beer good
Well-Known Member
Klas Östergren: The Hurricane Party
Cattle die,
kindred die,
we ourselves also die;
but I know one thing
that never dies, -
judgement on each one dead.
- Hávamál (transl. Benjamin Thorpe)
"Man sits at poetry's gate," wrote Swedish poet Nils Ferlin. "He speaks of great things he has done and all the great things he'll yet do." The idea of Canongate's Myths series is a great one; that all of the old myths and stories we used to tell ourselves about great heroes and old gods deserve to be told again, because they never stop being relevant. To quote a phrase, we're not so much Homo Sapiens as Homo Narrans; we are who we tell ourselves we are, the sum of the stories we have told to explain ourselves, and we need to know them and relate to them. Take vengeance, for instance. One of the oldest themes in literature, since it seems to be so inherently human; you **** with me and I'll **** with you - even today, "he tried to kill my dad" counts as a reason to invade another country. And if gods are something we invented to better understand ourselves, it follows that they have more power than we do; and for Man to have revenge on God is a difficult thing indeed.
When most of the other participants in the Myths series seem to stick rather closely to the Mediterranean world of gods, heroes, hydras, sirens, minotaurs, titans etc (ye gods, there are other stories to tell!) Östergren takes the opportunity to claim the Norse mythology for himself. In The Hurricane Party, he rewrites the Edda, a few hundred years into a post- or mid-apocalyptic future. The environment has fallen apart completely, Stockholm AKA Midgard is a tropical city where the rain thrashes everything that's not covered by the dome covering the richer parts of town, and nobody knows what's happening outside the city in Utgard. The city is run by a mafia-like organisation headed by the one-eyed godfath... sorry, Allfather O'Dean, who uses his berserker thugs to keep the people in line. Everyone else is happy to just get along; as playthings to the gods are we, but they're gods, what can you do?
In this world lives Hanck, a man who makes a living selling ancient typewriters (a machine that doesn't need electricity, and produces stories!) to the city's bards and lives only for one person: his son. Until his son is killed by a drunken Loki at a godly party gotten out of hand, and Hanck decides that this will not stand. He will have revenge.
As long as Östergren sticks to his own story, he does an excellent job, creating a dystopia that can stand next to any number of minor classics - I'm especially reminded of Paul Theroux' The O-Zone. But once again, he runs into the same problem as Atwood and Winterson before him; the need to make the connection between the modern (or post-modern) world and the old myth explicit takes over, and the middle of the novel turns into something that looks more like a recap of the Edda than a rewrite; as if Östergren thought it was a university class on Norse mythology rather than a novel. Rather than keeping on playing with the archetypes and matching the similarities between Odin and Don Corleone, he lectures and writes fanfic.
Though he does wrap it up with a nice twist on the old pen-and-sword thing (or rather typewriter-and-revolver) that feels almost borrowed from the superior Gentlemen (which might count as a modern myth by now). But still... if Ferlin and Kafka had ever met they might have decided that each man's gate to poetry is made for them alone, and for all the things this novel gets right, I'm not convinced Östergren is sitting outside his own here.
Cattle die,
kindred die,
we ourselves also die;
but I know one thing
that never dies, -
judgement on each one dead.
- Hávamál (transl. Benjamin Thorpe)
"Man sits at poetry's gate," wrote Swedish poet Nils Ferlin. "He speaks of great things he has done and all the great things he'll yet do." The idea of Canongate's Myths series is a great one; that all of the old myths and stories we used to tell ourselves about great heroes and old gods deserve to be told again, because they never stop being relevant. To quote a phrase, we're not so much Homo Sapiens as Homo Narrans; we are who we tell ourselves we are, the sum of the stories we have told to explain ourselves, and we need to know them and relate to them. Take vengeance, for instance. One of the oldest themes in literature, since it seems to be so inherently human; you **** with me and I'll **** with you - even today, "he tried to kill my dad" counts as a reason to invade another country. And if gods are something we invented to better understand ourselves, it follows that they have more power than we do; and for Man to have revenge on God is a difficult thing indeed.
When most of the other participants in the Myths series seem to stick rather closely to the Mediterranean world of gods, heroes, hydras, sirens, minotaurs, titans etc (ye gods, there are other stories to tell!) Östergren takes the opportunity to claim the Norse mythology for himself. In The Hurricane Party, he rewrites the Edda, a few hundred years into a post- or mid-apocalyptic future. The environment has fallen apart completely, Stockholm AKA Midgard is a tropical city where the rain thrashes everything that's not covered by the dome covering the richer parts of town, and nobody knows what's happening outside the city in Utgard. The city is run by a mafia-like organisation headed by the one-eyed godfath... sorry, Allfather O'Dean, who uses his berserker thugs to keep the people in line. Everyone else is happy to just get along; as playthings to the gods are we, but they're gods, what can you do?
In this world lives Hanck, a man who makes a living selling ancient typewriters (a machine that doesn't need electricity, and produces stories!) to the city's bards and lives only for one person: his son. Until his son is killed by a drunken Loki at a godly party gotten out of hand, and Hanck decides that this will not stand. He will have revenge.
As long as Östergren sticks to his own story, he does an excellent job, creating a dystopia that can stand next to any number of minor classics - I'm especially reminded of Paul Theroux' The O-Zone. But once again, he runs into the same problem as Atwood and Winterson before him; the need to make the connection between the modern (or post-modern) world and the old myth explicit takes over, and the middle of the novel turns into something that looks more like a recap of the Edda than a rewrite; as if Östergren thought it was a university class on Norse mythology rather than a novel. Rather than keeping on playing with the archetypes and matching the similarities between Odin and Don Corleone, he lectures and writes fanfic.
Though he does wrap it up with a nice twist on the old pen-and-sword thing (or rather typewriter-and-revolver) that feels almost borrowed from the superior Gentlemen (which might count as a modern myth by now). But still... if Ferlin and Kafka had ever met they might have decided that each man's gate to poetry is made for them alone, and for all the things this novel gets right, I'm not convinced Östergren is sitting outside his own here.
