Review of Grendel by John Gardner

As a teen, I would amuse myself with the classic thought experiment of observing life on Earth through the eyes of fictional aliens. Undoubtedly this lead to my agnostic “beliefs”, but it likewise lead to a lifelong appreciation of viewpoints which examine life from abstract angles. Perhaps this is the attraction to John Gardner's Beowulf-inspired Grendel (1971).

Grendel is Beowulf through the eyes of the eponymous monster. It tells the tale in first-person, tracking the hairy beast's observations, feedings, and musings on the villages and tribes he terrorizes. His encounters with dragons and priests likewise come under the story's lens, all before the monster meets his known fate.

But the script is flipped in more ways than one. Rather than a paean to heroism, Grendel is an evisceration of human behavior, mundane to ethereal. Gardner takes the piss out of our social hierarchies, religions, and methods for blowing off steam—aka sex, murder, drunkenness, etc. It's an expose—a yin to Beowulf's yang, that not all is glory and honor and legacy.

Grendel's biggest success is that it never openly states any of the commentary I just ascribed to it. It's all written between the lines, lines that are predominantly occupied by a psychopath, but a psychopath who takes on his own strange form of humanity. For as bestial as Grendel may be, readers can nevertheless relate to it, malice to ennui.

But there are some challenges. Gardner's prose can bloom purple at times, from weak metaphors to run on sentences that, while poetic in nature, can overstay their welcome. Another challenge are the occasional monotonous monologues. As mentioned, Grendel encounters a dragon. The ensuing conversation (if it can be called that) turns into a multi-page exercise in existential navel-gazing—ahem, philosophizing on the nature of mortality that would have been more effective in a succinct set of paragraphs. It, like a couple other “dialogues” Grendel has, drags.

When the history of modern fantasy is eventually written, a footnote will be the retellings of myth. Many if not most retellings focus on the same story through the eyes of a secondary character—Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, Madeline Miller's Circe, etc, etc. And Grendel is no exception. But where it is an exception, at least compared to most contemporary retellings, is its deeper, more invasive examining. Where many such retellings switch perspectives to satisfy the “needs” of identity politics, Grendel is human to the core, no further agenda, and thus stands the best chance of still being read decades from now.