#12: Grendel, John Gardner

Grendel is a lonely and wretched creature. He lives with his half-mad, bestial mother in a sea cave, but frequently ventures out to spy on the feasting hall of Hrothgar and ponder the meaning of his existence. Eventually, his spark is extinguished by the larger-than-life Beowulf.

I nearly read this book in college. The premise of Beowulf being told from the viewpoint of the monster, Grendel, is an enticing one. As I recall, though, I read the first few pages at the bookstore and decided to give it a pass because of the self-absorbed style.

Apparently, I have grown dumber in the last twenty years. After hearing this novel praised in another context, I decided on an impulse to give it a chance. I had the same reaction after reading the first dozen pages or so, but this time I pushed through my initial distaste. A passage here and there throughout the rest of the book made me glad I did so, but mostly my twenty-year-old first impression was the correct one.

Grendel is a pretentious and mystifying patchwork of style in search of interesting content. The entire book isn't so much what I hoped it would be: an interesting psychological profile of a tortured soul driven to violence. Instead, it is a sophomoric philosophical rant that exploits the particulars of Beowulf as set dressing. I have read that Grendel is supposed to be a critique of Existentialism. If so, I would argue that John Gardner has constructed a pretty pathetic straw man (straw monster?) from which to argue his case.

Grendel is written in the stream-of-consciousness technique, somewhere between the intellectual pastiche of James Joyce and the howl of the Beat Poets (but without the underpinning content of either). At moments the novel comes close to literary coherence and even brilliance, but these bits are like tiny, shapeless blobs of meat in a giant vat of tasteless chili.

More than anything, I was reminded of the long section of Frankenstein in which the monster spies on a cottage of humans. Grendel is an outsider by fact of birth and by inclination. Like Frankenstein's monster he longs to be a part of the human tribe (or at least deludes himself that he does) and makes an impetuous move to join them. Their reaction to his monstrous appearance is practically a forgone conclusion and results in sorrow, bitterness, anger, and violence. Grendel eventually comes to define himself by his ongoing war against Hrothgar's tribe, a meaningless war that he purposefully sustains by culling rather than exterminating the humans.

This one is an early contender for biggest disappointment of 2008.

P.S. I would be remiss to come anywhere near the subject of Beowulf without saying how awesome Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf is. Also, the the interior illustrations in the above edition of Grendel are quite interesting. They are all head studies of Grendel composed in small patches of parallel lines. Often one has to stare at the pictures for a few seconds to make the particulars of the monster's face appear. Very cool. The artist of these interior pieces is Emil Antonucci.