The Dreaming

AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman
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British-born writer Neil Gaiman has made a career out of ushering readers into fantastic, often horrific alternative universes. In his twenties, he enthralled comic-book aficionados when his Sandman title, which featured stunning covers by Dave McKean, became a runaway hit with DC’s mature-reader Vertigo imprint. Sandman’s title character was Dream or Morpheus, one of the Endless, a family that also consisted of Destiny, Desire, Despair, Delirium, Destruction and Death. They inhabited The Dreaming, from where Morpheus sent dreams out into our world. Gaiman and McKean wrapped Sandman after 75 issues, but it still earns praise and finds new followers through various graphic novel compilations.

Gaiman’s first book came out in 1997. The best-selling Neverwhere, which dealt with a macabre netherworld under the streets of London, was quickly picked up by the BBC as a miniseries, and an American feature film is in the works. Gaiman then wrote Stardust, an adult fairy tale, as well as an anthology, Smoke and Mirrors. Now 40, he has unveiled his fourth novel. It is by far his most intricate and intriguing work.

American Gods deals with the latter-day United States, in which people have forgotten the great gods of their ancestors. Our host on this journey is Shadow, a hulking young man who is about to be released from prison after serving a three-year sentence. He’s eager to get home to his wife, Laura, but is informed by the warden, hours before freedom, that she has died in a car crash. Devastated and demoralized, Shadow walks straight into a world where nothing is as it seems — or is very sane, for that matter.

Homeward-bound, Shadow encounters the mysterious Wednesday, who knows all about him, appears anywhere at will, has an insatiable lust for women and offers Shadow a job. He is to assist Wednesday unquestioningly. Together, they embark on a series of adventures in which Shadow meets a group of colourful characters, as unusual as any you would find through the looking glass. They share one impressive trait: All are ancient gods. Wednesday, one of the most powerful, it turns out, is gathering them together to prepare for a battle to the death against the latter-day gods of technology.

Meanwhile, Shadow must battle his personal demons, including the decomposing Laura. The deceased woman has taken to visiting her husband now and then, which has something to do with a magical coin that Shadow, an amateur prestidigitator, buried with her at her funeral. This is also a journey of discovery for Shadow, who knows little of his origins. What he eventually learns is revealing, moving and shocking. Like an adopted child who learns as an adult he is not who he appears to be, Shadow must adapt and so must we.

It was clear from his Sandman beginnings that Gaiman had a special knack for charming readers. It wasn’t comic-book banter, but literature, when he filled a page with prose. The same is true of his novels. His handling of Shadow, an Everyman sort of fellow, is as comedic and tragic as his portrayal of Wednesday, a great old god. Though it turns out that being godlike is no guarantee of happiness or survival, Gaiman’s qualities as a writer go a long way toward securing his chances of continuing success.

Make no mistake, Gaiman has become of the finest writers of fantastic literature anywhere and this is his best work to date. American Gods is a finely crafted melange of fantasy, suspense, humour and pathos. At times, it is truly chilling. Gaiman does horror exquisitely and, while this is not specifically a horror tale, there is enough here to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. Gaiman has researched his lore superbly. The results will please those who enjoy an intelligent read and a tweaking of their imagination.

A particularly clever device is the use of sub-stories about various gods, a vein running though the book and establishing the reader’s emotional connection with them. Evidently, Gaiman cares about his subjects far too much to disrespect them. Nor should we — for gods’ sake.

Nearly 20 years ago he was a struggling hack in London, writing articles for porn mags. Ten years ago he was penning four colour fictions for even more maligned publications - American comic books. Now he’s one of the most popular and respected British authors of his generation. What went right?

Gaiman’s six-year run on DC Comics’ Sandman, an epic collection of tales concerning Morpheus, Lord Of Dreams and his similarly eternal family, has been kept in perpetual print ever since the series ended in 1995.

The book collections are the cornerstone of all those rather sinister looking ‘Graphic Novel’ sections that lie on the fringes of any large bookstore and have won him fans as diverse as Norman Mailer, Stephen King, Tori Amos and Quentin Tarantino.

Next month he visits Edinburgh’s Waterstone’s West End to read from his new novel American Gods in an event that is guaranteed to sell out. Yet his name still isn’t as well-known in this country as several other (lesser) British writers. If you haven’t heard of Gaiman before then that is almost entirely down to the critical elitism that refuses to acknowledge that anything worthwhile could come out of fiction that actually stretches the muscles of the imagination.

Gaiman writes about gods and monsters, near-myths and dark fables. However, the Great British Literary Establishment prefers thinly-veiled autobiography - novels written by novelists who leave their wife and three children to write a novel about a novelist who leaves their wife and three children etc. And as for anyone who dabbles in the adolescent wasteland of comics, well …

So perhaps it’s no surprise that Gaiman upped sticks and moved to America nine years ago. Another hot writer chasing the American dream? The reason for the move was far more pragmatic he insists.

