“Color and sensation flood Byatt’s writing . . . One of the most brilliant minds and speakers of our generation.” –Independent
“Majestic . . . Dazzling . . . Wonderful . . . . What you see here . . . is the strength and fire of Byatt’s imagination.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
“Bristling with life and invention. . . . A seductive work by an extraordinarily gifted writer.” —The Washington Post
“Spellbinding. . . . Alive . . . Potent. . . . Byatt is a master storyteller.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“Proves that a serious, intricate book can also be a page turner . . . Manifest intelligence, subtle humor and extraordinary texturing of the past within the present make Possession original and unforgettable.” - Time Magazine
Byatt peels back the cover of the book that the girl reads and takes us deep inside it as she delights in reimagining the twilight of the gods and the destruction of the world . . . Like Wagner before her, she dares to dream how the world might end . . . this rewriting of the Ragnarok is a story for our time of overpopulation and anthropomorphic climate change, and of all time
Byatt's writing, impassioned and liberated from the strictures of the novel, has never been so beautiful
Byatt's prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages - jewelled one minute, gory the next - a pleasure to get lost in
Byatt has made . . . an entire world, compressed but energetically alive in all its details. When we have artists like this, who needs gods?
Byatt's retelling of Ragnarok is permeated with the loving familiarity of long acquaintance
Lyrical and urgent
Byatt enters with gusto and an almost Ted Hughes-like relish for savagery into this primitive world of sorcery and trickery
Brilliant, highly intelligent, fiercely personal . . . Gorgeous
Surely among the most beautiful and incisive pages Byatt has ever written
Byatt's prose, compact and lyrical, treats the gods with dignity . . . Ragnarok is a clever, lucid, lovely book
A multilayered retelling of the end of the world from Norse mythology, framed by the award-winning British novelist's analysis of how myth relates to her own work. This slim volume doesn't invite comparison with the expansive novels of Byatt (Possession, 1991, etc.). As she explains, "Gods, demons and other actors in myths do not have personalities or characters in the way people in novels do. They do not have psychology." Yet her narrative strategy recasts the myth through the perception of a reader known only as the "thin child in wartime," a British girl whose name and age are unknown, who finds resonance in this war of the Gods with the war from which she doesn't expect her father to return. Byatt invites some identification of this girl with the author by dedicating this book to her own mother, "Who gave me Asgard and the Gods," a primary source for this retelling. The girl compares the myth of world's end with the Christian faith into which she was born, and to Pilgrim's Progress, which she has also been reading. "Bunyan's tale had a clear message and meaning. Not so, Asgard and the Gods. That book was an account of a mystery, of how a world came together, was filled with magical and powerful beings, and then came to an end. A real End. The end." The girl doesn't come to believe in the Norse gods, a worshipper of Odin and Thor, but the reading experience leads the author to the conclusion that "the Christian story was another myth, the same kind of story about the nature of things, but less interesting and exciting." While the narrative illuminates the essence and meaning of myth, particularly as it shapes a young girl's wartime experience, it also serves as an environmentalist parable, one where we are "bringing about the end of the world we were born into." Though the cadences are like those of a fairy tale, a narrative seen through the eyes of a child, the chilling conclusion is not.
