GRENDEL, John Gardner

Greetings, Anglo-Saxon poetry fans and postmodern monster lovers alike. That’s a combination of readers I didn’t expect to come across in my fantasy excavations. Sure, there are plenty of contemporary fantasy works featuring monsters from gothic literature—e.g. vampires and werewolves—and folklore—e.g. fairies, witches and werewolves again (?)—that give the monsters a sympathetic perspective. Heck, more and more we get revamped fairy tales that turn classic villains into heroes or anti-heroes. So, what makes John Gardner’s Grendel stand out?

Let’s start with the fact that you probably know Grendel’s original source, the epic poem Beowulf, from one of three sources: your high school literature class, the 2007 3D-animated film with Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s mostly naked lizard mother, or the Wishbone book adaptation Be A Wolf! (Okay, maybe that last one only applies to me.) The point is that Grendel is the monster that the titular hero of Beowulf faces and defeats with pure strength and will. He serves mainly as a superhuman threat to King Hrothgar and the Danes, prompting Beowulf to show up for some old-fashioned monster slaying. Typical mythic story. Yet, to be fair, even in the original poem, the lines of good and evil are not so clearly defined.

A throwaway reference is made that Grendel may be a descendant of Cain, the murderous son of Adam and Eve who offed his brother Abel out of envy for God’s favor. This allusion paints Grendel as something inherently diabolic beyond his ghastly attacks on the king’s hall. His actions result in many a dead man, thus Beowulf’s efforts to kill Grendel seem doubly noble. That said, during the mano-a-mano fight, the poem portrays Beowulf as a monstrous creature, too, perhaps akin to Grendel.

The similarities drawn between Grendel and Beowulf could be enough to write a reversed-perspective story that explores them, and I did expect a stronger focus on Beowulf in Gardner’s novel. Instead, much of the novel centers purely on Grendel’s existential angst, and not in a bad way. Just a mind-tripping one.

As any respectable re-imagining would, Gardner’s novel deftly fleshes out Grendel as his own character without losing the essence of the original counterpart. Grendel is no gentle, misunderstood soul. Well, he may be misunderstood by the humans he first meets, but the Grendel we meet in the opening pages has already suffered the frustrations of dealing with humans and having no one like him to interact with, and this makes him kind of a dick to anything he does run across, including birds and goats. He’s a creature burdened with rage and bitterness, diluted only with crass humor. However, while the character may be bitter and crass, Gardner renders Grendel’s narrative voice nothing less than poetically raw. Grendel is intelligent, descriptive, insightful, even while socially stunted and too caught up in his pain to be a standard sympathetic hero. He does still manage to be sympathetic in his struggles to understand what he is and what it is to be a solitary, sapient creature.

Readers familiar with Beowulf will be quick to point out that Grendel isn’t completely alone; he has a mother. She later tries to avenge her son’s death, giving Beowulf another monster to fight. But in Gardner’s version, Mama Grendel has only the faintest spark of intelligence, nowhere near Grendel’s faculties. He often can’t perceive what she’s feeling or thinking, and he certainly can’t talk about existential angst with her. So he seeks answers in the world beyond his cozy, dank cave home. He becomes an observer of the humans who invade the surrounding land and comes to somewhat understand their petty, contrary natures. He’s especially wowed and appalled by how humans can commit terrible atrocities but, through the artifices of music and storytelling, transform their history into the stuff of grand legends that make them look like honorable heroes. Even Grendel wants to believe the lies, and that very impulse only fuels his hatred of humanity. So does, perhaps, his latten longing to belong with them, or with anyone he can see some of himself in.

Grendel’s continuous narrative drags you into his eyes and world and pulls at pretty much every emotion you can feel for such a character: pity, fascination, horror, revulsion, annoyance, humor, confusion. Confusion can become more prevalent for a few reasons. One is that there’s a lot of skipping around in time, and it’s not always clear whether certain events are happening in the present or past, or if time is in fact real. Sometimes one must question if some scenes literally occur or are an illusion born of Grendel’s active mind. One incident that throws doubt on Grendel’s narrative reliability is his conversation with a dragon. The dragon provides a devastating contrast to the humans—not an in evil/good dichotomy, but in a philosophical contrast. While the humans spend so much effort imposing value and meaning on everything, from material wealth to status to abstract concepts like religion and honor, the dragon is a tried-and-true nihilist who mocks humans and even Grendel for their existential struggle. He pushes Grendel toward a dark purpose—to defy humanity’s attempts to shove manufactured values down the universe’s throat. But is this really the fault of a dragon’s manipulations, or merely the dream-like manifestation of Grendel’s already present, destructive impulses? Well, the dragon isn’t telling anyone, that lazy, good-for-nothing, Camus-spewing, gold-hogging hipster.

This book is dripping with texture in both theme and language, which will thrill the literary treasure hunters but might startle those seeking some simple, fun, monster-sympathizing revisionism. There is nothing simple about this book, and it’s all the better for it, albeit often mystifying. Oh, and don’t expect a happy ending. Even re-imagined monsters can’t catch a break.

Rating: 4.5/5