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Sitcom of the Gods Dec 16, 2007 (16 of 18 found this helpful)
I just read that Ben Stiller's production company has optioned "Gods" for development as a TV series; I hope this hysterically funny yet sweet-tempered farce is not destroyed by a sitcom mentality.
In "Gods Behaving Badly," the gods of Olympus have been holed up in a decrepit London flat for almost 400 years of decay. Forced to make a living, Aphrodite turns to phone sex, Artemis walks dogs on Hampstead Heath, Dionysus runs a sleazy bar, and Apollo has a lame fortune-telling show on cable TV. Eros (Cupid) shoots Apollo with love's arrow, and his lusty gaze falls on poor timid Alice, a cleaning lady attending the show with Neil, a structural engineer who secretly loves her. In pursuit of Alice, Apollo comes close to destroying the world, and nerdish Neil must descend into the Underworld to rescue Alice (and the world) from death.
This *does* I admit sound like a sitcom premise; what rescues "Gods Behaving Badly" is the author's witty dialogue and almost romantic sympathy for her characters - even the naughty ones. Apollo's pursuit of little Alice has a kind of Marx-Brothers manic frenzy to it, and for bawdy comedy the book rivals Christopher Moore (one of my favorite authors), but with a more coherent plot, believe it or not. Read it before television gets hold of it!
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Gods behaving sadly Oct 12, 2007 (23 of 29 found this helpful)
This book's back cover blurb includes a review calling it 'hilarious.' I must have a different sense of humor than that reviewer, because I found little about the book that was amusing. The book was well-written, had swiftly but well-drawn charcters and a promising and clever premise of ancient gods living a modern life. Nonetheless, the overwhelming feeling evoked by the book was one of sadness.
The Olympian gods are living degraded existences in which all of life's moments, even sex, are desultory and boring. Their lives are boring and boring, therefore, to read. The two main human characters are both stunted emotionally and while their small lives are somewhat poignant, they do not inspire humor or in fact, anything more than pity. Nonetheless, the humans find heroism in themselves and manage to restore themselves and the gods to their rightful place through selflessness and courage.
This book is a good moral tale if one enjoys sad and dark stories. But hilarious? No.
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The Gods Must Be Crazy Sep 29, 2007 (9 of 10 found this helpful)
I wanted to like this book. Oh, how I wanted to like this book. And in the beginning, I actually did. It started out interesting and quirky, with a few hilarious lines.
And then it slooooooooooooowed down. The pace went from 60 to 0 in the space of mere pages. The humor faded more effectively and at a quicker rate than the powers of the gods in the book. We're then treated to a lot of tedious details about the lives of the gods and two of the most boring mortals on the planet.
Was there anyone interesting here? Hermes, perhaps. And Eros, just a bit; a Greek god turned Christian? How's that for weird. The other gods largely lack personality except for that dictated by their deistic functions, unfortunately. And the mortal heroes, Neil and Alice...Look, "ordinary" does not have to equal "mindnumbingly boring". But Neil and Alice are boring, so boring that they're not very sympathetic.
The plot has been done before, and better. Not that it wasn't a cute idea, but the execution is lousy and by the end it all feels so contrived. The ending picks up a tiny bit, but not enough to make up for the atrociously slow pace of the majority of the book.
The writing style itself isn't horrible, but it's far from great. Pages of dialog are poorly balanced against gigantic paragraphs of description and the ponderings of god and mortal alike. Some paragraphs are so large that they take up whole pages; they really should have been broken down more. Worst of all...do writers these days turn off their spellcheckers? Sure, typos happen, but how the heck do you misspell "smell" if you have a spellchecker on?
I promised myself that no matter what, I was going to be honest. And so I am. I didn't like it and honestly wouldn't recommend it.
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Good Story; feels derivative Sep 30, 2007 (5 of 5 found this helpful)
Gods are immortal; so what happens to them once they no longer have a following? While Ms. Phillips turns this premise into an interesting story, with many unique twists, the same premise underlies Neil Gaiman's 2003 book, American Gods--and was developed in a far more intricate (and interesting) plot. While Gaiman included a wide array of international gods of folklore (Thor to Native American spirits) and built his story around a basic mystery, Ms. Phillips focuses on the Gods of Greek mythology--Zeus and his immediate (more or less) family, and builds her story around a Greek myth--with heavy doses of satire and irony added.
Phillips' set up is brilliant--the Gods bought a London townhouse in the 1600, and it (and they) have been slowly deteriorating ever since. Aphrodite is reduced to working a telephone porn operation, and Apollo as a TV psychic (not a good one at that). It seems only Hermes, the God of War, is still fully employed. But it all goes on too long, and the sense of mystery--why have the gods lost all of their power--is no mystery at all to those who read Gaiman's book--no one believes in them anymore.
The central "action" involves a rough retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, reset in modern day London. The climatic sequence where our hero rescues his true love from the dead is compelling, but again, the gods' big revelation about how to regain their powers is anti-climatic--I figured out their problem long before they did!
In sum, a very good read, but felt throughout like a reworking of ground covered by Gaiman much more compellingly a couple of years ago.
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Interesting premise, but ultimately disappointing Mar 21, 2008 (10 of 12 found this helpful)
Being a big fan of all things related to ancient Greece, I was really looking forward to this modern tale of the Greek gods and goddesses trying to make things work in modern times. While it's an interesting premise, ultimately, it didn't hold my attention.
The Greek deities are known for their bickering, hot tempers, and wild emotional swings. At first it was entertaining, but when all the characters start to grate on your nerves, it's hard to find anything intriguing there. As one reviewer put it, it was the Greek gods in The Real World reality show. People arguing and acting like jerks isn't entertaining to me.
Throw in a couple of ho-hum, unrelatable human protagonists and the book just doesn't work.