Sunday, September 16, 2001
Title: American Gods
Author: Neil Gaiman
Publisher: Headline Feature
Shadow is finishing off his three years in prison. Looking forward to getting out, being reunited with the wife he has missed so much and rebuilding his life after the foolish incident that put him here. As the time passes it seems to do so painfully slowly, but it comes too soon. Mere days before he is due to be released his wife is killed in a car crash and "compassionately" Shadow is released early. Heading back to the old town, things aren't going well, so when he meets a mysterious stranger it doesn't really make a lot of sense to him. But with his life turned around it's not long before he is convinced to take the job this Mr. Wednesday offers him. This is the beginning of the story as Shadow joins Wednesday in his preparations, meeting old immigrants who have been in America for a long time now and whose lives are fading. It becomes clear however that these people are American gods, where gods are created and maintained by belief. Brought to America with each influx of foreigners over the millennia these gods have been birthed and flourished as long as their was belief in them, with that gone it looks like their time may well be up.
As a writer Gaiman has always filled his work with references to legend, most obviously this gained him a cult status with his work on Sandman. With that I suspect it is fair to say that American Gods extends as much from Sandman as it does from his first novel Neverwhere. Legends of creatures and gods are woven into American Gods, taking from a multitude of cultures and allowing them to interact and clash. For the most part American Gods is delivered in a "straight-forward" fashion, Shadow is presented as a real person with a real life, and the complications that entails. To begin with the idea of gods is conveyed more as short bridge pieces between chapters, the "coming to America" sections being historical flashes of people coming to America for the first time or other sections where we witness "gods" reduced to ekeing out a poor existence as the likes of taxi drivers or prostitutes. As it continues the characters that Shadow and Wednesday encounter become more clearly what they are, but still they are made human with their concerns. With that as mystery increases Shadow remains our link to the action, even while it is suggested that there is something different about him and he is increasingly haunted by strange dreams.
While not especially a fan of the cult attention that Gaiman receives, or more accurately the Sandman product and the way it continues to be exploited by some, I do have a certain degree of respect for his writing ability. Having read Neverwhere before this and enjoying that as a novel it seemed likely that American Gods could have some potential. Which it does, meaning that I found it to be quite an enjoyable read and it kept me going for the couple of days it took me to work through it.
RVWR: PTR
September 2001
