The Monstrous Child

"This is the third book that Francesca Simon has written about Norse myth. The Sleeping Army and The Lost Gods are for younger children. They are comic and funny and everything turns out well. In The Monstrous Child , Simon is writing for older children, with quite adult themes. She is telling the story of Hel, who is Loki’s child who is born half normal-looking and half corpse. I had always imagined that this was a split that went right down the middle, but for Simon the split is a normal upper half while Hel’s lower half is a decaying mass, rather like seaweed. She’s a happy child living with disability, but the gods decide she must go, just like Loki’s other children who are prophesied to be a danger to the gods, the wolf and the serpent. So Hel is thrown down into the world of the dead, where she must now rule, and she’s horrified and miserable. She’s a normal adolescent girl, but she has no friends. Eventually, she makes a kind of home for herself, and she makes friends with the giantess who guards the bridge into the underworld. When Baldur dies, he comes down into the world of the dead and Hel is overjoyed. He was always nice to her when she was in Asgard, and she’s had this huge crush on him, and now she’s got him. But then his wife Nanna follows and Hel realises that, in fact, Baldur loves Nanna and there’s no romantic possibility. Ragnarok eventually takes place and the world is destroyed. At the end of it, there’s nothing left but Hel, and the world is beginning again above her. She finds that she’s able to get up into this new world and start over, creating humanity again. So it’s a wonderfully affirming story about how a child lives through the turbulence of adolescence and comes to the end of it. We don’t need the gods anymore; it’s now the time for humans. We won’t have that sort of duplicity, that scheming, that endless back and forth between the gods and the giants. It’s just humans, who now have a chance to make a better world. Francesca Simon and the composer Gavin Higgins made an opera out of The Monstrous Child , which was on at the Royal Opera House and it was a wonderfully staged thing. It was brilliantly imagined and worked really well as an opera."