It's a risky strategy, but not as risky as, say, gods on mephedrone.
The story becomes as much hers as theirs. 'Possibly there would always be a war on.' This sense of eternal conflict acts as an anchor while interweaving the stories of the Norse gods with the story of how she first read about them makes a kind of bildungsroman. Byatt adds value to the end of everything by adding her own experience of it, as a child in the beleaguered England of the early 1940s. We reappropriate them with more certainty, perhaps, when we do it personally than when we do it as a culture.ĪS Byatt's Ragnarok is the latest in the Canongate series of reworked myths (already notable for The Hurricane Party, Klas Ostergren's encounter with the same material). In revenge or desperation we reboot them as science fiction, as monsters of the id, as guest appearances on other shows: gods on skateboards, gods on the autistic spectrum gods adapted to the needs of ideologies they would never in a billion years have espoused, carrying the baggage of every previous revision. Whatever their enthusiasts claim, the risk is that, by now, they have nothing left to say to us. They don't seem as concerned with identity politics or buying things as they might be.
