It is incredibly tempting to describe Klas Östergren's The Hurricane Party (Orkanpartyt, 2007) as the grown-up dystopian version of Eight Days of Luke (1975), but I think that would actually not be fair to either novel.
Some unspecified distance in the future, Hanck Orn lives in a Stockholm so run-down and dehumanized, it has lost its name, becoming one more anonymous collective of buildings with rainy seasons and street gangs and quarantine zones and a past as out of joint with itself as the protagonist's last name, which used to mean eagle before the umlaut died out of the language. It is not quite post-apocalyptic, nothing so violent or definitive. The protagonist makes a living from scrounging, repairing, and reselling old machineries like typewriters and telescopes, which have a sort of sentimental, broken value; he used to work as a claims investigator, but gave it up with the birth of his son. Toby is twenty now, a brilliant chef in a culture where the profession requires him to be as much black-market magician as artist—and it seems to have led to his death, catering an expensive dinner for the Clan, the mysterious, Mafia-like family that have gradually come to dominate every aspect of life in the city. No one wants to talk very much about it. The griefstricken father is encouraged not to investigate. Of course he does; he knows from professional experience when a family is being given the brush-off. He goes out to the islands to interview a woman who claims to have seen the whole thing, though he's never quite sure how many sisters she has or which one he's talking to. And the story takes a hard-right turn from grimy, slightly hard-boiled science fiction into mythography. The Clan are the Norse gods. The dinner turned into the Lokasenna. Menn lofuðu mjök hversu góðir þjónustumenn Ægis váru. Loki mátti eigi heyra þat, ok drap hann Fimafeng.
I don't think I've ever seen this in a novel before. I think it works. I have some mixed feelings about Östergren's structuring of his material—I can see how it would be almost irresistible to recount Loki's flyting blow-by-blow in modern language,1 but it also brings the narrative to a crashing halt for sixty pages—but it's rare enough for me to find a fictional treatment of Norse myth that I don't want to set on fire, I shouldn't fault him just because I would have assumed my audience already knew the stories. I appreciate that Hanck's saga goes on longer than his son's fatal cameo among the Æsir, and that like a proper epic hero he ventures to both Asgard and Hel, even if he's told at nearly every stage—and quite rightly—that he's "a lousy detective." I like the resonances with Baldr's death and the ways in which Hanck is drawn into the pattern of Ragnarök and, maybe, refusing it. And it is not possible for Östergren to have written my favorite version of Loki, because the novel picks up so late in the myth-timeline that the god's more malevolent aspects are necessarily at the fore,2 but I never felt that I was reading Neil Gaiman's Loki, fire and wit and hate. The subject line belongs to the character who narrates the Lokasenna to Hanck, and it feels right to me.
( If you ever did run into Loki, he'd make you forget all your hatred and all your despair in two seconds flat. He'd turn your whole world upside down, and then you'd sit there drinking and offering toasts like old brothers. )
In very general summary, then, The Hurricane Party is probably not the novel of the Norse gods I've been waiting for, but it's one more than I knew existed, and I find it fascinating to see what a writer with an actual cultural claim to the mythology does with it. I didn't mean to write this review on the eve of a hurricane, but there you go. I'll keep clear of charming strangers till it passes.
1. The novel was translated by Tiina Nunnally, who seems to be responsible for all of the author's work in English. I don't read Swedish, so I can't comment on her skill; I find Östergren's style an odd mix of third-person omniscient reportage and sudden passages of dialogue, but it works reasonably for the affectless future and the matter-of-fact integration of myth.
2. Östergren does run some intriguing twists on Loki's relationships with the other gods, like the idea that Angrboða and her three monstrous children were not Loki cheating on Sigyn, but his original family in Jötunheim, and part of his buying-in to the Clan was to renounce them. Also he makes Skaði the goddess with the clearest understanding of Loki, the one even the trickster can't quite figure out; I admit that I've never envisioned her with sharp red nails, but Östergren uses them to flash back to a kinky scene between her and Loki that I am totally fine with, even if I'll never write them now without feeling like a total copycat.
