I remember vividly my elementary school library having this big, thick book on Norse mythology full of illustrations. Like him, I was entranced by the stories of the Norse gods from an early age. In his introduction to Norse Mythology, Neil Gaiman echoes what draws me to it. The joke works once or twice thereafter, it becomes wearying.First of all, let’s be clear: Norse mythology is hella cool.

There are other rough parts, as when the origin of humankind becomes a scene of scatology, prompting Loki to address the reader every so often as “arse-born”. There is a problem, though, which threatens to undermine the whole, which is that Burgess makes Tyr – a valorous god who sacrifices his own hand to the wolf Fenrir – into the liar, instead of Loki, rather defeating the point of his character. One of Loki’s wives, Angrboda, gives birth to enormous monsters, and Burgess gruesomely details their arrivals as if on a contemporary maternity ward. Odin starts to go insane because he has peered into the multiverse, while the traditionally male god Baldr turns out to be a hermaphrodite, with Loki taking Baldr’s “second virginity” in soft-porn fashion on a bearskin rug. Canapes are served at Asgard’s many drinks parties. Burgess also infuses the gods with humanity: Odin sacrifices his eye to gain further knowledge, and turns into a wreck of a man, everyone’s great-grandfather on the edge of death. On the mystical side, Burgess is capable of chapters that brim with numinous light, as when Odin nails himself up on a tree to die. Burgess is capable of chapters that brim with numinous light, as when Odin nails himself up on a tree to die The result is Sleipnir, a many-legged mount he gives to Odin. He falls completely in love (something he does several times throughout the novel, with other gods and goddesses). In a hilarious scene, he makes the gods beg him to do it. I am.” Loki feels hard done by: as a shapeshifter, he is constantly called on to help the gods, most memorably when they ask him to transform into a mare in order to catch the eye of the stallion Svadilfari. Loki introduces himself with adolescent haughtiness: “I am one of those who sprang into being because the world demanded me it had no choice. It’s the other gods who have been defaming him. Loki, far from being a liar, wants to inform us that he’s been telling the truth all the time. He writes from Loki’s perspective, in the first person, which lends the book the air of a young adult novel.

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