Gaiman wrote a fantasy set in contemporary America. A man (Shadow) just out of prison finds that his wife and best friend have died, and now without either home or job prospects agrees to work for a mysterious man who calls himself Wednesday. Nope, this isn't a remake of The Man Who Was Thursday: Wednesday turns out to be Votan. It turns out that there are quite a few down-at-heels gods around, including some newcomers who are modern gods of the plane and of the TV and of the dot-coms and so forth. Votan foresees a war between the old and new, and is trying to organize the battle. Gaimon's gods live by sacrifices and belief (like Norton's original idea), and wherever the believers in some god traveled and continued to offer sacrifices, there the god wound up also. These gods are powerful and “immortal” but can be killed, and also fade away completely when all forms of worship vanish.
Shadow has a little trouble getting into the swing of things, so to speak, and his dead wife isn't making things easy for him either, though she doesn't stop by often. To describe much more gives away too many discoveries in the plot, but Shadow does start to figure things out and start making mysterious decisions on his own account.
Gaiman is a good writer. The story flows well, the characters seem realistic—up until the rather unconvincing climactic battle scenes. The Lakeside townspeople are a little over-the-top welcoming (a subplot that might better have been trimmed), and there's a bit too much irrelevant sex.
It is gratifying to find a writer who has bothered to look beyond the usual mythologies to the way the old cults were actually practiced. There's an amusing scene in which Wednesday interrogates a Californian self-proclaimed pagan, who of course knows nothing at all about worship. And Gaiman tries to be faithful to the characters of the mythological creatures as shown in both the Bullfinch mythologies and in the implications of their cults.
Willing suspension of disbelief only goes so far, though; and in Gaiman's America Jesus is less relevant than Horus. Even if (per Gaiman's setting) Jesus were merely one of these non-supernatural creatures, he'd still be far and away the most dominant of the gods, second only to the god of the TV.
For all his research Gaiman seems to have no feel for why people worship, or why places were associated with gods (which makes the buffalo-headed man's last comments rather silly). I suppose the story would have to be completely different if he brought that in.
Mostly well-written, but on balance I don't recommend it. From the number of Wisconsin references I gather he spent some time around here.
No comments:
Post a Comment