The Dreaming

Det moderne samfunds afguder bliver m�dt af opr�r fra en uventet side i kultforfatter Neil Gaimans visuelt appellerende roman.

Som manden bag ‘Sandman’ stod Neil Gaiman med sine �grafiske noveller� for et af de tegneserieprojekter, der blev be�ret med betegnelsen litteratur. S� der er god logik i, at Neil Gaiman nu med sin fjerde roman ‘American Gods’ har skabt en roman, der er noget af det t�tteste romanerne hidtil er kommet p� at v�re tegneseriekunst uden billeder.

‘American Gods’ lyder umiddelbart ogs� mere som et opl�g til en tegneserie end til en roman. Hvad blev der egentlig af alle de guder, som emigranter fra alle verdenshj�rner og til alle tider har haft med til Amerika i deres kulturelle og mentale bagage? If�lge ‘American Gods’ �lever� de stadig. Dog ikke i bedste velg�ende. Kali, Odin og en syndflod af indianske og egyptiske guder, keltiske nisser og feer og andet godtfolk lever deres mere eller mindre evige liv fra h�nden og i munden. Som anonyme skikkelser i storbyens slum eller i sm� byer langt ude p� landet. Godt p� vej til at blive glemt og skygger af sig selv.

Afh�ngige som de er af blot, offergaver og andre former for tilbedelse. En nation, der som Amerika altid har voldsomt travlt med at opfinde nye materielle afguder, er et skidt land for de gamle guddomme.

Den melankolske kleppert Shadow f�ler sig mere d�d end levende, da han bliver l�sladt fra f�ngslet. Hans elskede Laura er netop omkommet under tragiske og alt andet end stuerene omst�ndigheder. Hun var ved at give Shadows bedste ven et afskeds-blowjob, da parrets bil blev smadret af en modk�rende truck. Da Shadow f�r et tilbud om arbejde fra en mystisk mand ved navn Wednesday bev�ger han sig ind i en verden, hvor skillelinjen mellem liv og d�d, dr�m og virkelighed, er udvisket. Ogs� Laura viser sig at have et specielt forhold til det at v�re d�d.

Det g�r snart op for Shadow, at Hr. Onsdag er identisk med ingen ringere end Odin. Odin er p� en mission. Han er i gang med at m�nstre og opildne de gamle guddomme til et afg�rende br�vallaslag mod de moderne afguder og deres lige s� anonyme som magtfulde agenter. Det lyder jo �rlig talt som en omgang gudsforg�ende nonsens, men hatten af for Neil Gaiman, der er s� talentfuld en fort�ller, at han form�r at f� l�seren til at glemme sin velbegrundede skepsis og give sig fort�llingen i vold. Gaiman kan kunsten at spinde en ende, s� man glad sluger kamelen og bare spytter ulden ud igen, mens man l�ser videre.

Fort�llingen om gamle guder p� fri fod i det moderne Amerika, er b�de en omgang kul�rt kulturhistorie og en engelsk forfatters h�jst utraditionelle konfrontation med det amerikanske mysterium.

Det er en slags roadmovie, der b�de udspiller sig i det amerikanske landskab, dets byer og temaparker og bag virkelighedens kulisse. Helt undslippe fornemmelsen af at ‘American Gods’ ville have v�ret en endnu bedre tegneserie end roman, g�r man ikke. Gaimans orientering mod den visuelle fantasi forn�gter sig ikke. Der er scener, der bliver h�ngende p� nethinden selvom man kun har set den med sin fantasi.

Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada said he couldn’t stand looking at the forlorn faces of fellow staffers at Marvel in the days after the tragedy.

“We all wanted to help, we all wanted to do something,” he said. “We gave blood, but we wanted to do more. I knew I could not move rubble. I was a guy with pencils and paper, and that’s when it came to me that there was something we could do.”

