The Brooklyn Rail

Approximately eight centuries before Kurt Baumeister’s humorous second novel Twilight of the Gods opens, a momentous event in the work’s retelling of Norse mythology occurs and, in turn, looms over the entire narrative: the Norns—a trio of sisters named Darkness, Halflight, and Sunshine, messengers of Fate—abscond from the Nine Realms, all but forgotten by the humans of Midgard and let down by the Aesir deities—Odin, Freya, Thor, Heimdall, Baldur, et. al. The Norns sojourn through the outer reaches of space-time for eons, seeking a new home where they “might make a difference, serve Fate again.” They eventually settle in a parallel “pocket dimension … populated by sentient, bisexual plants,” where they are welcomed to stay and discover that they do in fact have “things to do.”

The Norns flee because the numbers of believers in the Norse gods were dwindling for ages, which bearded, one-eyed All-father Odin promised he would remedy through the “Great Integration,” i.e., by taking over and incorporating Christianity—the chief drain on their adherents—into the pantheon’s fold. But the opposite occurs. Christianity rises to supremacy throughout Scandinavia and Europe, vanquishing some earlier pagan deities and beliefs while absorbing and assimilating others, and thereby bequeathing unto posterity a smiling, rotund, furry-faced Santa Claus that suspiciously resembles the ancient Norse god of wisdom, warfare, and death.

As servants of Fate, however, the Norns are destined to return, which is how the novel begins: Sunshine, a dishy redhead in beguiling jeans who calls herself Sabrina, shows up at the sex addiction support group of narrator/protagonist and former lover Loki, Trickster, Master of Disguise, Mischief Maker, and Evil One himself. This Loki, however, is a handsome black man—“like Denzel with just a dash of Taye Diggs”—named Gustav living in twenty-first century Boston. He drinks a lot, attends support group meetings, is an aspiring writer, enjoys demolition derby, professional wrestling, bowling, football, baseball—any “Americana,” really—and, very crucially, this Loki is good. He has roamed and patrolled the planet for centuries helping people, human beings, and has become fond of us. He lives in a spacious abode called Chateau Loki with two former-giants-cum-dwarves Sutur and Thyrm, his wolf-son-faithful-dog Fenrir, and tech-savvy Goth daughter Hel, goddess of the underworld. They get high, play video games, surf the web, eat big breakfasts, suffer hangovers, but are no longer omniscient, omnipotent, immortal, or “omni-anything,” if they ever were, although now they can and do feel pain.

The same goes for Odin, Thor, and the rest of the crew. Odin’s “Great Integration” has long since failed, but, in the 1930s, he saw the creative-disruptive possibilities of a young would-be Führer who himself craved collaboration with the Asgardians to form a “religion of blood”—white, Nordic blood to go along with the German and Austrian—to inspire a thousand-year Aryan Reich. Odin and Co. happily ally with Hitler and the National Socialists, but everything comes crashing down to Earth quite literally when a bullet ends Hitler, his regime, and Odin’s hopes for renewal.

At least for a while. Between the end of World War II and the novel’s present (which appears to be 2020 or 2021, depending), earthbound Odin amasses great wealth and a New Valhalla by doing business with the political left and right, the fore and aft curtains of post-WWII Europe, and is looking to support right-wing businessman front-runner Reinhold Vekk over Greta Bruder, the “German Washington,” in the upcoming election to mark the end of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship. Sabrina/Sunshine arrives in Boston to inform Loki that she and her sisters are back, to confirm that neither he nor the other gods have been meddling in the affairs of men (which Odin has), to relay that her sisters are currently with Odin in Germany, and because, well, Ragnarök. Alternately translated as the End of the Gods or the novel’s eponymous “Twilight of the Gods,” Ragnarök represents the ultimate finale foretold in the myths, the apocalyptic battle of giants and gods that presages the destruction of them, the world, and men, the incipience of which is marked by the Norns’ return.

Before that, however, Darkness and Halflight must verify that Odin has in fact reformed his blood-thirsty, power-hungry ways, which of course he has not. Aware of his culpability, Odin informs Loki of his planned assassination of Greta Bruder, which he then inveigles Loki to thwart, so that the Norns will not discover his shenanigans. Ironically, now that he is good, Loki is no longer the consummate trickster, but rather the one most easily and often tricked. He’s a sucker for Odin’s crocodile tears and feigned displays of “real emotion,” yearns to kiss Sunshine once more, and over the course of the novel he is scapegoated and betrayed and cast down from Asgard again and again. In this Baumeister has opted for the divine genealogy that holds Loki to be a son or an adopted son of Odin, and therefore the brother of Thor, as in the Marvel Comic Universe, rather than as a primordial agent of chaos who antedates Odin’s reign, is the All-father’s ever-present drinking buddy, and has Thor as a travelling companion on adventures. That they are all family, however, provides both the necessary bond as well as the motivation and rationale that keep drawing Odin to Loki, Loki to Odin, and the rest of them together.

