men were generally hanged, on the Continent accused witches were burned or beheaded.) In my book, Martha also has a wax witching doll – a ‘poppet’. Martha could leave her poppet safely at home, but she chooses not to. She knows full well it is a liability, yet she goes back and back to it because it is the only tool she has to gain any purchase at all over her very precarious situation. I think Olga Ravn is doing something similar, but takes it further. The wax child itself has agency of a sort. But, partly, that agency has to be made operational by one of the women using it. The ending is very moving. Had I eyes that could weep, I would have wept. But I am only a doll, a child of wax. I cannot move my hands. My wax mouth cannot be opened. And yet I speak. There we are again. That’s a vast question that the doll is posing. How is it possible to speak hundreds of years later, without a mouth? She’s also asking: how is it possible that these monstrosities can take place? That’s the real horror. It sits with me, because belief in witchcraft in other cultures is still very, very strong. Every year, hundreds of women and children around the world are injured or put to death because of accusations of witchcraft. Tragically, it’s not a historical phenomenon at all. I think we live in an era when hatred of women is reaching an all-time high. One of the responses to that is through witches—whether fictional or real, witches are women, one way or another, claiming their power."