Gods R Us

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips is in many ways a refreshing indicator of the extent to which fantasy has been embraced by the mainstream. Far more so than science fiction, of course, because if you set out to depict spaceships in space, aliens in an alien landscape/society, or attempt include any kind of science or substantive, complex plot, you are moving towards 'cult', 'niche' and other more marginal frontiers where fewer members of the general public are inclined to boldly go. I'm not sure what it says about us that, as atheism achieves new heights of popularity, courtesy of the likes of Richard Dawkins, we're more widely accepting of gods and magic in our books and movies - especially in a comfortably contemporary setting - than we are of science in our fiction.
Turns out, I'm guilty of this myself, having emerged from Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull with the feeling that extraterrestrials were somehow less credible than the good old angels of death spilling forth from the Ark of the Covenant in the original. Which is just plain weird.
It's probably why Doctor Who, for all that it trots out aliens by the gross, so scrupulously avoids anything too much like intelligent science fiction.
However, I'm not one of these grouches who considers anything populist to be automatically bad and for all its lightness, there is plenty of wit and intelligence on display in Gods Behaving Badly. It's a funny, breezy read and - apart from the fact that I had the idea first, of course ;) - highly original. And it sells us on the fantasy in no time at all, slotting the Greek gods very easily into contemporary roles. In truth, in reviewing Marie Phillips' book, I have to take special care to remain objective, because almost as much as with Doctor Who, I find myself plagued with the "I would have done it this way" virus. But the fact is, central conceit and setting aside, Marie has crafted something quite different to the titularly identical version I might have written. Whereas - if my sample scenes for the competition were anything to go by - I might have gone with the more outrageous Young Ones style humour, what you get here is more rom-com than sit-com, with a touch of the Four Weddings And A Funeral about it, although she sensibly trims it down to one of each (kind of). Although it lacks the emotional weight of that film - which, for me, always lay in John Hannah's eulogy for Simon Callow and Kristin Scott Thomas' unrequited (if inexplicable) love for Hugh Grant. To be fair, the passages concerning hero Neil's devastation at the loss of the girl he loves, are well-written and genuinely moving, but they are somewhat undermined by the fantasy element, in that we know he's going to venture down to the underworld and get her back, and it leaves little lasting impression by the end of the book.
It's the mortals though - Neil and Alice, hero and heroine - who are the best-drawn characters in the novel. Most of the gods themselves come across as little more than sketches, drawn from their ancient mythology templates. And it's a shame that Athena is sidelined as a not all that comical laughing stock in order to make the plot work. Because the gods' circumstances rely rather too heavily on them not twigging to something that should have been staring them in the face for a few thousand years, and when one of them is the goddess of wisdom (amongst other things) she's altogether too likely to have it figured out. The answer supplied by the book is to make Athena a poor communicator, but I fear it might have been a more successful ploy if her dialogue had been styled after that of Babylon 5's Ambassador Kosh - rendering her an impenetrable mystic, instead of some sort of idiot savant.
There are other areas which might have benefited from a science fiction background, at least a portrayal of a sunless Earth more informed by a reading of Larry Niven's excellent Inconstant Moon. And there's what seems to be a hiccup in the internal logic, where hero Neil is still able to see heroine Alice after his return from the spirit world, when she remains invisible to everyone else among the living. Might have been a nice extra touch to have her vanish from Neil's sight for a while, as he is returned to his body.
But these are minor gripes, doubtless born of my sci-fi bias, that really take nothing away from a read that, despite an unusual special significance for yours truly, was good, unabashed fun, plucked from the mainstream shelves of WH Smith where I'm less apt to browse than, say, the science fiction/fantasy shelves just around the corner. (Although, as I say, maybe the fantasy books should be slowly creeping around into mainstream, they're still for the time being kind enough to keep the science fiction company.) And I might even be tempted to pick up the sequel when it appears, which it surely will.
Meanwhile, I'm going to add Marie's blog to my list of links here, because it turns out she's also 'one of us'. Besides being an author - and author's blogs are inherently interesting, no? ;) - she blogs her views on the latest Doctor Who episodes, Eurovision and the like. And she acknowledges the disappointment that was The Doctor's Daughter. Clearly, someone worth trading views with.