In June of this year, ‘American Gods’ turned ten years old, but it is ageless and tirelessly appropriate for our modern world. What could be more poignant today than a story that holds itself up as a light to our innermost thoughts and fears about religion and faith, our gods and our idols?
Gaiman’s novel does just that.
The main protagonist of the story is Shadow. Just as he is to be released from prison he finds that his wife, and his only thought for his entire sentence, was not only cheating on him with his best friend, but that both have been killed in a car accident. Lost in an existential crisis and alone in a world that has left him behind, Shadow grudgingly accepts a job as a bodyguard for “Mr. Wednesday”, a glass-eyed conman who may be more than he seems.
Accompanying Mr. Wednesday (who is really the Norse god Odin Allfather) across the United States, Shadow learns that the Old Gods are real, and not really gone but clearly forgotten. Mr. Wednesday, who is gathering the Old Gods together, is getting ready to wage a war against the New Gods, represented by internet, mass media and modern technology.
Woven into the book are a series of vignettes which figure heavily with mythological creatures and early American beliefs, giving a well researched look at the history of our most sacred superstitions and myths. American Gods tells the story of human obsession with mythology; our idols and heroes, our martyrs and saints.
Gaiman’s deities are well constructed and each in their own way is unsympathetically god-like. Cold and remote, interested in their own affairs more than the plight of humanity, the gods seek only to establish or, in the case of the Old Gods, reestablish their rule over the worlds. They will stop at nothing, even using humans as pawns.
Shadow is a modern lost soul, like John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’ from ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’. While surprised to find that the gods are both real and powerful, his cynicism often carries him when his faculty for faith fails. His experience also eloquently illustrates our own dilemmas with a lack of evidence for belief, questions about faith versus religion and our personal cynicism toward the beliefs and superstitions of our forebears.
In the novel, America is a character unto itself, as well. Strewn with the remnants of old faiths carried here by early settlers and later discarded in the light of the New Gods, the country is dark and gritty, steel hard and forbidding. As Wednesday and Shadow move across the desolate landscape, one is reminded of Virgil and Dante as they quest through the underworld of Hades in ‘The Inferno’.
American Gods is richly humorous; weird, fantastic in some sections and down-to-earth much like our own myths. The story is unfaltering in its look at our mythologies; amazingly sympathetic of all faiths, the novel is both diverting and challenging. American Gods is a modern faerie tale; it is also a fable with a very strong moral. What we believe shapes not only our own lives, but also the face of our nation. Spanning the country and its history, it is illuminating, well researched and terrifically entertaining.
A war between the gods is coming. On which side will you stand?
Even ten years later, it’s one for the ‘must read’ pile.
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