Ragnarok by A. S. Byatt

Ragnarok (Text Myth) (Myths) (Canons)

by A. S. Byatt

Ragnarok is the story of the end of the world. It is a tale of the destruction of life on this planet and the end of the gods themselves: what more relevant myth could any modern writer choose?

As the bombs rain down in the Second World War, one young girl is evacuated to the English countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new wartime life. Then she is given a copy of Asgard and the Gods - a book of ancient Norse myths - and her inner and outer worlds are transformed.

War, natural disaster, reckless gods and the destruction of life on this planet are just some of the threads that A.S. Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Just as Wagner borrowed from this dramatic Norse saga for the climax of the Ring Cycle, so A.S. Byatt reinvents it for our time in all its intensity and glory. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, this is a landmark piece of storytelling from one of the world's truly great writers.

Reviewed by brokentune on

4 of 5 stars

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I really liked it. I don’t even know why.

Ragnarok was really short but it was very much the opposite to Nesbo’s Macbeth (which I had read right before this), and thus perhaps exactly what I needed.

I only realised it when I started the book, but Byatt wrote the book as part of the Canongate Myths series, i.e. a retelling of a myth – so very much another similarity to Macbeth which was the retelling of a Shakespeare play as part of the Hogarth series.
Where Macbeth discouraged me from looking deeper into the retelling (because it made little sense at the heart of it), Ragnarok was a slow-burning revelation of subtleties that seemed to end in the discovery that the story was not just about the end of the world that the main character, the “thin child”, lived through when she sought to escape into Norse mythology. It was also the description of another layer of destruction that lurked or rather lurks beyond the short term vision of the stories setting.
Much like Ragnarok, once things are set in motion, it is not known whether they can be stopped.

I rather liked this. I do realise, however, that Byatt’s writing – ornate and flowery – is not something I can read a lot of.

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  • Started reading
  • 3 September, 2020: Finished reading
  • 3 September, 2020: Reviewed