MARIE PHILLIPS
(Niall mcdiarmid)
Gods Behaving Badly
By Marie Phillips
Little, Brown, 293 pp., illustrated, $23.99
Unworshiped, aging, their powers shrinking, the Greek gods have been living poor for the past few centuries in a shabby London neighborhood. Artemis, goddess of the moon, the tides, and the hunt, works as a dog walker. Aphrodite gives phone sex; Apollo stars in a third-rate TV program; Ares, the war god, foments terrorism and small far-off conflicts. Ceres is a gardener, Athena dispenses wisdom in a high academic jargon nobody can understand, and Zeus, quite mad, is locked up in the attic.
Around this conceit, Marie Phillips has devised a romantic comedy whose whimsical pitfalls she pretty much avoids. She tells a wry, spry story, rendering the fantastic with ingenious matter-of-factness and with a dialogue that skitters between lofty archaic and contemporary absurd. Here and there, like a cautionary gong, she strikes a note of metaphysical chill.
Chill, yes. Phillips knows her Greeks. The gods portrayed in their mythology - and in Euripides - were held in awe for their power, not their virtue. Unlike the monotheistic divinities, they were not exemplars for humanity. This meant a religion that offered considerably less consolation and example than Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, but it also left its worshipers freer if lonelier.
Not to belabor this, but it is a sub-sub-text in a prankish, lighthearted, and thoroughly witty caper. "Gods Behaving Badly" brings the old Olympian misdeeds, jealousies, reprisals, and indulgences up into London's present-day gray-yellow brick.
For instance, Apollo, self-centered and lustful, chases terrified maidens around Hampstead Heath, turning them into trees when they resist his advances. (A young mergers-and-acquisitions specialist for
But gods alone never were the story. From Homer to Phillips it was mortals who got them going. Here the action begins with the arrival of Alice in answer to an ad for a cleaner placed by Artemis .
For centuries, seemingly, nobody had bothered to sweep, scrub, pick up, or wash dishes. What's needed is an archeologist, Alice remarks of the layers of encrusted muck and scum, but she sets pluckily to work, her labors akin to
She is an innocent, as is her boyfriend, Neil. They haven't so much as confessed their love, let alone kissed. They possess the power of desire unrealized, in contrast with the gods' worn-out eternity of realizing their own.
Poseidon does his oceans, Ares his wars, Zeus (until confined) his thunderbolts, Hera her rages, Athena her apothegms, while Aphrodite fornicates endlessly, mostly with Apollo and neither getting any pleasure from it. Immortality is immensely boring, so is omnipotence, and it takes mortals to liven things up, however the gods may look down on them.
And need them, it turns out. Because they are gradually losing their powers, and each bit of godly magic hastens the loss. So when Apollo, lusting after Alice and trying to intimidate Neil, vaingloriously extinguishes the sun to prove his divinity, the effort exhausts his remaining powers. So much so that he can't get the sun reignited, and the world goes into deep freeze.
Phillips manages to avoid supernatural inflation by treating this and all that follows as a down-to-earth affair of comic mishaps, cross purposes, and wacky remedies. A great deal does follow.
For reasons too complicated to go into, Artemis and Neil visit the Underworld - entered at the Angel subway stop in Islington - to seek intercession from Hades to get the sun back, and to rescue Alice, who has been killed by one of Zeus's thunderbolts. That doesn't work, though it's highly entertaining. What does work is a vast mobilization of public belief at a monster rally in Trafalgar Square that restores the gods' powers. It was the millennial fading of such belief that had weakened them.
Hokey, of course, and of course reminiscent of London's annual Peter Pan pantomime, where at the end the audience is required to shout its belief in fairies so as to revive a dying Tinker Bell. I expect that Phillips, who is English, went as a child.
No matter, or only a little. Throughout, the author has treated her story with a resourceful dry wit that dresses her Olympians (present address: Hackney) in human foibles, while making it clear that there is nothing in the least human about them. She bends Puck's "What fools these mortals be" to target gods instead.
Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.
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