Some unspecified distance in the future, Hanck Orn lives in a Stockholm so run-down and dehumanized, it has lost its name, becoming one more anonymous collective of buildings with rainy seasons and street gangs and quarantine zones and a past as out of joint with itself as the protagonist's last name, which used to mean eagle before the umlaut died out of the language. It is not quite post-apocalyptic, nothing so violent or definitive. The protagonist makes a living from scrounging, repairing, and reselling old machineries like typewriters and telescopes, which have a sort of sentimental, broken value; he used to work as a claims investigator, but gave it up with the birth of his son. Toby is twenty now, a brilliant chef in a culture where the profession requires him to be as much black-market magician as artist—and it seems to have led to his death, catering an expensive dinner for the Clan, the mysterious, Mafia-like family that have gradually come to dominate every aspect of life in the city. No one wants to talk very much about it. The griefstricken father is encouraged not to investigate. Of course he does; he knows from professional experience when a family is being given the brush-off. He goes out to the islands to interview a woman who claims to have seen the whole thing, though he's never quite sure how many sisters she has or which one he's talking to. And the story takes a hard-right turn from grimy, slightly hard-boiled science fiction into mythography. The Clan are the Norse gods. The dinner turned into the Lokasenna. Menn lofuðu mjök hversu góðir þjónustumenn Ægis váru. Loki mátti eigi heyra þat, ok drap hann Fimafeng.
I don't think I've ever seen this in a novel before. I think it works. I have some mixed feelings about Östergren's structuring of his material—I can see how it would be almost irresistible to recount Loki's flyting blow-by-blow in modern language,1 but it also brings the narrative to a crashing halt for sixty pages—but it's rare enough for me to find a fictional treatment of Norse myth that I don't want to set on fire, I shouldn't fault him just because I would have assumed my audience already knew the stories. I appreciate that Hanck's saga goes on longer than his son's fatal cameo among the Æsir, and that like a proper epic hero he ventures to both Asgard and Hel, even if he's told at nearly every stage—and quite rightly—that he's "a lousy detective." I like the resonances with Baldr's death and the ways in which Hanck is drawn into the pattern of Ragnarök and, maybe, refusing it. And it is not possible for Östergren to have written my favorite version of Loki, because the novel picks up so late in the myth-timeline that the god's more malevolent aspects are necessarily at the fore,2 but I never felt that I was reading Neil Gaiman's Loki, fire and wit and hate. The subject line belongs to the character who narrates the Lokasenna to Hanck, and it feels right to me.
( If you ever did run into Loki, he'd make you forget all your hatred and all your despair in two seconds flat. He'd turn your whole world upside down, and then you'd sit there drinking and offering toasts like old brothers. )
In very general summary, then, The Hurricane Party is probably not the novel of the Norse gods I've been waiting for, but it's one more than I knew existed, and I find it fascinating to see what a writer with an actual cultural claim to the mythology does with it. I didn't mean to write this review on the eve of a hurricane, but there you go. I'll keep clear of charming strangers till it passes.
1. The novel was translated by Tiina Nunnally, who seems to be responsible for all of the author's work in English. I don't read Swedish, so I can't comment on her skill; I find Östergren's style an odd mix of third-person omniscient reportage and sudden passages of dialogue, but it works reasonably for the affectless future and the matter-of-fact integration of myth.
2. Östergren does run some intriguing twists on Loki's relationships with the other gods, like the idea that Angrboða and her three monstrous children were not Loki cheating on Sigyn, but his original family in Jötunheim, and part of his buying-in to the Clan was to renounce them. Also he makes Skaði the goddess with the clearest understanding of Loki, the one even the trickster can't quite figure out; I admit that I've never envisioned her with sharp red nails, but Östergren uses them to flash back to a kinky scene between her and Loki that I am totally fine with, even if I'll never write them now without feeling like a total copycat.
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