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As soon as a line was drawn and then breached, you knew that Loki had been there
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.
He fulfils his duties, ravages, abuses and flattens all opposition. He is a berserker when obliged to be one, a cavalier when that is required.
But it's only when he falls that he recognises himself. When everything collapses and goes to pieces, when glasses are shattered; when hearts, confidences, relationships, agreements and deals, hopes, teeth, furniture, nasal bones, strings, kneecaps—when they all break, fall off, fall apart, fall to pieces.
In the midst of the whole mess he might stand there, sweating, with battered knuckles and torn clothing and feel utterly cleansed. Somehow liberated. On a private battlefield, a disaster area, unknown to the general public. Everything has been levelled to the ground, not a stone rests on top of another. Every purpose is gone; every idea, concept, vision about life has been swept away.
A desolate, empty and tragic site for the foolish. But not for him. Everything is there, standing where it has always stood; whatever is supposed to shine is shining; life continues as it has always done, but in a greater, larger, more intense manner now that sorrow, pain and loss have struck, leaving an enormous, wide-open crater right in the middle of the heart of the orderly world—an entire district, the antithesis of the pleasure district, entirely devoted to the mystery of the meaningless.
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.
He fulfils his duties, ravages, abuses and flattens all opposition. He is a berserker when obliged to be one, a cavalier when that is required.
But it's only when he falls that he recognises himself. When everything collapses and goes to pieces, when glasses are shattered; when hearts, confidences, relationships, agreements and deals, hopes, teeth, furniture, nasal bones, strings, kneecaps—when they all break, fall off, fall apart, fall to pieces.
In the midst of the whole mess he might stand there, sweating, with battered knuckles and torn clothing and feel utterly cleansed. Somehow liberated. On a private battlefield, a disaster area, unknown to the general public. Everything has been levelled to the ground, not a stone rests on top of another. Every purpose is gone; every idea, concept, vision about life has been swept away.
A desolate, empty and tragic site for the foolish. But not for him. Everything is there, standing where it has always stood; whatever is supposed to shine is shining; life continues as it has always done, but in a greater, larger, more intense manner now that sorrow, pain and loss have struck, leaving an enormous, wide-open crater right in the middle of the heart of the orderly world—an entire district, the antithesis of the pleasure district, entirely devoted to the mystery of the meaningless.
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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I worry. It's just the earthquake, you see, and the flash floods and the hurricane... The tree in your front yard isn't an ash, is it?
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I don't think so; I've never really gone for books with fluffy bunnies. I don't think Watership Down counts.
The tree in your front yard isn't an ash, is it?
Both maples. No fear.
Watership Down
Re: Watership Down
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It's actually one of the Canongate Myths in English, so it's in print. Östergren's a critically acclaimed author in Sweden, but only seems to have been translated into English in the last few years.
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(they also have several of the other Canongate Myths)
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I bounced so hard off Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad (2005), I haven't really gone back to the author since; Victor Pelevin's The Helmet of Horror (2006) is brilliant and
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Nine
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I have no idea how you would feel about this particular take on them, but I do think it's a good book. I am hoping Byatt's Ragnarok will be, too; at least M. John Harrison is reviewing it, so I should have some idea.
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You're very welcome! I hope you enjoy.
A lot more of him is in print (and in English) than I thought. Hmm.
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I can't remember about him, but I did read Independent People on your recommendation.
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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.
Can you unpack these statements for me? Am I right in understanding that Gaiman's Loki is, then, even more malevolent, and you're relieved that this one isn't quite as much so?
The novel was translated by Tina Nunnally, On first glance, I misread this as "The novel was suddenly translated," and even though I reread and understood what you had really put, each time I come back to it, I make the same visual mistake. Weird. But I like the idea of something suddenly--maybe convulsively--being translated.
It sounds like a cool book, too.
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Am I right in understanding that Gaiman's Loki is, then, even more malevolent, and you're relieved that this one isn't quite as much so?
The line is taken from Loki's self-description in Sandman, where he is strictly the destructive kind of trickster, nothing admirable about him except the sheer gleeful malice with which he wrecks everything he can lay hands on and laughs at whoever thought him capable of anything different; he's relatively contained in Season of Mists, but in The Kindly Ones he perpetrates a deception that contributes to Dream's death, for which he is bound again beneath the venom-dripping serpent, neck-broken now and blinded, his only justification the debt that he owed Morpheus for sparing him: "I am Loki Scar-Lip, Loki Sky-Walker, Loki Giant's-Child, Loki Lie-Smith. I am Loki who is fire and wit and hate . . . And I will be under obligation to no one." It's like Gaiman's working entirely off the Christianized tradition where Loki is the Devil, or the only bit of the Poetic Edda he read was the Lokasenna. In American Gods, he's one of two characters running a long con designed to end in the deaths of old and new gods alike, a sacrifice to feed their power. There's maybe some handwavy implication that he's only a version of Loki influenced by American belief, as the wily Mr. Wednesday is only an aspect of Odin, but as he's one of the only gods in the whole novel to go by his own name as opposed a kind of slantwise handle (and he doesn't get a redeeming epilogue), I have trouble accepting this interpretation. As far as I can tell, Gaiman really loves Loki—he certainly keeps returning to him—and he really can't write him. I mean, I don't think he's good with gods in general, but I have ranted about this before.
By virtue of taking place after Baldr's death, in which Loki is intimately complicit and about which he shows no regrets, The Hurricane Party starts at a point where the trickster-god is already on the outs with most of the Æsir and working his way toward unforgivable; the Lokasenna's epilogue is a short prose description of his binding. Stories of his earlier exploits, his cleverness and his kinship with Odin crop up in the text, but onstage we mostly see him being insulting in a variety of creatively obscene ways and moved to sudden, shocking violence, inexplicable even to himself, for which he does not apologize either. That said, what Östergren really conveys is Loki's unpredictability, his consistent inconsistency, so that to look for nothing but evil from him is as much of a mistake as to look for nothing but good. Transgression can mean all sorts of things, depending on what boundary is being crossed. I don't have an argument with that.
Tina Nunnally
It really is Tiina with two i's. She's half-Finnish.
But I like the idea of something suddenly--maybe convulsively--being translated.
Absolutely.
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That's quite awesome: I like that last sentence and its implications.
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I should hope so; my cousins are two of the founding members.
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---L.
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Is it any good?
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---L.
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I figured from the title; but I wasn't sure if that would make it a simple inversion or an interesting novel. Good to know.
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Thank you. Same.