“Heroes,” a poster-sized, $3.50 special-edition comic, will depict the true heroes of the attacks: the police, firefighters, rescue workers and everyone else coping at ground zero in downtown Manhattan. It will be released by the end of September. All the artists are donating their work; Quebecor World Printers of Montreal will print the book for free and all proceeds will go to the police and firefighter funds and the Red Cross in New York.

Among the contributors will be Neal Adams, Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, Garth Ennis, Geoff Johns, Joe Kubert, Adam Kubert, Gail Simone, Stan Lee, John Romita Sr., Frank Miller, Alex Ross, George Perez, Jae Lee, Kurt Busiek, Frank Quitely, David Mack and Brian Bendis.

And in a real effort to show that peace among all men is truly possible, Quesada said longtime rival Todd McFarlane (”Spawn”) will be inking a piece penciled by Quesada.

Dark Horse and Chaos Comics will join with Image, Oni and Top Shelf comics companies to produce a graphic novel containing short stories and pinups depicting how the country dealt with the Sept. 11 attacks. The comic will include stories about similar tragedies around the world. The work should be out early next year. No cover price has been announced.

Not to be outdone, Alternative Comics will publish a tribute book to benefit the American Red Cross, said publisher Jeff Mason. “9-1- 1: Emergency Relief” will feature work by numerous creators including Frank Cho, who writes and draws the esoteric newspaper strip “Liberty Meadows”; Guy Davis; Danny Donovan; Will Eisner; Dan Fraga; Marc Hempel; Phil Hester; Tony Millionaire; Gray Morrow; Neil Vokes; and Ashley Wood.

Black House is a novel of slippage. We learn about slippage (a secondary definition of which, we are told helpfully in the text, is “the feeling that things in general have just gotten, or will shortly get, worse”) at the beginning of the book as we travel invisibly through the town of French Landing, Wisc., early in the morning, winding up in an abandoned shack where “limp flypaper ribbons hung invisible within the fur of a thousand fly corpses.” It is here that we encounter the mutilated body of 10-year-old Irma Freneau, and watch a dog attempt to eat the child’s severed foot out from its running shoe.

Irma is the latest victim of a serial killer whom the local paper has taken to calling the Fisherman, after Albert Fish, a real-life child-killer and cannibal. Not far from the shack, down a road, behind a no-entry sign, is a house all painted black; and that house is a gateway to somewhere else.

Slippage is what happens on the borders of things and places, and the town of French Landing is on many borders, one of which is the border between Stephen King country and Peter Straub country. The plot revolves around the struggle between two men: the murderous Fisherman and our hero, Jack Sawyer, known locally as “Hollywood,” a retired homicide detective from L.A. Sawyer quit young and came out to Wisconsin in search of peace and quiet. It is a truism and a genre obligation that retired cops in novels, even novels with slippage, must come out of retirement for their last case, and Jack does. Even so, we know from the outset that this will not be a simple police procedural or even a whodunit (the identity of the Fisherman is given to us early in the text — the “hook of his nose” followed by the “wormy lips” is a dead giveaway, if we’ve missed the hints about his awful deeds and secret pleasures). And we also know that Black House will have its roots in a previous novel.

Those who remember The Talisman, Straub and King’s first collaboration, have already met Jack Sawyer. Then he was a 12-year-old boy who traveled a long way, across the United States and across a distorted, magical version of the country called the Territories, to find the talisman that would save his dying mother’s life. The Talisman was a fantasy with dark elements — a fat book that could comfortably have been even fatter, with a winning young hero named after Tom Sawyer. Black House is a sequel of sorts, although it also draws upon the mythology that King has been building in his Gunslinger sequence and that surfaced most recently in his 1999 story collection Hearts in Atlantis. It is a book that exists on the borders of genre — it’s not a serial-killer romance, although the Fisherman is unquestionably a superhuman serial killer possessed of (and by) strange powers. It is too dark to be a fantasy but too light, too deeply sunny, to be at its heart a horror novel. Here also we experience slippage.

