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Loads of authors have written fiction about the Norse gods coexisting with our own world. Greg Van Eekhout is the latest to do so. Like other authors who are reworking an old trope, Van Eekhout tries to innovate on what has gone before. He does a couple of interesting things right off the bat.
First is something which I like because its a bit ballsy. He strongly implies that only the Norse gods exist, that people who believe in Jesus, xoose, whomever are just plane wrong. When you die, no matter what religion you were, you go to Hellhime, the Norse hell. I find this choice refreshing, because it apposes the cosmological political correctness you see in fantasy literature of this stripe, American Gods being the first example that comes to mind but by no means the only book to take the “all gods exist” stance.
The second thing Van Eekhout does is to take the mythology and move it one step farther along. People react to an impending final battle could easily be an alternate plot summary. If you don’t know anything about Norse Mythology, I’m about to tell you all you need to know to read the rest of this review. Millennia ago, there was a prophecy which explained how the world would end. There would be a battle between the Norse gods, (the good guys,) and giants, monsters, and a few evil gods, the bad guys. most gods learned how they were going to die. A couple learned they survived the end of the world to start a new world in its place, and a couple had fates which the prophecy never illuminated.
The gods who live through Ragnarock want it to happen, the ones who die don’t really care as they are fine with dying, and two who don’t know if they will survive want to stop the world from ending.
Van Eekhout has obviously done his research and he brings his gods and monsters to life with both a film directors emphasis on the cool, and a scholars knowledge of which frost giant did what when to whom. Van Eekhout makes his gods believable by referring to their previous exploits, (gained from the mythos,) in a way that feels organic and unforced.
Van Eekhout is a good enough writer that the things which are intrinsically cool and fun about Norse mythology are made better by Van Eekhout’s prose.
Now I’m going to stop being nice about Van Eekhout, because despite the fact that he’s a good writer, and his prose is enjoyable to read, and despite the fact that he knows his mythology and creates a lot of neat imagery, he also fucks a lot of things up.
His novel suffers from one major flaw. And that is that it ascencially reads like a teleplay which, when rejected, was then turned into a novel.
While the writing is good, the pacing is nothing short of frenetic, which sort of ruins all the things I just praised Van Eekhout for doing. Characters are introduced only when they are necessary. And I do mean at the very moment they become necessary.
To show you why this is destructive, take this example. “Frank was walking down the street. He saw tom. He didn’t like Tom. Frank shot tom.”
This is, at least with respect to the plot, what Van Eekhout does. Characters will show up about a page and a half before something happens to them, or before they kill someone else, or before they are otherwise needed for the plot.
The truly offensive thing about this is that it never actually stops. The proof being that the novels climax is when we see Odin, Thor, and Loki for the first time. And this is not because Van Eekhout was saving his big guns its because the novel was written while Van Eekhout was on speed and so only added characters when they were plot ascencial.
Van Eekhout two main characters are also introduced in this way. The valkyry Mist shows up about a page and a half before she lets an innocent man die and I cared about it just as much as you cared about Tom dying. Hermod, the rogue god trying to stop Ragnarog, is introduced Six pages before the plot is set into motion.
This tight focus, with almost no room to let characters simply be, makes the novel feel cinematic, and I mean this mostly as an insult. Its just hard to care about characters who are introduced three pages before they are killed.
Everything happens fast, as though Van Eekhout took Strunks rule of omitting needless words to its extreme.
Because Van Eekhout writes with a sprinters pace, his characters, while not actually one dimensional blur distractingly around the edges. Take this bit of dialogue from his main character explaining her origins three months ago, I was an MBA student… My world flipped over, everything spilled out of its tidy order.” Hmm, world flipping up side down, spilling over, sounds like an interesting thing to watch happen to someone, but all we get is that little mention before we’re once again whizzing down the sprint that is the plot.
This one flaw grows to eat at the integrity of the novel. Because characters are only shown when doing important things, they feel somehow incomplete. Because they feel incomplete, I never cared when some of them died, or achieved there goals. Because of that, I didn’t much care about the plot. Because the writing was good, and the plot had such potential, Van Eekhout paucity of grounding details began to offend me, so by the end of the book I was actually getting pissed at him personally.
I finished the book because Van Eekhout is a good writer who needs to work out a pacing issue. His characters were bland, but his writing was witty and his imagery was evocative and atmospheric.
This is a book which should have been two-hundred pages longer and that extra space should have been spent letting the characters think about whatever the hell it is they think about when not in pitched battle or scheming or being a god or what have you.
One and a half out of five stars.