Odin's Island, by Janne Teller

The Famous Five save a Norse god

The gods of the past face an even more humiliating destiny than humans: we just age and die, they dwindle and become silly. This is only one of the weighty themes in Odin's Island, a strange and troubling fable, part children's story, part political satire.

When a gaggle of children on a small island between two Scandinavian countries meet Odin, they do not see the hoary rider of the clouds, summoning his warriors to battle, but only a little old man with a long white beard and one bright eye. One of his two horses has hurt its leg "in a meteor storm", and, though he has some difficulty explaining this to the people of the island (they seem curiously ignorant of the world outside), their native hospitality prompts them to help him. Alas, there is no "veterinarius" who can heal his horse's leg. He'd be better off going to a place they call "the continent". The sea has frozen over and so Odin treks across, braving the frost, to "South Norseland". In so doing, he effectively steps into the 20th century, on the eve of the millennium.

The islanders found Odin odd, but they were willing to help him. The people of the mainland find him odder still, and they prove markedly unwilling to help him. They put him in a mental ward. But the powers that be have not reckoned with the dogged philanthropy of Sigbrit Holland, the young woman who first found him, caked with snow, on the motorway. Defying her husband's rolling eyes, she sets out to alert the world to Odin's predicament, and in so doing, awakens her homeland's sleeping dragons. South Norseland (a thinly disguised Denmark) plummets into religious fanaticism: there are the Born Anew Christians, convinced that Odin is Christ returned, the True Christians (from a thinly disguised Sweden) who are convinced he's a fraud, the Reborn Jews, convinced he's the Messiah son of David, the Lambs of the Lord, the militant and moderate Muslims and so on. Blandly tolerant South Norseland faces war - with its neighbour and with itself.

The bewildered Odin is freed from the hospital by Gunnar the Head, a former blacksmith and football player convinced that he's carrying his own head, and is soon ensconced on a fishing boat. All he wants to do is get back to the island and get his horse's leg fixed. There was something he needed to tell the world, but he's forgotten what it is. Sigbrit, whose marriage is disintegrating daily, Ambrosius the fisherman, Brynhild the transparent woman, and a broken old man called Der Fremdling are committed to getting him back to the island. Trouble is, how can they do that when the maps have forgotten it and planes disappear over it?

The book relies on an interesting narrative technique. Odin's oddity quickly fades, so the baton of battiness must be passed to the islanders. Then other figures emerge, each with his or her quiddity and mystery. About halfway through, with disappointed elder brothers, frustrated functionaries and bespectacled mediocrities all giving the forces of hate a hand, the little crew around Odin spend about 150 pages pootling about in "Famous Five" fashion. Trips are undertaken, gear is bought. It all takes far too long.

When it comes to Brynhild, the "transparent woman" (really transparent? We never learn), the book seriously slips its moorings. The odd gnomic remark can be forgiven, but after a while there's just no let up from sayings of the "a rolling kumquat gathers no nuts in May" school of wisdom. These "kennings" sober up towards the end, but by this point the reader's eyes have begun first to narrow then to glaze.

Much subtler than at first it appears, and rather more complex than it can well afford, Odin's Island is an unsteady success. It is rich and dull, challenging and frustrating, beautiful and bathetic. As Odin sails off, leaving behind a nation ravaged by fanaticism, you suspect that he himself was the bad tidings he had forgotten. You suspect that this is exactly what the author intended you to feel; but with this book you just can't be sure.