It can be a mistake to play hunt-the-author in any collaborative text. Collaborations work when two authors find a single voice for a story, and fail when they do not, and King and Straub create a mutual style that is clean and effective. It is knowing without being arch, and it does not read like either King or Straub. That there are dead giveaways in the text — the obscure jazz references that Straub delights in, for example, or some splattery scenes with a hedgeclipper that read as though they could have been penned only by King — is no help in the who-wrote-what game. (In fact I’d be willing to bet that most of the jazz references come from King, out to amuse his co-author and confuse reviewers, and that Straub took his turn at wielding the clipper.)

Initially, I found Jack Sawyer as uncomfortable in his role as the book’s hero as he is in his retirement. Surrounded by a magnificent supporting cast of colorful characters, Jack comes off as almost too pure, too perfect; he might have wandered into this Upper Midwestern Hell on Earth from a better place. But as I read on, I began to realize that in many ways Black House (only one vowel away from Bleak House, the foggy opening of which is quoted in the text) is a Victorian novel. The authors cited, quoted from, glossed in the book are popular writers who once were read and are now both read and respected, particularly Dickens, Twain and Poe. The characters, too, have a Dickensian quality to them. They are the forces of darkness — the Fisherman, Wendell Green the grasping newspaperman, Lord Malshun — alternating with forces of light: Sawyer himself; Henry Leyden, the blind man with the many voices; the magnificently filthy brewer-biker gang who call themselves the Hegelian Scum; brave Judy Marshall, who is being driven mad by her visions of the truth; and Judy’s son, Ty, who will become the Fisherman’s victim and on whose rescue the fate of the universe, quite literally, depends.

The plot, meanwhile, rollercoasters forward through the Wisconsin July, and has the easy comfortable quality of something built by two authors who are perfectly well aware of how good they are, even to the point of referring to themselves as a couple of “scribbling fellows” in the text. (”Always scribble, scribble, eh Mr. King?”)

Sometimes the collaborative process has its down side; on occasion the characters seem like counters being pushed back and forth across a board, and there is a final plot twist that smacks less of inevitability than of the authors checking off the last item on their to-do list. The use of the present tense, which could too easily get wearing over 600 pages, for the most part keeps the narrative voice supple, informal and fresh, although it can, on occasion, make one feel as if one is reading a film script. Indeed, in one sequence, when Irma’s body is found, the authors retread the same half hour from a number of points of view, and their dogged fidelity to the present tense actively becomes a handicap.

Many people blame it all on the inexcusable popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” And even the genre’s most ardent defenders (I’m one) won’t deny that dozens of paint-by-the-numbers Tolkien clones clog the fantasy market, and have doubtless obscured the far richer individual achievements of masters like Tim Powers, Peter S. Beagle, John Crowley, and William Browning Spencer (who usually attract mainstream reviews), or Patricia A. McKillip, Lisa Goldstein, and Robert Holdstock (who, more often than not, don’t).

British expatriate (now Minnesotan) Neil Gaiman is the man who just may change all that. After making his mark with the popular and critically acclaimed “Sandman” adult comic series (which unregenerate realist Norman Mailer proclaimed “a comic strip for adults”) and an inspired comic-apocalyptic collaboration (”Good Omens”) with satirical fantasist Terry Pratchett, Gaiman has moved on to more conventional adult fiction, including the novels “Neverwhere” (whose extraordinary events occur in a parallel world located beneath the city of London) and “Stardust.” Even better is his prose and poetry miscellany “Smoke and Mirrors” (whose piece de resistance, “Chivalry,” is a short story for which I would make room in any anthology imaginable).

“American Gods,” equal parts quest, “road” novel, love story, and religious allegory, is Gaiman’s most ambitious book, and probably his best. And its hero, a 32-year-old ex-con improbably named Shadow Moon, is at once his most symbol-laden, attractive, and likable character.

