Book review: 'The end of the gods: The myth of ragnarok'

The end of the gods: The myth of ragarok
Author: AS Byatt
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 17!
Price: Rs399

In 2005, Canongate Books launched an international project to produce a series of short novels in which contemporary authors re-imagine and re-write ancient myths from different cultures around the world. The End Of The Gods: The Myth Of Ragnarok by AS Byatt is the latest in this series that includes Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ, a (controversial) retelling of the story of Jesus, and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, in which, Penelope, the wife of Odysseus (the Greek mythic ruler of Ithaca and the hero of Homer’s Odyssey) gets to tell her side of the story.

This context enhances our reading of the book, not because you can’t understand what it is about but because you can better understand why it has been written. Or, in this case, re-written.

An ambitious project, the Canongate myth series has, presumably, succeeded in rejuvenating interest in fading myths and legends, making them more relevant and contemporary. And so, it becomes possible that the Scandinavian myth of Ragnarok is available for an English-language reader in India.

Unlike other popular myths with, say, more positive outcomes, Ragnarok… is a tale of the apocalypse. In this myth, gods are boorish, vindictive and, ultimately, self-destructive. As Byatt puts it, this is the story of “how a world came together, was filled with magical and powerful beings, and then came to an end. A real End. The end.”

The book begins with the ‘thin child’, evacuated to the English countryside during World War II, who is drawn into Asgard And The Gods, a book “full of immensely detailed, mysterious steel engravings of wolves and wild waters, apparitions and floating women”. Even as her world the way she knows is disappearing, the world of the Norse gods too is racing to an irrevocable, violent end.

This is not a pretty story, even less so through the eyes of a child. Byatt introduces us to a dramatic and menacing landscape — a world shaped from the body of a dead giant, Ymir, where the third god, Loki, is neither good nor evil, but amused and dangerous, whose children, a wolf, a serpent and a blue-black giantess, are cast out, where the imperious goddess Frigg sets out to make everything on earth promise not to harm her son Baldur, where a fire boils in the depths of the earth, and then it’s all death and blackness.

For all its darkness, Ragnarok… is also strangely lyrical and captivating. Describing Jörmungandr, the she-serpent flung into the sea, Byatt writes: “She grew. She was no longer the size of any earth-snake. She was as long as an estuary, as a road across moorland. She needed more food… She was prepared to take on the long, streaming squid, tearing off tentacles, driving her fangs into the pale eyes, sipping and swallowing in a cloud of ink in the dark lightless water”.

This isn’t a novel in the usual sense as it merges three kinds of voices, moving from the fictionalised autobiography of the thin child, into the energetic and fantastical legend, ending with an epilogue that is an almost academic discourse on myth. Each part is distinctive but fits into a whole, leaving us with a book that is imaginative, sensual and unique.