Ragnarök: The End of the Gods by A.S. Byatt

First published in Great Britain in 2011; published by Grove Press on February 7, 2012

How does something come out of nothing? A thin girl in England during World War II compares creation myths as she ponders the question. Her church teaches her of a "grandfatherly figure" who created everything from the sun to the peacock in six days. Her reading of Asgard and the Gods introduces her to a more appealing explanation. In the empty gulf between the cold mists of the north and the hot flames of the south known as Ginnungagap, a giant named Ymir is formed in the steam of melting icebergs. Ymir becomes the father of "the frost-giants, who budded from his bulk" before he is slaughtered by the first gods: Odin, Wili, and We. The gods make the world from the flesh, blood, and bones of the dismembered giant. Yet nothing lasts forever; even gods must die. Ragnorök refers to the Norse end-times, the judgment of the gods, the twilight of their reign. The gods do not go down gently; as befits a myth, their battle to survive is epic.

The thin girl does not want to consider the possibility that the creation myths are related -- that, for instance, a flood in Asgard might be "an echo of the story of Noah and the Flood" -- because she likes to believe the Asgard stories have an independent foundation. She nonetheless sees similarities between biblical stories and those of Asgard, comparisons that are insightful yet plausibly within the ken of a bright child. The thin girl enjoys but does not believe the stories of Asgard, any more than she believes Greek myths, fairy tales, or the stories told by the vicar at her church. Reading the stories gives her reason to ponder the nature of belief and to ask herself not just why she doesn't believe, but why she doesn't want to believe.

Using the thin girl as a focal point, A.S. Byatt selectively retells the tale of the gods of Asgard from their beginning to their end. Unlike some other entries in the Cannongate/Grove series of books in which contemporary writers reimagine a myth, Byatt does not modernize the myth but uses the character of the thin girl to suggest the ancient tale's relevance to the modern world. The child, familiar with the news of the war that is killing and maiming her countrymen, finds it easy to relate to the brutality of the Norse gods. As the thin girl listens at night to "doom droning in the sky," she imagines Odin's warriors and hunters charging through the heavens. Byatt also analyzes the nature of storytelling as the thin girl anticipates events that are demanded by the conventions of fiction. For instance, a promise that a god will never be harmed assures the opposite: "the shape of the story means that he must be harmed."

The Norse myth of Yggdrasil -- an immense ash tree that is "a world in itself" -- will be familiar to dedicated science fiction fans as the inspiration for various worlds and vessels that share its name. Other familiar figures from the myth include the shapeshifter Loki ("a being who was neither this nor that"), and, of course, the thunder god Thor, complete with hammer. Less familiar (to me) are the goddess Frigg and her not-so-invulnerable son Baldur, whose story illustrates the mischief that gods can make.

Byatt's prismatic prose, sparkling and colorful, transforms the mundane -- mushrooms sprouting near a tree, fish carried by ocean currents -- into something glorious. As lovely as the prose is, however, a few lengthy descriptive sections of the text (particularly those concerning Jörmungandr the snake) are a bit too ponderous. And while Ragnorök: The End of the Gods is a solid and enjoyable retelling of the Norse myth, it is just that: as a retelling rather than a modernization, it offers little that is new, despite the thin girl's apt comparisons of the mythical warriors to the war that rages around her. (In a lengthy essay appended as an afterword, Byatt explains in greater detail than necessary why she wrote the story as she did.)

A final, post-war chapter addressing the thin girl's adjustment to peacetime seems uncomfortably out of place. Still, the retold Norse myths are enough. Norse gods, like nearly all gods, are petty and vengeful, qualities that lend themselves to entertaining drama, as well as lessons about how mere mortals might live richer lives than gods.

RECOMMENDED

The Third Coincidence by David Bishop

Published by Oceanview Publishing on February 6, 2012

A Justice of the Supreme Court is murdered. Inexplicably, the Supreme Court Police fail to enhance their protection of the remaining Justices, making it easy for a second Justice to be assassinated. Then a Federal Reserve Governor is killed, followed by more targets from the Court and the Fed. Despite the absence of evidence that a foreign power is responsible for the assassination, the president asks a CIA agent to assemble a task force to find the killer. In the real world, every available FBI and Secret Service agent would be investigating the murders, plus the local police, the U.S. Marshal's Office, the Supreme Court Police, and any other law enforcement agency that could reasonably justify sharing in the glory of finding the killer. In the world of The Third Coincidence, the crime is solved by Jack McCall and a handful of people who spend most of their time eating meals together and thinking lustful thoughts about each other.

Finding the killer should take all of thirty seconds given that he's a crackpot whose political grievances are inconsistent and laughable, but the novel posits this loony toon as a serious threat to governmental institutions. Frankly, if it were that easy for deranged individuals with screwy political beliefs to kill important members of government, we wouldn't have a government. That murders of highly placed officials would continue to occur when those officials are under constant surveillance requires more credulity than I was able to muster.