The story begins when Shadow (who grew up fatherless, and has long since lost his mother), on being released from prison for a pointless crime, is informed of the death of his beloved wife, Laura, in an automobile accident. Returning to Indiana for Laura’s funeral, Shadow attracts the attention of an ebullient older man who coyly identifies himself as “Wednesday” (the day on which they meet) and offers Shadow a hazily defined job as his all-purpose chauffeur and handyman - and, it seems, his enforcer.

Weirder things than this begin happening. Shadow has the first of several bizarre dreams in which a man with the head of a buffalo offers sonorous, cryptic advice. Laura’s ghost drops by, and increasing evidence of her spirit’s undeniable corporeality makes it clear that this visitation is emphatically not a dream. Repeated warnings that “a storm is coming” accompany Shadow’s progress throughout the Midwest and beyond, with and without Wednesday. And that warning is both clarified and complicated by the people Shadow meets: a bibulous self-styled leprechaun, “Mad Sweeney”; a trio of elderly fortunetelling sisters and a vigorous aged black man, Mr. Nancy; morticians Mr. Ibis and Mr. Jacquel; and, in the climatically challenged northern Wisconsin hamlet of Lakeside, the garrulous and quite possibly dangerous Hinzelmann.

It soon becomes apparent that Wednesday is the Norse god Wotan, and that the gathering that he is organizing (with Shadow’s aid) represents an attempt to muster the powers of the “old gods” who followed their emigrant believers to America - in order to engage in battle with the “new gods” of communication and commercialism who have replaced them.

This is a delicious premise, if not an entirely original one (in a typically gracious brief afterword, Gaiman implicitly acknowledges such influences as that of “my favorite unfashionable author, James Branch Cabell” - one of his own “old gods,” as it were). Much of the considerable pleasure this novel provides consists in identifying the legendary and/or divine counterparts of its irrepressibly colorful pseudonymous characters. Mr. Nancy, for example, is the West African spider-trickster (and lord of creation) Anansi. Hinzelmann is a German household spirit reputedly capable of both benevolent and malicious acts. This is the sort of novel in which a Middle Eastern ifrit assumes the identity of an immigrant Manhattan cabdriver; the queen of Sheba amuses herself as a casually murderous hooker; and Shadow’s former cellmate “Low Key” Lyesmith bears a disturbing resemblance to the troublemaking Scandinavian demigod Loki. Oh, and when our hero hitches a ride on a “thunderbird” - you guessed it: it’s not a car.

Gaiman ups the narrative ante by juxtaposing with the central chronicle of Shadow’s adventures briefer ones involving the aforementioned and other characters, and also lengthier interpolated narratives that echo the motif of the gods’ displacement - such as the wonderful story of Essie Tregowan, a devious Irish lass “transported” for her crimes to America (whence her homeland’s “piskies” followed her) and that of the arduous passage to the Americas endured by the ancestors of “voudon” queen Marie Laveau.

But Shadow is quite properly central. He’s a good-hearted and resilient (if downbeat and somewhat shaggy) hero, who commands a bit of “magic” himself; he’s made himself an illusionist adept at “coin manipulation.” Furthermore, he is put to a series of tests that recapitulate the experiences of Orpheus seeking his beloved Eurydice (Laura) in the underworld; the medieval knight Sir Gawain stoically preparing to offer up the death he owes to the mysterious Green Knight, whose counterpart here is the surly Middle European deity Czernobog; and, in the novel’s extended (arguably overextended) climax, the mortally wounded Fisher King’s sacrifice, an exchange for the health and safety of his embattled homeland.

There will be readers who will find all of this insufferably precious and clever. (I regret to inform you that Gaiman does not refrain from allowing a character to inquire, about Media, the contemporary “goddess” of instant global communication, “Isn’t she the one who killed her children?”) They may have a point. Yet readers who have enjoyed such classic fantasies as Cabell’s “Jurgen,” the Alice in Wonderland books, E. R. Eddison’s “The Worm Ouroboros,” Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast,” or the exuberant fiction of T. H. White, Fritz Leiber, or Poul Anderson, will want to check out “American Gods.”

