The Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson review: 'gives the Norse myths a feminist tweak'

For a start, not only does it take in all three worlds I mentioned at the start, but it also gives the Norse myths a feminist tweak somewhat akin to Madeleine Miller and Pat Barker’s reimagining of the Odyssey. More audaciously still, it tells the story of the clash of the gods not via one of their human contemporaries from the golden age of heroes but through Helen Firth, a singleton Surrey librarian in her fifties with a terminal cancer diagnosis.

Helen isn’t particularly heroic, but she is thrawn enough to shrug off the oncologist’s recommendations. If she’s going to die, she reasons, it might as well be in Orkney, where she spent her childhood, even though it was blighted by the suicide of her charismatic but unpredictable father, a failed writer obsessed by the Vikings.

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In the icy wastes of Utgard, there is another Hel - the goddess of death. The daughter of shapeshifting god Loki, she is summoned to Asgard because Odin has seen a vision of the future in which his reign ends at the hands of Loki’s offspring. So Hel’s wolf brother and serpent sister are mercilessly dealt with and Hel herself is cast out to rule in the icy prison of Niflheim, where all those who don’t die a glorious death in battle - and who are hence beneath contempt - shiver away for eternity.

Once all of this has been established, we switch back to Midgard (Earth) - specifically, Orkney. Helen, we are told, had always been fascinated by the Norse legends. Looking back 40 years, she recalls reading about them in the local library, where she shrugged off the attentions of Thorfinn, a local lad who had a crush on her. Many writers might have left the story like that: a light dusting of Viking metaphysics, an elegiac remembrance of teenagerdom and some sad musings on mortality.

But Magnusson aims higher. Steeped in Norse legends from her own childhood, she wants to do them justice by getting inside the minds of both Helen and Hel - human and god alike. In Hel’s case, that means not just giving her feelings, but nuanced feelings and new ones too – like compassion.

Gods and men meet (though the humans are unaware of it) in the unlikely setting of a bereavement group Thorfinn runs at Stromness library. This is risky, high-wire stuff, hard to make plausible, but Magnusson just about gets away with it, even though the possibility of Helen finding love again at the same time as she is approaching death, means there is a serious danger of plot overload.

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Against that, the novel has many compelling virtues. Helen, we are told, could lose herself in books about the Viking world, and her father had always taught her the importance of empathy with people from the pre-Christian past in places like Maeshowe. That is mirrored in the imaginative verve of Magnusson's writing, which becomes genuinely thrilling with the arrival on Orkney of another god - one who can take any human form he wants - determined to thwart Hel’s plans.

Towards the end of the book, Thorfinn wonders: “What if there were to be a meeting of worlds in this thin island of ours? What if myth could be made manifest? It would look like this, wouldn’t it?”

Personally, I would have put that quote on the book’s cover. Because the answer, when you have finished it, is a resounding “Yes.”

The Shapeshifter’s Daughter, by Sally Magnusson, John Murray, £16.99

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