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GRENDEL by John Gardner. 174 pages. Knopf...
...Beowulf in Hrothgar's meadhall can now relax. It hurts like the devil. "I bawl like a baby. I am slick with blood," cries Grendel in this splendid fiend's-eye view of an Anglo-Saxon epic. "My heart booms with terror." Yet as Novelist John Gardner retells the story, much of Grendel's pain is pure philosophical chagrin...
...originally shaped Beowulf around the monster and the Geatish champion was busy trying to blend heroism and history, pagan myth and Christian message. He had no time to empathize with the devil's henchman. So Beowulf's Grendel is beastly, God-cursed, a conventional scourge to man. Gardner's Grendel may look like a lump of earth with a hairy pelt, but (conveniently, yet convincingly) he throbs with primal rage, despair, collegiate idealism and existential inquiry. Gardner has also given him a gnawing sense of humor. "I have eaten several priests," Grendel reports. "They...
...that one of the races was saved, the other cursed. Yet . . . it came to me with a fierce jolt that I wanted it, yes! Even if I must be the outcast, cursed by the rules of his hideous fable." Grendel soon casts off this grim, comforting illusion. Thereafter John Gardner's own fable, by turns grisly, comic and curiously touching, follows Grendel's twelve-yearlong crusade against the Danes-to force them into seeing "the mindless, mechanical brutishness of things...
...Gardner's book gives ample scope to the view that man is more naturally kin to Cain than Abel. Yet it is closer to a more entertaining tradition-the literary monster made real because he has been made so human. Variously and happily, Grendel suggests Caliban, grumping around Prospero's island like the first exploited colonial, Milton's Lucifer, that voluble, self-righteous rebel simmering eternally on a lake of fire, even King Kong on the Empire State Building, bemusedly plucking at those 30-cal. holes in his furry chest...