A tree meets a dog walker at the start of Gods Behaving Badly, Marie Phillips' flossy, high-concept comic novel. "I'm Kate," the tree says. "I work in mergers and acquisitions for Goldman Sachs." And then: "Could you dial my boss' number and hold the phone to my trunk?"
You'd think this situation held some novelty for the dog walker, but it does not. She is Artemis, the Greek goddess of hunting and chastity, who now lives in London and now wears a track suit. Artemis knows that her flirty twin brother, Apollo, is up to his old tricks. When times were good, Apollo turned a woman who spurned him (Daphne) into a laurel tree and saw his feat celebrated by the world's great artists, like Ovid and Bernini. Now he's turned Kate into a variegated eucalyptus in Hampstead Heath. And, frankly, nobody cares.
Phillips' premise is that the Greek deities have collectively suffered a whopping reversal of fortune, but that they still endure tenuously in the modern world. They live together in a disintegrating London house with a laurel-wreath knocker (nostalgia counts for a lot here) on the front door. Thus ensconced, with time on their hands, they trade spiteful wisecracks about the glory days.
Aphrodite has a cell phone with the song Venus for its ring tone. In a world that has lost much of its romance, she spends her time saying things like "Hello, big boy" to anyone who'll pay her for phone sex. Dionysus runs a nightclub and always has his headphones on.
Meanwhile Apollo should be doing his job as sun god instead of chasing women. "Two words," says Aphrodite to Apollo, her vain and lazy nephew, "Global warming." But Apollo has fallen so far - specifically, into a television show that uses a Styrofoam version of the Delphi oracle as its backdrop and Zorba the Greek as its theme music - that he is almost beyond saving.
There is much about this setup to suggest that Phillips warrants a thunderbolt from Zeus. But she teases a modicum of real humor out of her sitcom-like story. This is a fish-out-of-water tale in which the fish are Greek gods, the water is Mount Olympus and the opportunities for comic contrast are everywhere. "We were famous once," Apollo tells the book's actual heroine, a timid young house cleaner named Alice. "The adulation, the fame, it was like - well, it was worship, really." Alice finds this very weird but chalks it up to this family's Greek heritage and all families' eccentricity. Her own parents eat cereal in the afternoon.
In a story so conventionally constructed that it suggests the help of fiction-writing software (yes, there is some), Gods Behaving Badly injects a pair of human lovebirds into the world of its downtrodden deities. They are Alice and "a small, mole-like creature with wiry brown hair that stood straight up, like a brush." This is Neil, who loves Alice and under ordinary circumstances might land her. But Eros, who is sick and tired of the way his mother, Aphrodite, keeps embarrassing him, winds up shooting one of his famous arrows, the ones that create inexplicable love. It hits Apollo, he gazes at Alice, Neil has a rival, and the rest is on autopilot.
Apollo's new love is baffling for Alice, whose real interests are Neil and Scrabble (not necessarily in that order). Eventually Apollo gets angry. So he recruits the crazy old patriarch of the family for purposes of vengeance. "Local Lunatic in Suicide Bid" is a caption Neil sees when he also spies a picture of Zeus in the newspaper.
With Alice struck quasi-dead, Phillips has an excuse to bring her narrative to the Underworld. This too is a place full of familiar mythological faces, even if more than one of them can belong to the same creature. (Cerberus, the hound of Hades, has three heads.) Think of action sequences and special effects as Neil, aided by his new friend Artemis and a host of other divinities, tracks Alice and tries to bring her home. Think of Peter Pan and Tinkerbell when it turns out that the Greek gods would have their powers back if people would just believe in them again.
Cliches aside, Phillips has bigger pitfalls to watch out for by this juncture. She has glancingly introduced Christianity into her book's pantheon, as Eros wonders wistfully why he didn't get to know Jesus better when he had the chance and thinks of how much more admirable the Virgin Mary was than Aphrodite, his own debauched mother. At moments like this, or when Alice casually encounters the dead who have perished in battle, the novel's sense of humor goes from fluffy to nonexistent, but it always manages to come back again. Gods Behaving Badly is much more fun than it has any right to be.
And although Phillips fulfills her purely lighthearted ambitions for this story, she provides a cautionary example to budding novelists everywhere. Though her background includes stints as an independent bookseller and BBC researcher, she also has a blog full of her thoughts about the hot competition on a television dance-contest show. When writers lived on Mount Olympus, they didn't talk about things like that.
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