With this much in place, the plots and subplots unfurl: Odin wants Sunshine brought to him, but Loki and his troop hide her safely in Boston while Loki goes to Germany and disguises himself—poof!—as Wrath X, in order to infiltrate the white supremacist Viking Brotherhood motorcycle gang to stop their assassination of Bruder. Sunshine escapes her hapless Playstationing protectors and travels to Europe, followed by Hel, the giant dwarves, and Fenrir, but also Loki’s writer friend and support group leader Kurt, who is smitten with Sunshine but winds up comically drugged and shackled in a basement. Will Loki stop the assassination? Will the Norns reunite and uncover Odin’s machinations? Will Bruder win the election? Will the authoritarian right-wing resurgence swamp Germany, Europe, and the U.S.? Will Loki and Sunshine hook up? Will Hel get busy with Bruder? What about Kurt? Does he stand a chance with Sunshine? (No.) Will the Wheel of Fate, which has been melted down and molded into a miniature statue of Hitler, be restored to its original and assist the Norns in initiating Ragnarök and the destruction of all?

Double dealings and plot twists abound throughout, but for obvious reasons, Ragnarök is the central concern of Loki and the other gods in the text. Early on, however, Darkness tells Loki that “Ragnarök is not what you or the All-father believe it to be,” while Sunshine later adds “your current conception of Ragnarök is so very literal … it won’t be like that when it finally happens.” Whatever the end or twilight portends for the gods themselves, its meaning for humanity is nevertheless clear: it will be a release. For as Loki tells us, addressing his human readers directly as “you” throughout the work, the gods and their dubious antics are the main source of all our problems. Well, kind of. More than anything, it is our desperate, undying need to believe in gods that is our undoing: “Your love of gods, your desire to be shown the way, has caused you to create so many of them [gods] out of whole cloth; to put your energy, most of it, into ones that aren’t even real.” Coming from a god, this is rich indeed, but it goes as much for the risible notion of a single god—“name one other thing that comes in ones and only ones, one thing that is its own beginning and end,” who was obviously “designed by some of you guys to control others of you guys”—as it does for “kooky demagogues,” i.e., the hucksters, cons, billionaires, and even felons in whom we mistakenly place trust as they pursue their own nihilistic schemes of will-to-power on political stages both domestic and international: “when personal performance artists gain sway over millions, it’s time to run the other fucking way.” Bruder, at least, holds out hope for a clean slate: “Finally getting rid of you guys once and for all could make humanity a lot better. Could completely change things.”

The fictional German election between Vekk and Bruder to become Merkel’s successor (Angela Merkel resigned in 2021) gives an oddly backward glance to the novel since the object of its social satire is the re-emergence of white-supremacist, authoritarian parties and leaders through democratic means in countries across the globe, which of course is very real and very ongoing today. Loki is perplexed by this trend: “I can’t believe humanity’s dumb enough to try this again, after how the 1940s worked out;” to which Odin replies, “I guess they’re dumber than you think.” Perhaps odder still, despite the numerous mentions of America, is the novel’s indirect treatment of US politics. To be sure, there is a tamping down of the jingoism associated with the “American Century,” but Loki still loves America and likens its political trajectory after the fall of the Berlin Wall to “a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, the mother of all hangovers from the nightmare of all drunks.” Our real problem, in fact, over and above our general human craving for divine “absolution and absolutism, no matter the dangers,” is that we mistook the post-WWII left-right continuum for a line, when it was actually a circle, one that corralled us and made us into “cattle,” on the one hand, and that—in Kurt’s words—“we’ve had it so good for so long,” making us soft and juicy and ripe for the taking, on the other.

While this assessment is debatable, the novel’s focus on a fictional Germany of the recent past nevertheless provides the implicit foil of America in the historical present and future. In other words, Baumeister offers a clear warning about the November 2024 election and its likely consequences without mentioning it at all, which is indeed a neat and deftly turned trick for a writer to pull. The current president and vice president of the United States are never named either, instead they haunt, or rather ignorantly and maliciously taunt (as is their wont) every page. From the perspective of a very short time right before now, we can see what’s coming, and what’s coming is a constellation of forces forged in Germany’s past. As Loki states:

You’d have thought they’d outlaw fascism in Germany after what happened with the Nazis. You’d have thought they’d outlaw fascism everywhere after what happened with the Nazis…. But everyone over here, everyone in America, is still hoping somehow Bruder can pull it out. It’s terrible to see an ally go wrong—heartbreaking and terrifying in equal measures. I hate to think what it would be like to see a country as powerful as America go that way.

It is not giving too much away to say Twilight of the Gods suggests that, whatever happens under this potentially calamitous regime, we will face it without the help or hindrance of gods, and without the predetermined alibis of Fate, which Sunshine finally and belatedly admits is just another “lie.” No one is coming to help or save us. This is not, however, a recipe for defeatism. Instead, Loki counsels, “I’ve seen human history, and no one with a heart who’s seen your history, not a century, let alone millennia of it, can turn away. You have to accept the truth in experience. You have to give history its due.” This is both necessary and true. But the alternative recent-history perspective of the novel not only refocuses our gaze on doings in a fictional near-contemporary Germany, but also tends to occlude aspects of the American past. For instance, Loki, embodied in the novel as a Black man living in the United States from the 1950s onward, has almost nothing to say about race or racism, other than this:

Much as I like, even love, America, American exceptionalism has never made any sense. It’s really just a nice version of Hitler’s Master Race Theory, a way to make some of you feel better at the cost of making others of you feel worse.

Unfortunately, racism in the United States does more than just skew our feelings: it is a central component of the ideological hardware that makes the national machinery run. In fact, when Hitler was seeking historical precedents as workable examples for the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, he turned for assistance to the Jim Crow South (James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model). Either Loki doesn’t seem to fully grasp that, or being a trickster, he doesn’t want to say. However that stands, America will never have to wait for the most shocking forms of white supremacy to arrive from overseas: they have always been here already.