I'm tired of thrillers that imagine the hero to be a personal friend of the president, particularly when they lead to inane dialog like this: "`I often think about those nights we spent in embassy kitchens eating your homemade ice cream,' the president said .... `Do you still make those Grand Marnier bonbons?'" Friendship or not, it is impossible to believe that McCall would be given a leading role in the investigation. A president who puts his buddy in charge of the investigation despite his buddy's lack of law enforcement experience and who publicizes his idiocy by having the buddy give a televised news conference, would be committing political suicide.

I'm also tired of unoriginal supporting characters, including killers who taunt their hunters. McCall assembles a stereotypical "task force" that includes a sexy FBI agent who wants Jack to desire her so she can reject him, a gifted computer whiz, local cops who think the feds are snobs but love McCall anyway, and a former military sniper whose job is to sit around in case the task force decides someone needs to be shot from a distance. Of course, McCall, the hacker, and the sniper have no law enforcement experience, which makes it even less likely that real cops would take direction from the task force.

We're told that McCall is a stud who has had "flings" with women all over D.C.; if so, they must like his looks because he has no personality with which to wow them. The other characters are just as thin, but McCall is laughably one-dimensional. He pictures himself as a boulder "standing strong against the forces of evil." Sadly for the reader, McCall is about as interesting as a boulder. He is given to self-righteous platitudes and apparently views himself as more patriotic than other Americans because he works for the CIA -- as if patriotism has anything to do with catching a nutbag killer. My impression is that The Third Coincidence is intended as a message novel -- the message being "true patriots risk their lives for their country" -- but a message is no substitute for good storytelling. To the extent that a few paragraphs deliver a more salient message about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court's function as a guardian of constitutional rights, it gets lost in the morass that precedes and follows it.

In one or two chapters, David Bishop manufactures a high level of tension. Those are unfortunately offset by chapters in which characters sit around a table stating the obvious. They spend most of their time praising each other as government officials continue to die. By the end I was thinking "Just catch the guy already." I have no problem with Bishop's prose -- he is a capable writer -- but it takes more than a clean writing style to make a novel work. Dull characters and a silly plot make The Third Coincidence unworthy of attention.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker

First published in German in 2002; first published in translation in 2006; published by Other Press on January 31, 2012

The first third of The Art of Hearing Heartbeats is enthralling.  The remainder of the novel is problematic; it sustained my interest but not my enthusiasm.

After telling her that he was leaving for an appointment in Boston, Julia Win’s father takes a flight to Thailand and disappears.  The Times described him as “an influential Wall Street lawyer” but the police suspect he had a hidden past.  Burmese by birth, Tin Win became an American citizen in 1959.  Julia, a recent law school graduate, viewed her father as staid, reliable, out-of-date -- not the sort of person whose life is filled with mystery or who takes an unannounced trip to Thailand.  Four years after his disappearance, Julia finds a letter he wrote to a woman named Mi Mi.  Julia travels to Kalaw, determined to find Mi Mi, the only clue to her father’s past.  There she meets U Ba, who has been waiting to tell her the story Tin Win told him, a story from which “a life emerged, revealing its power and its magic.”

Just as we’re settling into Julia’s quest, the story shifts to the one told by U Ba.  It starts with Mya Mya, a young Burmese woman who regards the birth of Tin Win as a calamity.  An astrologer’s prediction that he will lose his sight is soon fulfilled.  After his parents die, Tin is taken to a monastery.  It is there that he first meets Mi Mi -- or, more precisely, that he first hears her heartbeat.  Mi Mi was born with “crippled feet”; their disabilities draw Tin and Mi Mi together.

Hearts and heartbeats are frequent images in the novel.  Jan-Philipp Sendker also makes good use of the imagery of balance:  Mi Mi, for instance, is emotionally well balanced even though she is incapable of balancing on her misshapen feet.  Tin balances his blindness with exceptional hearing.  Mi Mi and Tin balance each other:  when Tin carries Mi Mi on his back, her eyes provide their twinned vision, his feet set them in unitary motion.  Julia, despite having all the advantages of a stable, upper class family and western education, finds that she needs to bring her life into balance:   understanding her father becomes a necessary condition of understanding herself.

As related by U Ba, Tin Win’s tale is a love story that too often shares the characteristics of a well written fairy-tale.  There are times when the descriptions of Mi Mi’s blossoming love are a little too obvious, too melodramatic, too much like Barry Manilow with punchier prose.  Moreover, the description of their developing love creates a dull lull in the story arc.  After Tin leaves Mi Mi to meet his uncle in Rangoon the novel regains some of its force, particularly after it circles back to Julia and her uncertainty about her father’s love (understandable given his abandonment of her).  At that point a different and more original love story emerges, one that addresses a child’s love for a parent.  U Ba sums it up:  “Love has so many different faces that our imagination is not prepared to see them all.”

As the novel winds down, we learn the rest of Tin’s story.  It comes to a predictable finish but (despite its greater length) it seems less important than Julia’s.  To the extent that Tin’s story is about the purity of devotion shared by two separated lovers, I tend to agree with one of the characters who observes that love is a form of madness and hopes it isn’t contagious.  And as much as I would like to believe in the strength of heart displayed by Tin and (especially) Mi Mi, I found it incongruous that Tin couldn’t give the same unconditional love to his daughter, and I was disappointed that Sendker didn’t address that incongruity in greater depth.

