Picture credit: diamondsharp (who incidentally has a rather different opinion of the book from mine)
Technically, this book has all the elements that will make it likeable; it has a clever and imaginative premise, Neil Gaiman’s prose is fluidly descriptive (the type I usually dig) and at many points brilliant and insightful. I’d also say that it’s very well researched. The plot’s intelligent and everything actually fell into place at the end of it all.
In Gaiman’s own words, “It would be a thriller, and a murder mystery, and a romance, and a road trip. It would be about the immigrant experience, about what people believed in when they came to America. And about what happened to the things they believed.”
With all of that, what is there not to like?
I don’t know. Maybe it’s me, not Gaiman, because in spite of everything, this book still managed to fall flat on me somehow. By page 635 on week 4, I was actually relieved that it was all over.
It was the premise — the diverse and ever-evolving American beliefs being represented by the rise and fall of gods (and the bastardisation of their states of existence to reflect the American people’s shifts in beliefs) — that drew me to the book at the start. But it was also the same premise, or more specifically, the execution of it that threw me off.
There were simply too many (unfamiliar) gods taking on too many incarnations. I suppose Gaiman had to do that to highlight the diversity and age of the American tapestry of beliefs, but for someone like me who’s unfamiliar with mythology, the premise turned cold very quickly. To be fair, Gaiman did provide some background to each god he introduces. But the sheer number of gods coming into the picture soon enough rendered the novel a story with too many distracting subplots. In the end, I am left disengaged — somewhat like Shadow, the story’s protagonist. Perhaps it was just too ambitious a novel, one that tries too hard to be everything. In the end it simply turned out to be nothing much at all. Or at least, a reader like myself is unable to figure out what it actually is.
This version that I’ve read is the Author’s Preferred Text. In his foreword, Gaiman did say that the version that won him numerous prizes was the one that his editor brutally cut. His Preferred Text, however, reinstates many of the parts that went into the editor’s bin. Perhaps if I had read the shorn down version I would be writing a different review now. Mmmm… perhaps.
