In Joanne M. Harris’s The Gospel of Loki, the demon prince of the Norse pantheon gives his side of the myths we all know and love, retelling them in a delightfully wicked first-person narrative pleading the case that if he's not entirely innocent, then at least he's a necessary evil.
Far from the destroyer and spoiler of all that is good in the world, he is a vital part of creation, or so he argues. He is chaos, “wildfire incarnate” and thus embodies the unpredictable and morally flexible element that the worlds of god and men require. . “(…) Perfect Order,” he tells us, “does not bend; it simply stands until it breaks.”
It is grasping, avaricious Odin who tempts Loki to abandon the realm of chaos and join him in his quest to conquer all. He is the tempter and despoiler, not Loki. By bringing our protagonist into the fold of the Aesir and Vanir, Odin seeks to bring chaos itself under his dominion—an impossibility.
Like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, or to use a more contemporary example, Anne Rice’s devilishly charming vampire Lestat du Lioncourt, Loki’s wit and charm has a way of making the indefensible not only worth overlooking, but delightful to boot.
Loki, after all, is all too aware of his wickedness, but he’s equally familiar with the ruthless nature of the other gods—and at least he’s honest about it. Well, maybe. Harris’s Loki reminds the reader many times over that none of the gods are to be trusted, and that includes himself.
if you’ve read any of the Norse myths—or even seen The Avengers—then you’re familiar with Loki the murderer, poisoner, and liar. Odin, the master of the runes and wisest among the gods (or so he says) wrote the supposed history by which we know the Norse trickster god.
Loki knows how hard it might be to set the record straight. No matter how good his gospel may be, Odin has already written a first and final draft. His fiction is indistinguishable from fact, and as Loki warns us, there’s not too much difference between the two:
“After all, words are what remain when all the deeds have been done. Words can shatter faith, start a war, change the course of history. A story can make your heart beat faster, topple walls, scale mountains—Hey, a story can even raise the dead. And that’s why the King of Stories ended up being the King of the gods, because writing history and making history are only the breadth of a page apart.”
