Ragnarok: The End of the Gods [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

When the Canongate Press commissioned AS Byatt to contribute to their series of short novels based on ancient myth (following such authors as Margaret Atwood, David Grossman, and Natsuo Kirino), they must have known the rich tapestry of words they would receive. For Byatt is no stranger to myth; ancient legends form the substrate of her long novels POSSESSION and THE CHILDREN'S BOOK, and two of her story collections, THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE'S EYE and LITTLE BLACK BOOK OF STORIES, are "fairy stories for grown-ups." For this commission, she chose a retelling of the Norse myth of Ragnarök, the Judgement (or Twilight) of the Gods: "Wind Time, Wolf Time, before the World breaks up." She stirs a wonderful witches' cauldron of names -- Yggdrasil, Rándrasill, Asgard, Midgard, Jotunheim, and Ironwood -- fraught with fecundity, seething with violence and danger. But what interests me most is the personal story peeping between the shattered basalt slabs. Byatt dedicates the book to the memory of her mother, who first bought her the book ASGARD AND THE GODS by Wilhelm Wägner, seeding the imagination of this Thin Child evacuated to the countryside during wartime. I only wish there were more of her; one wonders what book Byatt might have written had she not been bound by a commission.

To express profusion, Byatt makes frequent use of one of the oldest literary devices, the list; think Oberon's "I know a bank" speech; think Homer. Here is the Thin Child: "When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom and then berries, blackthorn, hawthorn, dog-roses, the odd ash tree with its sooty buds." Here she is a few pages later describing another ash tree, Yggdrasil, the central axis around which the Norse world revolves: "Beetles were busy in the bark, gnashing and piercing, breeding and feeding, shining like metals, brown like dead wood. Woodpeckers drilled the bark, and ate fat grubs who ate the tree. They flashed in the branches, green and crimson, black, white and scarlet. Spiders hung on silk, attached fine-woven webs to leaves and twigs, hunted bugs, butterflies, soft moths, strutting crickets." The link with the child's world of wonder is established at once, but there is also a subtext: that all this proliferation has already been diminished by the seven decades that followed, by the loss of species, the loss of hedgerows, the loss of a pastoral richness that persists only in memory. I wish she hadn't needed an afterword to spell this out, but the elegy is implied nonetheless.

The destruction of the Norse gods, though, comes about through epic violence rather than elegiac decay. Byatt paints a fascinating picture of the child reading under the blankets with a flashlight while German bombers thunder overhead -- the same Germans (as she vaguely knew) that had transformed these myths into their own Götterdämmerung. I was reminded of John Connolly's THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS, in which a slightly older child in the Blitz escapes to the world of myth. But this is no escape; you can see the future author being formed, in imagination and belief. Sent for scripture lessons to the village church, she revels in the sonorous language of the Book of Common Prayer, but rejects the cotton-wool blandness of "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild." She rejects, too, the later version of the Norse myths in which a shining new world, Gimle, is born out of the destruction. Not for her a tepid analogy to the Resurrection; she preferred to cling to that bleaker vision, "like a thin oval sliver of black basalt or slate, which was perpetually polished in her brain, next to the grey ghost of the wolf in her mind."

It seems an age for childhood memoirs. Margaret Drabble (Byatt's sister) revisited her girlhood through a book about jigsaws, THE PATTERN IN THE CARPET; Michael Ondaatje fictionalized his own youth in THE CAT'S TABLE, and Julian Barnes looks back at school and college in THE SENSE OF AN ENDING. You might even say that, in CAIN, the older José Saramago was revisiting (and rejecting or at least transforming) his own childhood myths. Byatt's exploration could have been the most interesting of the lot; I only wish she had demanded the latitude to expand upon it.

I found this book uninteresting in the beginning. It took at least 20 pages or so to spark my imagination. Byatt is a writer I love though so I persisted and it paid off. The nominal narrator is referred to as the thin girl. She loves to read the old Norse tales from her mother's many books. She's reading them in the country where she and her mom have gone to escape the London Blitz. Her dad has been away for many years bombing the enemy's towns. She knows he won't come back. She reads late into the night with only a smidgen of light from a hall lamp.

Ragnarok, which is an end time legend, is a great overview of the Gods and other creatures and the deeds associated with each. I'd heard some of the names, Odin, Loki, Yggdrasil, etc. but never in such a clear concise way and, let's face it, this is Byatt writing and as always her prose adds much to the telling. What I felt was missing was a hero or heroine to hate or hope for. A human touch that would have made me more eager to read on. The thin girl helped slightly. In an epilogue Byatt explains that in her opinion faerie tales include the character's personalities and feelings and usually the bad guy losses. Faerie tale people are much like humans. They are relatable. Here is what she writes about myths, "Myths are often unsatisfactory, even tormenting. They puzzle and haunt the mind that encounters them. They shape different parts of the world inside our heads, and they shape them not as pleasures, but as encounters with the inapprehensible." Mythical beings are outside us and we as humans can't understand why they act as they do. To me they feel akin to archetypes that are beyond personality and are mere function. Faerie tales, on the other hand, were created to entertain and to teach moral or life lessons. I almost wish Byatt had placed her epilogue as an introduction. Then I would have been aware that she meant to keep the myths pure by not mixing in human psychology.

3.5/5

The writing is excellent. I agree with the difficulties about Christianity & the futility of the Norse gods. After all, the Christian missionaries (as recorded by Bede) made headway against northern pagans by preaching an afterlife that had a negociable destiny for everyone. The story of the judgement of the gods is told incompletely but vividly. For all that, I have problems. To one who spent most of his childhood in Hogwarts-like schools, the medium of this tale, the "thin child" is curiously bloodless. She has opinions that I support and a breadth of knowledge - but she is a drip.

Moreover, I find the suggestion by a reviewer that the book reflects the modern day totally opaque. The world is not being destroyed casually. It is, instead, too full of people chattering without expert knowledge, quoting so-called scientific conclusions without any concept of how tentative they are. Almost all published experiments are no more than suggestive of future research. Leaving aside that the majority of published experiments are imperfectly controlled (i.e. compared with the existing situation), the normal acceptable criterion, that a result is 95% certainly better than chance, is no better than a sign post. Imagine if you remembered only 19 out of 20 times to put out your dustbin, what would your wife say?