The Testament of Loki, Joanne M. Harris’s second novel narrated by the titular trickster god, is an interesting sequel, because it feels both wholly different and right in line with its predecessor, The Gospel of Loki. Both are written in the charming voice of the venal, vain blood brother of the Norse gods, but where The Gospel of Loki takes place in something like a mythic space, in the world of the Aesir and their petty, godly, familial squabbles, The Testament of Loki relocates the self-serving members of the Norse pantheon to modern day England. Oh, and the gods in question are all sharing bodies with teenagers, mostly, riding along as psychic hitchhikers. Won’t this go well!


The Testament of Loki
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This book is so much fun to read. It’s something like a dramatic monologue blended with a farce blended with serious mythological business, but the kind of “srs mythological bizness” that isn’t spelled correctly. While it isn’t a young adult novel (though it could be read by a young adult, no question), in tone it exists somewhere between its predecessor, which deals semi-seriously with the end of the world, and Harris’s Norse-informed young adult novel Runemarks, which she published about a decade ago (and considers nominally a part of a series with Testament and Gospel.)

The first book is a ripping good time largely due to Loki’s narrative dissembling. While it doesn’t hew exactly to the Norse lore laid out in the Poetic Eddas, it’s got as its narrator a trickster god, not damaged so much as damaging. (Though if you ask him, nothing is ever his fault.) But it is a gospel, so there’s a twist on this pre-Christian lore. The novel plays with the strange future-past tense of prophesy, the stories of apocalypse one can find in many mythic systems that detail events that have not, but will inevitably, come to pass.

Testament picks up after Ragnarok has gone down, after the prophetic future becomes the mythic past. We’ve moved from prophesy into the strange, dislocated afterlife of the Aesir, where they muddle on in one of the nine realms detailed in their epistemology. Loki hasn’t been assigned to Hell (which might not be that bad anyway, because he would know how to work the system, and Hell’s minders, at least one of whom is his child). Instead, he’s stuck in Chaos, a boring, howling void, the kind of place where no trickster god can work his tricks. Loki engineers a scheme to piggyback out of Chaos and into the dreams of a young woman in England called Jumps, dream being the river that flows through all nine realms.


The Gospel of Loki
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Jumps has a pretty serious crush on the Thor of comics, games, and movies, who looks strikingly like Chris Hemsworth (though no one dares speak his name.) As such, her dreams are filled with Thor and all of the Aesir, at least partially at the behest of her one-eyed best friend, who pushes the dopey yet playable game Asgard!—exclamation point obligatory—into her hands, and from there, into her dreams. But wait, don’t we know someone in the Norse pantheon who has one eye? And likes to engineer happenstance in a way that seems like an accident? And also likes to jerk Loki around?

Loki soon finds Odin, the Allfather, also piggybacking, hitching a ride in Jumps’ best friend, just as Loki’s set up shop in Jumps. According to Loki, Odin is the literal, actual, and uncontested worst. Ugh, why must he even?

The interactions of these interloping Aesir and their teenage hosts are funny indeed, though not everything is hijinks and banter: Jumps and her best friend have real and intractable problems, none of which are helped by the bickering Norse gods who have made homes in their minds, and sometimes their bodies, and sometimes the bodies of their dogs. As Loki and Odin work to rescue their fellow gods from the drear afterlife, Jumps and her friends just try to get by, like teenagers have always and ever done. Harris cuts myth with the everyday, cuts it like a drug, and the hit is hard.