The Gospel of Loki by Joanne M Harris, book review: Wicked humour in a revisionist retelling of Norse myths

This book is about story, and the love of story; Harris's Loki is a story-teller even before he is trickster, murderer and betrayer – most of his tricks, all of his graver sins, come from his awareness, his attempt to avoid the fact, that his will not be a story that ends happily.

The narrative has its own implicit ironic contradiction – Loki is telling his tale after its ending and his death. To whom is he talking? And how? This is a book about playfulness and trickery and their dark side – it takes for granted that its reader will not be naive about such things, which also means that the reader will not be wholly innocent, will be complicit in wickedness by enjoying it as story.

One of the things that Joanne M Harris does with these stories – which draw eclectically on the Edda, folklore and in places Wagner's version – is point to the fact that Loki is not the only amoral trickster involved in them.

Odin is at least as bad – in some ways worse because both manipulative and hypocritical. Odin is as guilty as Loki of trying to circumvent prophecy – in a very real sense, his desire to know and then change the future creates the doom he tries to avoid, just as his desire to achieve and hold power inevitably leads to the destruction of that power.

Both gods are caught up in a version of Fate which is less the Wyrd of the legends this book draws on or the Anangke of Greek tragedy than a purely aesthetic irony. The question at stake ends up being, not just who is telling this version of the story, as who told the story in the first place.

At first sight, this is surprisingly male-dominated for a revisionist retelling of old stories – we are used to revisionist versions having an obvious agenda of including the normally excluded. Loki does not like, tends to exploit and sneer at, the women in his life – his wife Signy, his mistress Angrboda, his daughter Hel – let alone the other goddesses of Asgard.

Yet, in the end, he is their patsy – even the downtrodden Signy becomes his jailer, protecting him most of the time from the snake that spits venom in his eyes, but refusing to help him escape a situation which has, for her, an element of domesticity to it – he may be in agony, but she knows he isn't off cheating on her.

There is a sly humour to this novel – both the narrator's and at his expense. It is a book about a trickster, and his tricks often turn and bite him.