Steven Wu's Book Reviews: Grendel (John Gardner)

John Gardner's Grendel is the story of Grendel and Beowulf, from the monster's point of view. Gardner's Grendel is (I suppose) a postmodern "hero": he believes himself to be the only sentient being in the universe, he is both beast and human and despises both his bestiality and humanity with equal bitterness, and he alternately gibbers nonsense and utters deep truths as he tromps from Hrothgar's hall to his cave to the dragon under the sea and back. He is probably insane. He also has a very strange relationship with his mother.

At any rate, Grendel is a book clearly meant to be Gotten, but which I did not Get. The chapter where Grendel speaks to the dragon, and where the dragon blabbers on about something that I'm sure is significant, I didn't understand (I barely read it). When Gardner did funny things to sentence structure and text formatting, my eyes glazed over. When Grendel engaged in bizarre soliloquies about--well, I don't really remember--I stopped paying attention. I basically just opened my eyes for the good bits--Grendel stuck in the tree, Grendel's apple-throwing fight, and then his last, bloody battle with Beowulf, the fascist hero-fanatic.

If I had to make a guess, I would say that Grendel is concerned, first, with Grendel's struggle over his own identity (man or beast, child or adult, etc.); second, with the power of poetry/fiction and the illusive greatness of dreams and myths (the Shaper's tales, the bards' songs, Grendel's struggle over whether to lose himself to the beauty that he knows to be false or resign himself to the ugliness that he knows is reality); and third, with the rise of man and what that signifies, particularly in the form of Beowulf, who ends up being more frightening than Grendel himself.

I think somebody who has read the original Beowulf and who is more well versed in modern literature would find Grendel much more exciting than I did. (The newspapers quoted on the back cover certainly couldn't find enough good things to say about it.) But I didn't think it was such hot stuff.