Old gods walk the Earth but not with mighty, thundering footsteps; instead, they wear worn-out sneakers and smoke cheap cigars. They are hookers and con artists and funeral directors, doing anything they can to survive.

New gods of technology and money threaten their very existence, humble as it is, leading inevitably to that favourite godly pastime — war. Caught in the middle is a man named Shadow who’s trying to figure out what the hell is going on and why it has anything to do with him.

American Gods is a self-contained story in its own right but there are constant references to mythology from all over the world that will be an added treat for fans of folklore.

Neil Gaiman is one of the world’s greatest storytellers and American Gods is just more proof of that. His third novel is a dark, funny, disturbing and ultimately thought-provoking story about how we in the western world believe. The story suggests our thoughts have not only power but lasting effects of which we’re unaware.

I recommend American Gods to anyone and I heartily suggest readers also pick up Gaiman’s other works, including the novels Good Omens (absolutely hilarious) and Neverwhere and the early-1990s comic book series Sandman.

Perhaps I should recount Neil Gaiman’s lengthy list of accolades, from the praises bestowed upon him by his fellow writers to the numerous awards he has garnered, in the hopes of persuading you with opinions weightier than my own that this gentlemen is worthy of your attention.

Any of these approaches could prove effective, but nothing beats straightforward honesty. My entire review can be expressed in one word, a succinct summary of my heartfelt reaction to — American Gods.

Wow.

Everything that follows is merely elaboration.

The novel begins by introducing the character of Shadow, a convict serving three years for aggravated assault, a man with a fondness for coin tricks and the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus.

Determined to live a clean life, Shadow is informed, just days before his release, that his wife Laura has died in an automobile accident.

Still in a state of shock, he is released from prison and boards a plane home to Eagle Point, Indiana only to have his flight diverted, by a storm, to St. Louis.

While boarding his St. Louis flight Shadow meets an elderly grifter named Wednesday who is not only aware of Laura’s death, but also quite convinced that Shadow will accept the job offer he extends to him.

Events serve to justify this presumption and Shadow goes to work helping to protect and transport the grifter on a road trip that winds through the Midwestern United States, leading to the mingling of men and gods as Shadow encounters the deities and heroes of Slavonic, Norse, African and Egyptian mythology.

The old gods, brought to this continent in the hearts and minds of early immigrants, have become weak and starved for worship, cast aside in an effort to assimilate into American society.

New gods have emerged to fill the void, those of the media, Internet and automobile, new gods who threaten to extinguish the old.

The only viable option is to fight back.

Out of respect for those who have yet to enjoy the novel’s many twists and surprises I have provided the sparest of plot summaries, but I can assure you that American Gods is a beautifully written work of satisfying depth and complexity.

Gaiman seamlessly integrates elements from the genres of horror, fantasy, romance and mystery as he weaves his tale, a tale that testifies to his abilities as a master of allusion.

American Gods seems deliberately structured for the thoughtful and perceptive reader who will take the time to savour the text, noting the sprinkling of clues identifying each god or acknowledging passages from Yeats or the Song of Solomon. Gaiman even proves himself to be a bit of a conman, misdirecting the reader long enough to pull off some unexpected, but enjoyable plot twists.

Be advised that American Gods won’t appeal to everyone. It is a novel about earthy and occasionally violent pagan gods who drink, smoke, swear and come to know man, in the biblical sense. (In short, they are Americanized).

None of this is done in a gratuitous manner, but I am certain some readers will be quite disturbed by the end of the first chapter.

American Gods is without question the finest book I have had the privilege of reviewing. Curious readers are advised to visit www.neilgaiman.com where they may sample the first chapter for free.

Before concluding, it should be noted that Herald staff member Scott Sakatch campaigned, and rightly so, to have this book reviewed.