Norse Myths: The Ultimate End of the World. Or Not.

It takes two people to make a book, the writer and the reader. That's a statement I make frequently when I lead my book discussion groups, and this week I came upon a brilliant example when I went looking for another telling of the Norse myths.

One of my groups had  read Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology this spring, and so I went looking for another retelling of the stories.  That experience loomed behind my reading of  A.S. Byatt's Ragnarok: The End of the Gods and I think Byatt's book suffers in my mind because of that.  I liked Gaiman's colloquial style and was put off a bit by Byatt's more studied devices.

Gaiman's book is much less poetic, and far more action-filled, easier to read, something that would appeal to young as well as adult readers. Byatt's book has as its point of view character is a "thin child in wartime" which might make you think initially that it would appeal to a similar audience. It juxtaposes the child's magical wandering in the English countryside during a very frightening time when the family has been evacuated out of London during World War II with the world of the Norse myths. She is just as much at the mercy of geopolitical events as the people who made up these stories were, faced with wind, storm, sea, human passion and greed, and the turmoil of the earth itself. Byatt's book is far more literary than Gaiman's, and the stories seem more distant, more obviously tales of things that are far removed from the present. They are--dare I say it?--much thinner in substance.

The thin child's own story ends happily in a sense: her father comes back safely from North Africa, the war ends, the family is together again. But there are shadows. Her mother who had enjoyed teaching, now does not have a calling since the men have come back. Rebuilding after the war means destroying the countryside. After time, it looks like the end of the world, Ragnarok, lies only a little ways in the future. Indeed, Byatt ends the book with a comment that also applies to the present: "the world ends because neither the all too human gods, with their armies and quarrels, nor the fiery thinker know how to save it. "

Gaiman has said that he thinks 80 years from now someone will come along and retell the stories in a voice that carries the accents of the end of the 21st century. That is what we do with stories as powerful and complex as myths, he suggests. True, probably. But what is telling about the two writers' attitudes to myths is his assumption that the world will be around in 80 years time, and that he ends his book with a vision of a rebirth, a new start for humanity. Byatt is much less certain about what the future holds.
A difference in expectations from two British writers, one of whom remembers War first hand, and the other who is too young for that?