Headline Review American Gods

A great book.

We've had the USA shoved up our noses a great deal for the past four years, and the end of 2020 is a nightmare. However even though it was written nearly 20 years ago the novel American Gods is a perfect companion through these times in that it reminds you that the madness started elsewhere, mostly in Europe but everywhere else as well. Gaiman won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards with this novel; the version about which you are reading is Gaiman's own preferred publication and well worth the purchase for the hours of brilliant delight and mystery (and even horror) it will provide.Basically… The culture of the USA abounds with gods, practices, beliefs and fears that arrived with the humans that have settled there for thousands of years… and those gods still survive in the 21st century, although now at war with the new gods of Media, Technology and the digital age.The book might beautifully paired as a gift (especially to yourself) with seasons 1 and 2 of the TV series of the same name. Plus Season 3, when it's finally released. And a copy of a kindred volume, Anansi Boys.

In American Gods, traditions linger and refuse to fade, gods are spawned by the handed-down thoughts of immigrants, and belief and reality are one and the same thing. This is a novel about the soul of America, and the heart of the modern world, with maybe just a tad of how our past shaped us, all told through a cast of characters that's as offbeat and well developed as it is numerous.Gaiman's themes here are weighty, and they could drag off and drown your average narrative with their importance. Gaiman doesn't even try to fight this; he lets the book be tossed to and fro, gyrating wildly and leaping off into tangents in order to explore part after part of his post-mythology mythos. As such, though the story is interesting on its own, and the character's usually well drawn, this is more a novel about America and its synthesis than it is about anything else.The gods were brought here by the immigrants (the Irish leprechaun upon ships during the days of famine; the pixies and their ilk from English prisoners; Odin from exploratory and bloodthirsty Viking longboats; the Egyptian pantheon of Anubis, Thoth, Horus, Bast settling in New Egypt; Anansi from - well, you get the idea) but things have changed, and, in the process of acclimatization, the believers became American, and the gods were cut loose. Now, as time moves on, their belief and traditions are fading fast towards zero, and the old deities are desperate to not simply drop out of existence.Now, in this new world, the actual facets of the gods' being are no longer important, the funeral director gods of death are as on the verge as a New York City djinn, and all that still matters is where they came from and whether they still exist at all:"'I have a brother. They say, you put us together, we are like one person, you know? When we are young, his hair, it is very blonde, very light, his eyes are blue, and people say, he is the good one. And my hair is very dark, darker than yours even, and people say I am the rogue, you know? I am the bad one. And now time passes, and my hair is gray. His hair, too, I think is gray. And you look at us, you would not know what was light and who was dark.'" (p. 79)Simplification is not the only change brought on by the passage of years. The majority of Gods in the book fall into one of two pathways. The first try - in vain? - to recreate the glory days, always striving to remember. The world, however, has moved on, and their attempts frequently become depressingly comical, as they try to assert their dominance over a world that has forgotten them, such as Eoster, trying to claim that she's still beloved due to the name of the holiday. In many cases, being the American incarnation of these gods, they don't even have a period of power to look back upon, such as Czernobog who cannot even contemplate his days as a dark god anymore and is able to do nothing else but dream about his years in a slaughterhouse.The other potential path is a darker one still, and it is one that we are introduced to at the end of the very first chapter: the perversion of everything that the god once held holy. The Queen of Sheba has become a prostitute. Even that, however, is not far enough. In a twisted incarnation of her need for belief, she forcers her forces her lovers to worship her and sexually devours them for sustenance. Her words hold true for her and for the array of similarly striving gods we glimpse in the narrative: "There is nothing holy in [my] profession. Not anymore." (p. 373)But is the decline of the gods really such a bad thing? In one part of the story, we see a funeral home run by the Egyptian gods of death. They provide a more personal touch, a send off by something with more of a soul than the mechanical filling of orders provided by a big funeral company. In another subplot, we get to see a community still run and safeguarded by a supernatural being. The community's exterior is enticing and gleaming, which hides the sacrifice needed to maintain it.Is such a thing worth it for a more ordered world? Has our modern world of machines and computers destroyed wonder and human contact? It's impossible to truly a question like that, and Gaiman doesn't. American Gods is not a narrative of answers, but rather a tapestry of questions. You will never get a definitive answer of how the gods interact with mortals; you will never know whether the old gods were right to fight for their survival; you will never know whether the gods will one day be gone completely. But you don't need to know. In American Gods, Gaiman asks the questions, and I think that every reader will have their own answers.The sprawling nature of the themes, and the narration's tendency to leap after them wherever they may go, leads to an incredibly meandering text. Our main character Shadow, who is roped into the conflict as the assistant to Mr. Wednesday only hours after leaving prison. While it seems, at first, that the two are working towards a definite goal, Shadow is soon sent off to location after location without any discernible rhyme or reason.Further complicating matters - if you're a fan of anything even approaching linier plots - are the interludes, taken from the modern incarnation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. These stories feature brand new characters, often separated from the main narrative by spans of decades, living their lives and either interacting with or contributing to the nature of the various scattered American deities.Somehow, Gaiman pulls all of this off. The trick is, I think, his intuitive grasp of character. He only need mention a name and spout a few lines of dialogue and, poof, a fully grown man appears on the stage. Each interlude feels complete enough to form its own text, and each adds to the main narrative in immeasurable ways.And yet, this grasp of character is not applied to one character. Shadow, whose eyes we spend the vast majority of the book looking out of, is told:'You're not dead'" she said. 'But I'm not sure that you're alive, either. Not really.'[...]'I love you,' she said dispassionately. 'You're my puppy. But [...] You're like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the world.' She frowned. 'Even when we were together. I love being with you. You adored me, and you would do anything for me. But sometimes I'd go into a room and I wouldn't think there was anybody in there. And I'd turn the lights on, or I'd turn the lights off, and I'd realize that you were in there, sitting on your own, not reading, not watching TV, not doing anything.'" (p. 370-371)After his release from prison, and the death of his wife, Shadow retreats into himself, and it is rare for the reader to get a glimpse inside. This leads to a good portion of the book feeling aimless, as we're cast about in Shadow's wake, without him even knowing - or caring - where he's going. The reader that is willing to follow will eventually come to realize that Shadow's recalcitrance is not shallowness, but, in order to get to that point, you need to be willing to follow Gaiman on all of his digressions.On the subject of the book's prose, Gaiman says in the included interview: "I wanted to write American Gods in what I thought of as an American style - clean, simple, uncluttered - and push the narrator further into the background than I had in previous books. But the narrator crept out in the "coming to America" chapters, where I got to play with a wider set of voices." (p. 596)It's true that the writing is more subdued than it is in Neverwhere or Anansi Boys, the plot less self aware. But this is still a Gaiman novel, and it's still filled with the delicious idiosyncrasies of language that characterize all of the man's writing. There are sections here that are jaw dropping in their grandeur, and there are sections that are laugh out loud funny, and both build with the other to create a wry and majestic experience, filled with larger than life characters who are anything but above sarcasm.American Gods looks like a simple read on the surface. Underneath, you soon come to realize the depth that is packed into every scene and every single glance. This is a book that is impossible to really predict, so come to it and get ready to be swept along. While occasionally directionless, American Gods is simply something that needs to be experienced. This is not the most entertaining book that I've read of Gaiman, but it is undoubtedly the best.

