Friday 31 December 2010

American Gods – Neil Gaiman


Neil Gaiman is one of “those” writers. You know what I mean – the ones who have the gift for story telling, who deliver you into wondrous worlds and burn characters and images onto your memory for decades. They are the authors who take you on what seems like an effortless journey, until you look back and see how your path had always been set, skilfully and painstakingly constructed from the moment you took the first step.

Neil Gaiman is one of “those” writers.

He has built up quite a legacy now (movies such as Coraline and Stardust included), yet I am still very new to his books. I consumed his critically acclaimed and extremely popular The Sandman comics and read his collaboration with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens. The latter is a novel, which questions what would happen if the son of the Devil were born on Earth, a la The Omen, and was accidentally brought up by a nice middle-class couple from Suburbia, instead of a powerful ambassador’s family.

However, I have been somewhat remiss about reading his novels. So let us get down to American Gods, set in the modern day United States of America.

When we meet Shadow, he is coming to end of his prison sentence. A few more days and he will be home to his devoted wife, back to a job set up by his best friend and back to real life.

A car crash changes everything and suddenly throws Shadow into a world that exists within and beneath the America of everyday humans. The mysterious Mr Wednesday quickly finds Shadow in the terrible aftermath and offers him a deal – act as Wednesday’s bodyguard, do his errands, perhaps keep his vigil and receive a hefty wage for it. Apparently, the old gods have set up shop in the U.S. and they need a hand. With little choice, a slightly numbed Shadow is soon dealing with ancient deities and mythical creatures struggling to find their way in this world as they march towards battle with the new, American gods.

I will resist going into too much detail. It is a book best read without any real clues, as it is beautiful to watch them delicately unfold as the plot continues.

And American Gods has quite a plot. The book covers many big ideas: the clash between old and new; humanity’s need for gods; the “personality” of America; the importance of death; the difference between existence and living…these are to name just a few. Gaiman handles them all with a deftness of hand, weaving them into Shadow’s story as well as into the book’s vignettes. These chapters, added sporadically, are like short stories. In them, you meet some of the old gods and discover their modern living situations in America. They range from the genie taxi driver, now frustrated and imprisoned in his yellow cab, to the fertility goddess scratching out an existence as a prostitute, whose passion literally consumes her clients.

Much as America has taken these old gods and given them life, so too does Gaiman, layering little details to make them believable in a modern world. Yet, the narrative never gets lost or tiresome. I found myself consuming this 600-plus page book within three or four days as I wanted to find out where Shadow’s journey would take him. It is a physical journey as well, one that stretches across the country and dips into pockets of surreal yet very familiar America. This is not a real America, however. As Gaiman explains in “Caveats, and Warning for Travellers”, he has drawn inspiration from landmarks, but taken certain “liberties” with them. In fact, half the fun of American Gods is trying to separate the real from the imagined.

The other half is working out who the gods are before Gaiman reveals their identities. I found myself pleased for guessing correctly at an early mention of a god’s name, but deducted geek points for not cracking Mr Wednesday sooner.

Like all Gaiman’s work, there is an edge of brutality within it. Anyone who has ever read The Sandman will be familiar by now with his ability to unsettle deeply (personally, I always found that part of the reason his ideas and words stay with you). However, that is not to say American Gods is only a disturbing book. It is a joyous and disturbing book. Gaiman’s work has always contained the idea that there is evil as well as good; however, the important thing to note is that nothing and no one is simply one or the other. In American Gods, there are atrocities and cruel acts, yet there are also moments of dark humour and genuinely tender acts of love and sacrifice.

Gaiman’s ability to acknowledge equally our darkness as well as our redeeming features makes his writing so interesting to read. If nothing else, you will come away from reading American Gods with a renewed agreement that there are no purely good or bad guys, no absolute rights or wrongs – humans and gods are, after all, far more complex than that.

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