Ragnarok

"Ragnarok is quite a short novel. It is largely a retelling of the Norse myths, ending with Ragnarok, but it’s also interwoven with Byatt’s memories of herself. She talks about a little girl who she calls “the thin child”, but it’s clearly the young Antonia living with her mother in the countryside during the Second World War while her father is away fighting. She reads a version of the Norse myths written by the German professor Wilhelm Wägner, whose work was one of the standard children’s accounts of Norse myths. She retells and comments on these myths and describes the creation of the universe as we have it from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda . But she also invents a kind of underwater version of the World Tree, and she talks quite a lot about Loki, who is the figure of all the gods who she likes best. There’s a wonderful line in which Loki is talking to his daughter, who is the world serpent, the great monster that lives in the ocean. Loki says of the other gods: “They don’t study. They hammer and slash. But I study, I know”. Byatt picks out exactly this quality in Loki as to why she’s attracted to him. He’s the thinker, the god who makes things happen. He’s the one who precipitates so many of the stories, and for someone who’s going to grow up to be a storyteller, that’s what she really likes about him. Byatt unravels the myth. She has the world serpent going through the ocean, eating everything as a very destructive force, figuring the way in which the seas have been degraded. She ends with the end of Ragnarok, there’s no rebirth in her story. All you’re left with is a kind of black, oily slick on the sea, and that’s the end of everything. But then her father, whom she thought she would probably never see again, whom she thought would die like Baldur as a sacrifice, comes home and is very cheerful. Real life, as opposed to mythic life, starts again. But in a wonderfully observed moment, she mentions that an ash sapling, which figures the World Tree, is growing by the shed in their garden. Her father thinks it will destroy the shed, and he takes an axe and chops it down. So there’s a sense in which that mythic delight that she was taking in these stories as a child is being crushed by the family order being restored again. There’s a lot of Byatt’s reflection on her own progress as a writer, I think, in this very short book. I think there Byatt picks up on what has happened to Loki in popular culture over the last forty years. When I was a child and read children’s versions of Norse myth, Loki was bad, and that was quite straightforward. Yes, he was a bit mischievous, but he was always working for the wrong side. But increasingly Loki has become the charmer, the bad boy, the misunderstood guy. He has a lone wolf aura to him. He goes his own way and if the gods don’t like it, well, too bad. I think that the kind of independence that Loki represents is something that has made him much more attractive."