It’s difficult to introduce an element of mysticism in a book that isn’t wholly a fantasy.  The best writers (Haruki Murakami comes to mind) manage to convince the reader that the mystical is real.  That Sendker doesn’t quite pull it off is my largest reservation about The Art of Hearing Heartbeats.  Its fine prose and entertaining moments nonetheless make the novel worth reading, and an unanticipated twist at the end pays a rewarding dividend.

RECOMMENDED

Me and You by Niccolò Ammaniti

First published in Italian in 2010; first published in translation in Great Britain in 2011; published by Grove Press on February 7, 2012

Lorenzo Cumi is a boy in a bubble. He has no friends. As a kid who imagines his room to be "a cube that floated through space," Lorenzo is untroubled by solitude. He believes he would be content as a prisoner in solitary confinement. Lorenzo knows he isn't "normal" but he's studied his classmates so that he can pretend to be. When his protective camouflage fails to ward off the bullies, he imitates the bullies. The pretense allows him to make it through the day without being scorned or injured, but by the time he is fourteen, he concludes that he is only happy when he is by himself. No amount of pretending could change the world outside his house, a world "filled with violence, competition, and suffocation," where "girls are mean and they make fun of you."

To mollify his parents (who worry about his strangeness), Lorenzo pretends he is leaving home on a weeklong ski trip to Cortina with classmates who didn't actually invite him. He plans to spend the week in the basement of his apartment building in Rome, armed with a Playstation, Stephen King novels, and Marvel comic books. He spends his time musing about his mother (to whom he is overly attached) and his rebellious half-sister Olivia, who regards their father as "the master of repression and silence." His days in the basement seem paradisiacal until Olivia shows up. Although she's an unwelcome and annoying guest, her problems force Lorenzo to confront his own isolation from reality.

Me and You is a charming little novel that perfectly captures the hell of being a fourteen year old outsider. It begins and ends with Lorenzo looking back on a formative event in his life ten years after it occurred, an event that may or may not have caused him to burst free of his bubble and accept the value and necessity of friendship. I'm often put off by novels in which a character undergoes a profound change as the result of a single non-traumatic experience -- changes in personality tend to be gradual and stories in which a character suddenly "awakens" to a new view of life often strike me as artificial -- but everything about Me and You is authentic, from young Lorenzo's voice and attitude to his emerging self-realization near the novel's end. The ending is jarring, completely at odds with everything that precedes it, and that too gives Me and You a feeling of genuineness. Some readers might be put off by the ambiguity surrounding Lorenzo's personality change, but what happens to Lorenzo after his week in the basement didn't strike me as necessary information in the context of the story that Ammaniti decided to tell.

Niccolò Ammaniti writes gracefully and economically. The narrative is never rushed or hurried; it evokes a childhood sense of time, when days are long and offer endless possibilities. At the same time, the story moves so swiftly that it comes to an end all too quickly -- yet the slim book is exactly the right length for the story Ammaniti wanted to tell. Ammaniti brings to bear an impressive combination of skill and heart in his creation of this short, sweet, moving novel.

RECOMMENDED

Background to Danger by Eric Ambler

First published in 1937

Everywhere Kenton goes, he seems to have the misfortune of finding a dead body with a knife protruding from its back. The police believe Kenton is responsible for at least one of the deaths, so he is on the run. His only chance to prove his innocence lies in recovering the photographs that a stranger gave him while he was on a train to Austria -- photographs he no longer possesses. Unfortunately for Kenton, at least two adversaries are also determined to find the photographs. As Kenton makes his way from Nuremberg to Linz to Prague, a journey that becomes more desperate by the minute, he tries to puzzle out the relationships between the various parties who are after the photographs. Along the way, he attempts to anticipate their next moves, the better to survive the journey.

This formula -- an innocent man caught in a web of intrigue must use his wits to save himself while thwarting the evildoers -- is the sort of thing that Alfred Hitchcock loved to film (Background to Danger was, in fact, filmed in 1943, but by Raoul Walsh). Background to Danger has all the hallmarks of a black-and-white Hitchcock film: a brooding atmosphere, a strong sense of place, quirky characters, sharp dialog, and suspense that begins to build from the opening scene. Yet the plot wasn't formulaic when Eric Ambler wrote Background to Danger; Ambler is one of the formula's originators, and writers who subsequently followed the formula have rarely done it better than Ambler.

The plot (as we learn in the prologue, it all has to do with oil) is complex without becoming convoluted. Action scenes alternate with chapters that engage the intellect, producing a story that drives forward at a brisk pace without ever becoming mindless. Ambler didn't feel the need to bog down the text with unnecessary verbiage as have so many of his successors; the story is tight. This isn't Eric Ambler's best novel (my favorite so far is A Coffin for Dimitrios) but it is more entertaining than most of the thrillers written in more recent decades.

RECOMMENDED