by Neil Gaiman
p. 2001
American
Gods is a book I’d been meaning to read for quite some time, penned by Neil
Gaiman, whose specialty—I’ve gathered, now that I’m three books in—is taking
old school fantasy and mythology and transplanting it into a contemporary
setting. With Neverwhere, it was
magic and mysticism. With Good Omens
it was angels and demons and Horsemen of the Apocalypse. With American Gods, it’s the gods and myths
of various cultures. In all three, there is a recurring theme of these legends
struggling to fit into a world that has no place for them anymore.
American
Gods is so thick and layered that it would be impossible to cover every
detail in a few paragraphs. The gist of the story is that a young man named
Shadow is released from jail following the death of his wife and finds himself
falling in with a mysterious conman named Mr. Wednesday and his strange and
quirky associates. Wednesday employs Shadow as a bodyguard and reveals himself,
in time, to be the modern American reincarnation of Odin, the Norse god. In this
story, the power of the gods is determined by how strongly people believe in
them. Some, like Wednesday and his colleagues, are Americanized incarnations of
the old gods, brought over from other continents in the old days, and their
power has diminished as they get farther away from their origins. Others are
new American gods, created and molded by a society whose values have moved on
to other things—such as technology and drugs. Both factions are in a sort of
cold war which Wednesday believes to be heating up; he has dedicated himself to
rallying the troops accordingly for the coming battle, and Shadow finds himself
caught in the middle of it all.
That only begins to describe
everything that is going on in this heady book. There are tons of vignettes and
side stories, some depicting various gods and their histories traveling to the
Americas, some about Shadow’s dead wife, resurrected with a magic trick and
dedicated to protecting her husband in exchange for a return to the living, and
the longest subplot: Shadow’s time hidden away by Wednesday in a small town
called Lakeside, where he bonds with the locals. It seems strange that in a book
about gods and goddesses and mysterious men in black and the undead that one of
the most compelling parts would be Shadow’s attempts at domestication in small
town USA and yet, when Shadow is inevitably outed and exiled from the modest
life he has created for himself, it is somehow the most heartbreaking part of
the story—even more than Wednesday’s ‘death’ just prior.
I was a little disappointed by American Gods, perhaps because the hype
exceeded the depth of the material. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the
story, but I also found it a little boring at times, and I think the climax of
the book was a bit of a letdown. What prompted me to finally plunge into
Gaiman’s book was hearing that it was soon to be developed into a miniseries
for cable. Upon reading it, I can see now that that is really the only way it
can be translated to screen. A movie wouldn’t begin to cover it all, not even
if it were split up into a trilogy, because (as we learned with The Hobbit) there is no logical stopping
point for each film. In this golden age of matured television programming, a
miniseries would be best, and then only for cable, where the subject matter can
be explored on American screens without the restraint of network censorship.
I’ll look forward to seeing how the material plays out and may have to check
out Gaiman’s other stories set in this same universe.
