Book Review: Gods Behaving Badly

Book Review: Gods Behaivng Badly

Author: Marie Phillips

Date: 2007

Publisher: Hachette

Length: 292 pages

ISBN: 98-0-316-06763-8

Illustrations: black-and-white line drawings

Quote: "`And what does a goddess look like, exactly?' said Artemis."

With a title like that, you know it's going to be about the mob of nature spirits, personified ideas, legendary ancestors, and cartoon-like characters that made up the pantheons of ancient Europe. It's getting to be a genre, writing about how they've fallen on hard times since nobody worships them any more.

So I read Marie Phillips' Gods Behaving Badly to see where it fits into the genre. It's a long way form being the wittiest use that's been made of its material but it does feature an honest, rather than "romantic," female view of sex: The humans, Alice and Neil, have a nice clean wholesome friendship that blossoms into a sweet romance, against the background of Apollo and Aphrodite having explicit onstage sex, frequently, and not even liking it, and Artemis chiding them and cleaning up the mess.

Do adult readers really want to risk exposing sensitive adolescent to the reality that, apart from the thrill of breaking rules, adultery is not actually much fun? That if you're not, in fact, with your One True Love and Partner For Life, you'd have more fun in bed playing Scrabble, waking up with tiles stuck to your back, or even watching TV reruns?

Apart from the cosmic powers of Lust having boring incestuous sex, and the slight novelty of Alice and Neil putting their own spin on the myth of Orpheus, what else does this novel have to recommend it? Mainly it has the leading role given to the asexual character, Artemis. She's still as arrogant as the Greek "gods" always were, but I enjoyed her scenes. I think you readers will too.

On the downside, Zeus and Hera are senile, Hephaestus is practically catatonic rather than excited by new mechanical technology, Dionysus has become an old drunk...and Athena's become a yuppie. She sounds just like every corporate promotion-seeker the thought of working with whom ever made you want to sleep late. The Greek goddess of wisdom left much to be desired, as did the Greeks' practice of whatever they thought wisdom was, but I always thought better of Athena than that.

What's not to like is the Christian-bashing., Eros flirts with being a Christian, lured into church no doubt by Christian marriage counsellors who blather about bringing eroticism into Christian marriage, but everyone else "knows" Jesus was just a mortal, currently shuffling around in the Greek underworld with other departed mortals. Only a revival of belief in the Greek gods can keep the sun shining.