Word: odin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Mysteries and Science Fiction THE LONG TWILIGHT by Keith Laumer. 222 pages. Pufnam. $4.95. Sci-fi explanation of Thor, Odin, Loki and a few other figures from Norse mythology as the ageless earth agents of some intergalactic villains...
Television does not suggest this. It gives us Eric Sevaried, that sallow Odin, reading one hundred sensible words as insurance against controversy, never mentioning that Chicago, or the capture of Hill 881 was an unconscionable waste of life. It gives us commercials of flagellating concupiscence so that, after twenty years of them, we begin to view the whole world as a commodity, the uncommitted and benighted as the greatest consumer product. As it crowds more harrowing specials into the week, we turn away with less and less hesitation. It is possible that if Jesus Christ had spoken only on television...
...Odin's foreskin!, as the author says. What isn't in this belly-gutting, god-rotting typhoon of a book? In his bestselling first novel King Rat, James Clavell may have been only clearing his throat for this one, which seems every bit as long as it is. Its narrative pace is numbing, its style is deafening, its language penny dreadful. All the characters whirl like dervishes, especially Dirk Struan, a kind of Scottish superman who can borrow $5,000,000 in silver ingots from an Oriental tycoon, invent binoculars, and corner the world supply of cinchona bark...
Ultimately, of course, the violence of the Reich (its anti-semitism, its insane Odin-ism, its rigidly-controlled economic life are all "violent" in this sense) found its foreign policy equivalent in a war against the whole world. But Taylor rightly treats the period prior to 1939 in terms appropriate to diplomatic history...
...does so in a relaxed and skillfully developed study of a man who is made understandable. But throughout Virgin Spring, obsession is the key character trait. Ingeri, the slut who, in envy of the girl, casts the spel! that precedes her rape and death, excuses the murdrers by saying Odin has possessed them. The parallel to the householder's mindless slaughter of the murderers and blind dragging of his followers back to the scene of his daughter's death, is surely intentional. Obsession and tension make compelling viewing; they do not make persuasive or perceptive art. Bergman wanders instead into...