I really liked this book but still contemplated putting it down a time or two. The story is sublime, the histories and myths are interwoven beautifully and that makes it a captivating and interesting novel to read. However, the female characters were definitely written with the male gaze, they're simplified often and appear as something parallel to the manic pixy dream girl, if she had to fight for her life, or was already dead, or was also a Goddess. I didn't realise what an excellent job the TV series had done in developing the character arcs of the women in the novel. I decided to push past this because it's incredible fiction in every other respect, but if that's something that would bug you beyond reprieve, then I wouldn't bother with this book.

Forever in pursuit of beautiful editions, I could not resist getting my hands on the latest special editions of the Neil Gaiman American Gods quartet. And boy, are they pretty? In the finest Neil Gaiman tradition, the jacket illustrations are compelling and eye-catching to say the least. The illustrations inside are dark and minimalist, and maybe 'pretty', which normally brings to mind something airy, light and possibly pink, is not the correct term for them. In the introduction, the author mentions that the publishers sent along readers' copies along with the special edition so that people won't soil the beautiful, white covers on the originals. What?! Who thinks like that - except Americans, of course. I myself had to remove the white dust jacket before reading the hefty volume of American Gods or it certainly wouldn't have survived even the first reading.This edition of American Gods is huge! In the introduction, Neil Gaiman mentions that he put in all the parts that were edited out by his first publisher in the previous editions because you know it was after all a labour of love and he wanted to see the complete book for once. Well, I understood where his editor was coming from when I read this book and completely agreed that there were quite a few parts, sometimes entire chapters, that could have been easily removed without harming the overall telling of the tale. Like the chapter on Nunyuninni and the journal entry by the Egyptian God Ibis. That is not to say that they were not as unexceptional as the rest of the book.This is the story of Shadow, a convict who is about to be released back into the world after serving a sentence for robbery, battery and assault. He keeps his head down, reads Herodotus' Histories and counts the days that will bring him home to his wife again. Unfortunately, two days before he is to be released, his wife dies in a car crash and his whole world goes upside down. What follows is a series of inexplicable and unbelievable events that seem to take over his life completely. Shadow, being the kind of man he is, simply accepts the lemons and the few prickly roses that life seems to be dishing out o him and keeps moving with the flow.  And strangely, I didnot question his not questioning all the bizarre things happening all around him. It seemed but natural that after the painful loss of his wife he will take a man who seems to know all about him and seems to appear out of apparently thin air as a matter of course. The concept of the book, that of Gods moving with devotees from one continent to another, and then feeling lost and abandoned as people move on and start forgetting their roots, is an absolutely genius concept. Why did nobody else ever thing of it? Everyone is forever talking about the Irish superstitions and so on in the old country but none ever anywhere else. And then the new Gods that are emerging, because what else is devotion but intense concentration and meditation on something. And nothing commands more concentration than the video games everyone is constantly playing nowadays. So, is it too far-fetched a concept that a new God could be the 'Internet'?Never being a fan of dark fiction, I nevertheless found myself unable to put this tome down before I had read it all. And it says something about the book when you find yourself willing to lug it around with a child on one hip in the hopes of finding a spare moment to finish another chapter. It is disturbing, there is an alarming level of violence in it and the sex is downright weird - and yet it one feels a compulsion to keep on reading to find out what comes next. Some of the chapters, like Mr Ibis' journal entry feels almost like a philosophical essay. And a joy to read for its contents. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, when I wasn't really prepared for it. I was horribly scared that my impulse buy would turn out to be a complete dud, but happily all's well that ends well. I have still to read the three other books of the quartet, but I needed a little break before I could attempt reading more about these sometimes vicious, sometimes sweet American Gods and their shenanigans.