My local atheist group has a book-club which meets every so often, alternating between fiction and non-fiction. Our next discussion will be American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and I’m pretty damned stoked about it. Admittedly, the premise that all the gods are real might sound a bit off-putting to the average unbeliever, but trust me on this, he totally pulls it off.
Fans of Douglas Adams will notice more than a few similarities to The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, including the major premise, a handful of Norse gods, and the idea that the veil between the world of men and the world of the gods may become thin and permeable in certain times and places. Gaiman takes these ideas and expands them in darkly unpredictable ways, bringing in multiple pantheons, obscure mythologies, and demigodly personalities. He’s done his homework, all right, but even more strikingly, he manages to wrap it all up in a story that makes the reader more than happy to suspend all manner of disbelief from the highest places. As they say at writer’s workshops, “Find a hero, put him in trouble.”
The book is also packed with thoughtful and metaphysical narrative asides bordering on the poetic and profound, such as this one:
None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you-even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.
Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.
Not bad, eh? Without much by way of spoilage we may safely ask the following: Why did Gaiman leave out any of the incorporeal omnipotent gods of classical theism? Yahweh of the Jews, Jehovah of the Christians, Allah of the Muslims, and perhaps Ahura Mazda of the Zoroastrian faith. On the premises of the book, they should exist somewhere in America and hold spectacular power on account of being actively worshipped here. Why then their conspicuous absence from the storyline?
