Ragnarok: The End of the Gods
By A.S. Byatt
171 pp; $25.00
Reviewed by Kate Carraway
Like everything else “contemporary,” fiction has moved so far away, and so fast, from what was once the understood and assumed source material of Western literature — the mythical, the biblical, the a priori canonical — that a common frame of reference is suddenly too much to ask for. Sorry. Our Internet-brains have left us with much less capacity for the circulating universes of influence, too: Today I had to Google “Tom Joad” and 0.42 seconds later was privately (um, now publicly) embarrassed to find out that he is, in fact and of course, a main character in a favourite book by a favourite author. I’m not convinced that we’re much stupider than ever, but the expectation on “us,” or the “us” that reads, to know things together, is gone. And it will be (I give it 20 years) mostly forgotten.
It’s not to say we don’t need, or can’t use, the texts and traditions that even the sharpest younger fiction writers are leaving behind, which is why a book based on and in the deepest, darkest myth is a comfort on its own. That it’s by stalwart-author A.S. Byatt makes an argument for that lost emphasis on what came before: Byatt, who The Independent calls “one of the most brilliant minds and speakers of our generation,” and who has been awarded and honoured accordingly, has revived something important in Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, a sort-of study of the Norse myth of the end of the world.
Despite all that annihilation, the book is a slim, quick read, efficiently gorgeous and terrorizing. It’s part of the Canongate Myth Series, in which authors — Alexander McCall Smith, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood — interpret an ancient myth of any origin. Ovid’s been covered, and The Odyssey; Byatt, of course, takes on the end-game of Norse mythology (as did Wagner, for his Ring Cycle), and Byatt, of course, chooses the most fantastical, paradoxical and affecting superstructure for the retelling: the first encounter with the myth by Byatt, or a Byatt-esque proxy, as a little girl.
“The thin child” is given a copy of Asgard and the Gods when she’s evacuated to the English countryside during the war. Byatt writes “… there was ‘a war on.’ Life was a state in which a war was on.” She is sure her father isn’t coming back, lives in a state of constant anxiety, and reads. “She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.”
Nothing could be more unwieldy than the Ragnarok myth of utter destruction, but the child’s voice, personal and hungry, brilliantly grounds and contextualizes its retelling. The metaphors that the thin child — not as present as Odin or Loki, but crucial — finds in the Ragnarok myth — the illogical destruction and utter annihilation of the world and the gods — seems to make some sense to her, of England at war; it’s meant to make total, infuriating sense of environmental devastation (and, yes, obviously, war) to us.
It does that, largely because of Byatt’s infinite facility with language, which here is let loose in every direction. In Possession: A Romance, her 1990 novel, a dusty academic investigation is written sexy, riveting, strange; while Ragnarok is slowed by some impenetrably boring valleys (Internet-brains!), and while the good-vs.-evil stuff, the myth-as-metaphor so explicitly applied to the planet’s destruction is mundanely overfamiliar — is that her fault, or ours? — Byatt is still able to do something spectacular, something worth this scope, with the story of the end of the world. We know how the story ends, but the storytelling is what slays.
It’s not a novel, or a memoir-proper, or even, really, much of the one-off experiment. What emerges is a theme, albeit one with the narrative of a fatal myth and the dramatics of angry, emotional Norse gods creating their own end, pulled up and away from structures it’s usually confined to. All on its own, that’s something.
• Kate Carraway is a columnist with The Grid in Toronto and a frequent contributor to the National Post.