“My wife’s family moved back to Minnesota and they wanted to see the kids,” explains Gaiman. “I was also getting very pissed off with the international exchange rate because I was being paid entirely in dollars. My wife proposed we move and I said ‘only if you can find an Addams Family house’ and, bless her, she did.”

Now Gaiman lives out his childhood dream of living in “a large rambling house of uncertain location with a weird turret and a huge wraparound staircase.”

He admits his new novel, American Gods, is an attempt to understand his adopted homeland, a country that even now seems to leave him in a state of humorous bewilderment.

“This place is no melting pot,” he says on the line from the States. “Middle America is filled with people who have come from all over the world and it’s almost like they jettison everything they bring with them so they can embrace a culture which is led by David Letterman,” puzzles Gaiman.

One of the things that the tired and huddled masses reject when they enter the land of the free are their old gods and mythical figures. “People from other countries in America will happily talk about fairies and leprechauns, but only in the context of things that exist ‘back in the old country’. If you ask them if there any leprechauns in America they’ll just laugh at you, so obviously there are not,” says Gaiman wistfully.

Gaiman has been courted by Hollywood. His collaborative novel with British comic fantasist Terry Pratchett, looks set to go before the cameras under the aegis of Terry Gilliam. Gaiman won’t be holding his breath, however. A scripting job on a proposed Modesty Blaise movie with Quentin Tarantino five years ago came to naught.

“The thing I love about books or comics is I write it, I give it to a publisher and they publish - I love that. With movies you get obscene amounts of money - really obscene amounts - but after writing the script there’s no guarantee that a film will be made.”

Frustrating it must be, but it’s still a long way from writing articles for Penthouse, hardly the most august of journals from which to launch your literary career? Gaiman laughs. “It was actually an incredibly practical decision on my part. In the first few weeks out of the starting gate I sold an article to She magazine and an article to Penthouse. She paid me #80 and never published it and Penthouse paid #300 and it wound up in the next issue.”

Fast forward a decade and Norman Mailer was praising Sandman as “a comic book for intellectuals”. Quite a leap, but it demonstrates the potency mythical figures can still have when used to examine contemporary culture. “I don’t believe that gods walk the streets of America, but I believe that metaphors do and gods are an enormously powerful metaphor,” says Gaiman, who is earnest about the power of the fantastic as medium for serious work.

“I think JK Rowling is saying more about what it means to be a kid by writing about a bunch of kids going off to a magic school than somebody probably would do by writing an earnest and exact novel about kids in an inner-city comprehensive because you don’t have to talk about what’s real to say something that’s true.”

It’s a gracious compliment when you consider that Gaiman had published a four-part series, The Books Of Magic, about a bespectacled boy who was schooled in the ways of magic, back in 1990. Harry Potter was still a twinkle in Rowling’s imagination. Her first novel, Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone wasn’t published until ‘97 but there’s certainly no rancour on Gaiman’s part.

“I think there are a lot of similarities,” he concurs, “but I am so far from the first person to create a kid with magical potential and JK Rowling was so far from the first person to create a kid who went to magic school,” he chuckles.

“It would probably be far more accurate to say that we both owe an awful lot to TH White and The Sword In The Stone and probably to CS Lewis and a whole bunch of other sources.”

Gaiman’s new opus is a road novel that imagines what becomes of the disenfranchised figures of myth and legend as they try to eke out a living where the new gods are mobile phones, TV and the internet. Babylonian love goddesses end up as hookers while Odin pumps gas - sadly appropriate in a country that seems content to forget about its collective history.

“Take Scotland, for example,” offers Gaiman. “Now, there’s a country that’s got a happy, solid 2000 years of history - you can be pretty sure of which clan was killing which 500 years ago. In America they have absolutely no idea. People come from all over the world, they end up in this gigantic country and then they go to eat at McDonalds,” he laughs dryly.

“I remember Terry Pratchett and I were watching a Hallowe’en parade one night in New York. It was a parade of monsters and creatures, hundreds and hundreds of them just walking down the street and Terry turned to me and said: ‘They’d never do this in Britain, because there are things there that would wake up,’ and who am I to argue.”

It becomes apparent from talking to Gaiman that nine years in the US has left him “enormously homesick for Britain, I miss the irony and the sense of pace,” he says.

Even now he is “embarrassed and a bit shocked” at being recognised in the street. “Whenever I’m recognised in the street my jaw drops,” says Gaiman. “That’s why I’ve always refused to do the David Letterman show or appear in People magazine.

“Stephen King told me that if he had his life to live over again, he’d probably do it all the same, including the mistakes, except he wouldn’t do the American Express ads again. It was when he did this ‘do you know me?’ ad, that was the point that everyone in America knew what he looked like,” Gaiman shudders.

