XIX - American Gods

'When the people came to America they brought us with them. They brought me, and Loki and Thor, Anansi and the Lion-God, Leprechauns and Cluracans and Banshees, Kubera and Frau Holle and Ashtaroth, and they brought you. We rode here in their minds, and we took root. We travelled with the settlers to the new lands across the ocean.
'The Land is vast. Soon enough our people abandoned us, remembered us only as creatures of the old land, as things that had not come with them to the new. Our true believers passed on, or stopped believing, and we were left, lost and scared and dispossessed, to get by on what little smidgens of worship or belief we could find. And to get by as best we could.
'So that's what we've done, gotten by, out on the edges of things, where no one was watching us too closely.
'We have, let us face it and admit it, little influence. We prey on them, and we take from them, and we get by; we strip and we whore and we drink too much; we pump gas and we steal and we cheat and we exist in the cracks at the edge of society. Old gods, here in this new land without gods.
'Now, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover for yourselves, there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance.
'They are aware of us, and they fear us, and they hate us,' said Odin. 'You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise. They will destroy us, if they can. It is time for us to band together. It is time for us to act.'

I love a good yarn. Give me all the fruity language and clever prose you want, but without a good story behind it it's all rather empty. Just look at the last blog post for an example of technique with no substance. I grew up obsessing and adoring folk tales and mythology - the Iliad, the golden fleece, aesops fables, arabian nights, grimms fairy tales, the list goes on. These books were full of what Joseph Campbell would call the 'Hero with a Thousand Faces' the everyman hero that would appear in limitless guises across the globe, from Oddysseus, to Jack of Fables, to Jesus Christ. Their commonalities being a hero the reader, or listener, could get behind and root for, a character that almost appealed to their own subconscious sensibilities about themselves. Neil Gaiman's American Gods is deeply immersed in this world of mythos and fantasy, but like most of his superb output, is set in a world much more familiar to our own. Gaiman is perhaps best know for his Sandman comic book series, arguably the best adult comic ever made (certainly superior to Watchmen in my humble position) and a precursor to the creation of DC's Vertigo imprint.

American Gods follows an ex-con called Shadow, from his penitentiary cell to a chance encounter with a mysterious figure called Mr.Wednesday, through 635 pages of travel around the forgotten places of America. Along the way he meets the forgotten gods of the old world now hired muscle, loneley apartment dwellers, and petty crooks and conmen. They languish in the recesses of the world's mind, swept aside by the fickle memories of mankind, now embracing the new gods of technology and commerce. The old gods have not yet given up though, and with the help of Shadow seek to wage a final confrontation with the new gods of the USA. The characters alone in American Gods make it worth the reading, from an Ifrit taxi driver, to a 6-foot tall hard drinking leprechaun, to a teenage god of technology who smokes cables. By far my favourite however was Czernobog, a hammer-wielding giant of a man, who acts as Shadow's dutiful protector based on the promise that he can one day smash out Shadow's brain with his hammer. The conversations between the two characters are superb, and have the sort of fairytale logic that really takes you into another place. Here's a beautiful example of an exchange between himself and Mr.Town, one of the new gods.

Town said, 'Whatever. You could save yourselves a lot of time and effort by going back to your homes and shooting yourselves in the heads. Cut out the middle man.'
'Fuck you,' said Czernobog. 'Fuck you and fuck your mother and fuck the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. You will not even die in battle. No warrior will taste your blood. No one alive will take your life. You will die a soft, poor death. You will die with a kiss on your lips and a lie in your heart.'

Gaiman's book is literally bursting with ideas and little plot movements and shifts. Though long, it's by no means a challenging read, and it whizzes along at such a pace it's really a dissappointment to arrive at the end. Many times the wider world can be quite off-hand about Fantasy/SF books, seeing them as an inferior model of prose. In some instances I can agree, a lot of the pulp SF, though entertaining, don't exactly fire off all cylinders. Novels like American Gods can demonstrate quite capably though that you can have your cake and eat it, there are plenty of beautifully written passages amongst all the chaos of the day. The story is rich and driven, the characters are fully fleshed out, and the book is an absolute joy to read. May it become a future HBO series.