2001 Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning modern fantasy. Shadow finishes
his time in prison… but learns that his wife has died just before he
was due to be released. He goes to work for Mr Wednesday, who's
gathering forces for a big fight…
Fair warning: many people loved this book, and it just didn't
grab me at all.
I think that that may be because it relies for its effect on giving
the reader Amazing New Ideas – what if gods rise and fall by the
amount of worship they get? What if the old gods came to America, and
what new gods would modern culture form? – and to me they weren't
particularly new. Diana Wynne Jones did gods walking among humanity in
Eight Days of Luke back in 1975; and the early successful books of
Tim Powers (I'm thinking particularly of The Anubis Gates, The
Drawing of the Dark and On Stranger Tides) handled the integration
of hidden fantastic elements into the mundane world, and the rise and
fall of gods. All that really needed to be said about the New Gods was
compressed (among many other things) into Pratchett and Gaiman's own
Good Omens. (And now I want to read those books again.) When Gaiman
hands the reader such "subtle" names as Mr Wednesday and Low-Key
Lyesmith, I at least find myself rolling my eyes; this book still has
the same good ideas, but they've been watered down for the mass
market, for people who want to think they're clever for spotting the
references.
After the setup establishes Shadow's situation (characterisation: he's
a big man), the book fragments into a picaresque series of
microstories, showing us how various gods have adapted to living in
America on minimal amounts of belief. (And yet, there's no mention of
the god that an actual majority of Americans claims to believe in.)
It's all supposed to be a bit trippy, but in fact it comes over as
strangely sober and un-fantastic: Anubis works as an undertaker, ho
ho. But the New Gods are just as self-interested as the Old Gods and I
never felt any degree of sympathy with anyone involved, which doesn't
help. People talk, and talk, and tell stories, and talk more. The
Great Big Climactic Resolution to all these wars and rumours of wars
consists of Shadow saying something that everyone already knew, or
could have guessed.
Gaiman has done a great job of creating a creepy and magical
atmosphere in other books, such as Neverwhere; here it doesn't come
off. All the same, I could forgive a lot more if the book weren't just
shy of 200,000 words.
Reread for Neil Bowers'
Hugo-Nebula Joint Winners Reread.
(Other nominees for the 2001 Best Novel award were Bujold's The Curse
of Chalion, which I loved and plan to re-read soon; Connie Willis's
Passage and Robert Charles Wilson's The Chronoliths, neither of
which I've read or even heard of; China Miéville's Perdido Street
Station, which almost everyone liked much better than I did; and Ken
MacLeod's Cosmonaut Keep, which I'm fairly sure I've read but which
left absolutely no impression on me.)
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