Like it or not, It’s something that Gaiman will probably have to deal with soon - whether he appears on chat shows or not.

“I always used to like the fact that the New York Times Review of Books didn’t know who I was - I think they do know. “The point where everyone starts taking you seriously is a strange one and, for me, it’s immediately followed by the thought; ‘hmmmm, maybe I was more comfortable in the gutter.’”

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, British writer Neil Gaiman helped reinvent the entire comics industry. Along with those other classics of postmodern apocalypse, Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Gaiman’s graphic novels– Violent Cases, Black Orchid, Signal to Noise, The Books of Magic, and the phenomenally successful series The Sandman–drew on the greater arcana of 19th- and 20th-century pop culture to create an enthralling mythos that incorporated literature, rock music, classical mythology, serial killers, superheroes, and transgender heroines. Working with artists like Dave McKean and Mark Hempel, Gaiman created a pantheon of enduring comics icons. The Sandman s central character was a gaunt Morpheus who resembled guitarist Johnny Thunders, but the series’ most popular character was the punk waif Death, a fetching amalgam of the young Patti Smith and Winona Ryder’s suburban goth in Beetlejuice.

The Sandman ended in 1996, leaving literate high school students bereft, although Gaiman’s 1996 novel Neverwhere helped ease their grief In his new novel, American Gods, Gaiman returns to the fertile killing ground that nourished The San&nan: that peculiarly American crossroads where pop culture intersects with religion, violence, and death.

Shadow is a 32-year-old ex-con who, upon his release from prison, becomes the bodyguard of a mysterious one-eyed grier named Wednesday. Shadow soon flashes onto the fact that his new employer is no ordinary con man. Still, he sticks around, accompanying Wednesday on a journey through the dark heart of the American Midwest, a journey that turns out to be a recruiting expedition.

Wednesday is not the only ancient deity who has survived into the present day. The American landscape is littered with old gods, the mythological detritus left by millennia of immigration from every country on earth. As their human followers have gradually forsaken the pagan deities, the gods themselves have devolved into petty thieves, drifters, prostitutes, con men, and drunks. A few pockets of belief and sacrifice remain-neopagans, Aryan cultists, genuine believers among Native American tribes. Their belief in the old ways gives the gods power to exist, even in their diminished capacities.

But over the last century, new gods have begun to flourish, gods of electronic media, of commerce and bureaucracy. Feisty young immigrants eager to reshape the cultural landscape, these newcomers don’t want to share the country with their predecessors. They declare war upon the old gods. Shadow and Wednesday desperately attempt to pull together a ragtag army of supernatural conscripts.

As a novel premise, this doesn’t exactly have the champagne shimmer it possessed when writers like Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, and Alfred Bester first exploited it, decades ago. The new gods in Gaiman’s pantheon are folks like the ur-anchorwoman Media, the ultra-geek Technical Boy, a few tired Men in Black. They aren’t original or scary enough to generate much tension: In a contest with, say, the sledgehammer-wielding giant Czernobog, who wouldn’t put their money on the guy with the hammer? The novel’s pacing is leisurely, its narrative propulsion interrupted by a series of set pieces-how ancient African gods became transmuted into voudon idols, the suggested origins of North American Ice Age cults-that, diverting as they are, sabotage the story’s bid for page-turner status.

Shadow’s part in all this is to act as Wednesday’s recruiter, tracking down-at-the– heels deities and trying to enlist them for the final battle. Gaiman gets some nice riffs off Shadow’s encounters with the ancient Egyptian gods of the dead, who now run a funeral parlor in the Mississippi River town of Thebes; there’s also an endearing incarnation of the African spider trickster Anansi, a charming elderly gent called Aunt Nancy. As it follows Shadow across the country, American Gods becomes a slightly lumbering road book, a shaggy-god story that never quite achieves the delirious escape velocity of works like The Stand, Peter Straub’s Mr. X, or Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, With Occasional Music. The most successful, and clever, segment centers on Shadow’s winter sojourn in the little Wisconsin town of Lakeside, a deceptively idyllic place that owes as much to Shirley Jackson as it does to Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon.

But Shadow leaves Lakeside to join the pop Gotterdammerung scheduled to take place in-where else?-Rock City. As in The Sandman, Gaiman makes sly good use of his extensive knowledge of and delight in mass culture; when Shadow wonders why Disneyland isn’t the locus of American myth, Wednesday tells him, “No magic there of any kind. . . . But some parts of Florida are filled with real magic. You just have to keep your eyes open. Ah, for the mermaids of Weeki Wachee.” Later, Shadow asks the Budweiser– drinking shaman Whiskey Jack if he is a god.

Whiskey Jack shook his head. “I’m a culture hero,” he said. ‘We do the same shit gods do, we just screw up more and nobody worships us.”