Marie Phillips, Gods Behaving Badly (Little, Brown and Company, 2007)
It isn't always easy to find a good title, but this time Marie Phillips is spot on. The title Gods Behaving Badly really does tell you everything you need to know about this book.
What? Still here? You want details?
When I say that it's all downhill from the first chapter, where Apollo turns someone into a eucalyptus tree for refusing to have sex with him, will you believe me? We have incest, attempted rape and murder for your delectation, not to mention frustration (not all sexual), insanity and general filth (physical, setting all morality aside).
The premise of this retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is that the gods of Olympus were and are the actual rulers of the universe. Their powers have waned because fewer and fewer people believe in them. For some reason that is not really explained, they have ended up in England. Most of them live together in a dilapidated shack in London, where Artemis is a professional dog-walker, Aphrodite is a phone-sex operator, Eros is a Christian (doesn't seem to have a profession apart from that), Dionysius runs a seedy bar, Athena keeps coming up with schemes none of the others listen to aimed at reclaiming their power, Apollo is a TV psychic and Ares, the only one who seems to be having fun, flits about encouraging wars around the globe. Things are at the point where Persephone hates coming back topside and prefers the underworld with Hades.
A cleaner (I guess thinking of her as a charlady proves my age) and her would-be boyfriend are accidentally ensnared in this most dysfunctional of dysfunctional families, and mayhem and murder ensue. Can anyone as cheerfully exempt from mortal moral standards as an Olympian deity be depended on to do anything for anyone else's benefit? Or even for his or her own? It certainly doesn't look like it most of the time.
As you may have guessed, this gang are not my type of people at all. However, the premise is fairly interesting and the book isn't badly written at all. One little quibble -- the possible solution to everything is stated explicitly quite early on in the book, but comes as a big surprise to all the gods anyway.
Ah, well.
Marie Phillips' Web site is here. She has blogs here (this one is by invitation) and thisaway.
