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This was the tone Tolkien’s books achieved his elves fought for Middle-earth even as they were doomed to leave it. The moody gift of Norse myths is to offer us tragic necessity as nobility of purpose.
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The essence of Norse mythology lies in its fatalism, its sense that the eternal balance of good and evil may well be stacked against the good and yet the good still has a duty to go on, delaying, at least, the day of Ragnarok.
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So too, in the Percy Jackson books, the Greek truth that the best teachers are the wildest men spoke to us freshly - and those books taught something, too, about the classical notion of the antic nature of desire. Annabeth, daughter of Athena, was a more than plausible recreation of the Greek ideal of stern yet supple feminine wisdom. Riordan very skillfully modernized that in the Percy books. Greek myths have the distinctive quality of capturing human passions as personal types the essential gift of the Greek myths is to personify forces as characters. One wonders, though, if Riordan has caught enough of the special quiddity that separates Norse mythology from other kinds, or even winged it adequately. If at times the tone is unfortunately like that of a “Transformers” movie, all wiseguy plucky kid versus Orson Welles-basso-voiced enemy demiurges, at other moments the secondary characters seem convincingly imagined both as old myth types and as comic sidekicks. (One of the book’s more winning conceits is that Boston is really, truly the hub of the world the entrance to the world tree Ygdrasil is in the Boston Commons statue dedicated to “Make Way for Ducklings.”) The action, at moments made confusing by the device of characters dying and being born again, unfolds predictably but convincingly through various betrayals and plots to the inevitable triumphant alliance of eccentrics. Valhalla is a convention hotel, complete with alarming announcement boards (“Buffet Lunch to the Death! - Dining Hall, 12 p.m.”), and Aegir the mead maker is always “talking about microbrews.” But some of it feels a bit dutifully antic: The evil prankster god, Loki, is introduced wearing a Red Sox jersey and eating a Pop-Tart. It pits him against giant eagles and sea serpents, with a diverse coalition that includes a young Muslim Valkyrie, in a desperate struggle to put off the day of Ragnarok, the apocalyptic battle the forces of good are doomed to lose.
#Best books by rick riordan series
His quest is more episodically comic in tone than the Percy series often was (we learn that Magnus has watched William Goldman’s “The Princess Bride” 26 times, and some of that tale’s facetious humor has slipped into this one). Magnus, our hero, is the son of Frey, the god of plenty, where Percy was the son of Poseidon, and so his sword is the summer sword. The magic craft of dwarves, the mission of the Valkyries, the surprisingly variable sizes of giants, even the division between the godlike orders of Aesir and Vanir - all are made beautifully clear. In the new book, Norse myths are given the same carefully detailed exposition. If one price paid to keep kids involved was to give the characters overly neat, X-Men-style powers, so cheating the original myths of their strange violence - violence and combat not being quite the same thing - this seemed a small price paid for clarifying, as nimbly as Riordan did, the differences, say, between the Greek and Roman mythological pantheons. The classical panoply of gods and demigods - satyrs and centaurs and even one girl who, quite properly and unpuritanically, was sired by Zeus and born to a television starlet - were all made new. Riordan, a teacher before he was a writer, taught a generation of American children not just the names but also much of the substance, the emotional architecture, of Greek mythology. The “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” and “Heroes of Olympus” series, to give their official names, certainly earned all their successes. The boys are certainly different - Magnus, our new hero, a Kurt Cobain look-alike, starts out homeless and a petty thief in Boston, where Percy was at boarding school. Rick Riordan, after the well-earned triumph of his two Percy Jackson series, tales of an all-American boy who discovers that he is the son of a Greek god, now embarks, with “Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Sword of Summer,” on an entirely new series, this one about a not-quite-all-American boy who discovers he is the son of. The line between cynical repetition and elegant variation is as fine in adventure stories as it is in - well, as it is in that line the members of Spinal Tap sapiently discovered between clever and stupid.