In the dining room, between the Iris Murdoch and the Margaret Drabble, was the collection of A.S. Byatt. By eleven, I had free reign of the books in the house, but these three authors were always off limits, as "I wouldn't get anything out of them yet." At seventeen I was still considered too young, or perhaps naïve would be a better word, and thus they languished on the book shelves as the last bastion of 'adult' books. This is my first.
Owing to a slightly bohemian religious upbringing, I was intimately aware of the Norse myths from a young age. Ragnarok could be described as a simple retelling, framed by the thoughts of a young, thin child in the second world war, but that sounds like a slight. It is not meant to be. Byatt has drawn out the most beautiful and violent of the stories, stripped them bare of the romantic veil cast over them by 19th century artists, and left them raw and angry and born of the hostile landscape of Iceland.
Ragnarok is in prose, but begs to be spoken rhythmically like a poem. Nothing could be more fitting for the myths drawn from the Eddur, yet the effect is subtle. Lists are employed to give both a grandeur to the scale of the world, and a magnified view of what the thin child finds interesting. They read breathlessly, litanies divorced from the Church but tied in to the English sense of cultural Christianity felt by any person with a sense of history.
The end is inevitable, and if one is aware of the myths, the method of the end is known. However, none of this stops Ragnarok - both the book and the final chapter - from giving a strong, empty feeling of being at, "The black undifferentiated sky, at the end of things."
Ragnarok, Canongate, 2011
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