I prepared to be disappointed by Gods Behaving Badly. After all, I was instantly intrigued by the premise, I enjoy Marie Phillips’ ‘Struggling Author’ blog – that’s why I put the book on my must-buy list in the first place – and on top of this there has been quite a bit of hype about the book in the media. That’s usually a recipe for a complete let-down.
But this time, it wasn’t. I opened the book in poor health and a glum mood, grinned and laughed my way through the story, and finally closed it, not having noticed it was almost dawn then, with a sigh of (almost complete) satisfaction.
So: the Greek pantheon are living in London these days – since the Great Fire, in fact: real estate was cheap back then – and their powers are waning. Artemis works as a professional dog-walker, Aphrodite has her own telephone sex line, Dionysus owns a nightclub, and Apollo tries his hand (in a hilarious episode) as a TV psychic. Zeus is senile by now and Athena, the only one who has any idea as to strategy, doesn’t get her point across to the other gods – she bombards them with memos on ‘the implementation of organised religion-based solutions within the crowded multi-faith context’ and, as the goddess of wisdom, expects the others to be able to understand her jargon. Things can only go from bad to worse, it seems.
These being Greek gods, they squabble and scheme amongst themselves, and in a fit of pique the deliciously bitchy Aphrodite convinces her son Eros (nowadays dabbling in Christianity) to make Apollo fall in love with a shy cleaner called Alice, who only has eyes for Neil, her geeky almost-boyfriend (they’re both too shy to make any progress beyond accidentally brushing against each other). Apollo’s passion brings on a near-apocalypse and the whole thing climaxes in a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
The humour is dry, often absurd, sometimes raunchy – though nowhere near so much as I’d expected from reading some reviews – but there is a great deal of sweetness in the story too, courtesy of Alice and Neil. The characters all sparkle, the gods especially, my favourite being the bad-boy Apollo who’s so self-centred it’s almost endearing. (Or might be, if he weren’t a would-be rapist, that is.) I can’t choose any particular passage as an example of the humour, but go here for an interview of Marie Phillips, and at the end of the article there’s an extract of the first chapter – which is representative of the rest of the book, so if you’re grabbed by it you should like the whole thing.
All that said, the ending felt very rushed to me – I think the novel could easily have done with a fifty pages more, and the trip to the Underworld had potential for more than it actually delivered. (Also, I felt the cutesy epilogue added little to the book – but it may be just me being overly curmudgeonly . . . and having a stomach flu.) The first half was so strong that the second half was perhaps bound to be a bit of a disappointment, but it was still pure entertainment.
Final Verdict: A cracking good read – nothing more, nothing less. Lots of laughs and a good plot too. Read it on a gloomy day: as a mood-lifter, it’s better than chocolate!
Jonathan Cape, 2007, 208 pp., hardback, ISBN: 0224081314
(Originally posted 14 September 2007.)
