I have just finished American Gods which is seriously one of the best books I have ever read. He writes its with some awareness that he is an Englishman writing about the basis of American culture and its essential replacement of old gods with new. He creates a fantastic epic which is suddenly interjected with insightful pages of deviation in which you wonder how one man can possibly reason so eloquently and so painfully.
'Tonight, as you eat, reflect if you can: there are children starving in the world, starving in numbers larger than the mind can easily hold, up in the numbers where an error of a million here, a million there, can be forgiven. It may be uncomfortable for you to reflect upon this or it may not, but still you will eat.' (Gaiman: American Gods p346)
Later in that same chapter:
'Women, Men, the old and the young of them: there are so many of them, and so many of the stories are tragedies with grief too deep to be contained, but holding here and there tiny joys, snatched from the darkness like flowers picked by a fallen traveller from the side of cliff.'
'No Man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others tragedies.
These are snippets eventually cumulating in a revelation which I believe is one of the most important revelations possible:
'We need individual stories. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million". With individual stories, the statistics become people- but even that is a lie, for the people begin to suffer in numbers that themselves are swollen and meaningless'.
And contained in these words are the most important thing any human can ever learn, that listening to the cry of people in stories, song, art- anything will do more for recording the true scale of history than numbers ever will.
Numbers will not stop things from happening again. The amount lost in WW1, in the holocaust, in the wars being fought all over the world mean nothing without the stories.
This book has is off the scale in the number of layers it possesses. It contains a simple story of a man becoming whole after imprisonment and bereavement. It contains the psychoanalytic factor of fantasy.
But what I find very interesting is its experiments with idealism. The Gods that exists in the book travelled to America in the minds of their believers and maintain a external presence as well as an internal one. They exist because people created them. They can control people but they are ultimately bound by a need for belief. They are sustained by sacrifice in the same way Christianity is sustained by ritual sacrifices. Only these Gods were forgotten when they changed addresses as their believers moved on or moved back to their homeland leaving the Gods there to fight for existence.
Interestingly, the land which appears as a carnation of a buffalo man (who is resolutely not a god) is the moral compass within the book. Appearing to the protagonist Shadow in dreams he provides guidance on the right course of action. Because gods they might be, but squeaky clean they are not.
Anyway, the fact that the gods within the book are part of a shared system of belief but there are two types of existence.
1. The land exists because it is a shared idea of ALL. It exists in the same way that natural world and people exist in a coherent system of ideas.
2. The gods exist on a different plane. They are not a shared idea and exist in the minds of believers and at the same time can shift between the 'real' world (The world of America and technology) and into a different, almost incorporeal plane that exists simultaneously. The world created by the beliefs of individuals which they cannot access.
Shadow does at points shift through into the other section which seems at time almost mental, like they live in an external but separate world which is created in peoples head although not accessible by said people.
Finally, to end with the words Shadow spoke Mr Nancy, the spider God:
"Call no man happy until he is dead. Herodotus"
'Mr Nancy raised a white eyebrow and said "I'm not dead yet, and, mostly because I'm not dead yet, I am as happy as a clam boy"'.
" The Herodotus thing.It doesn't mean the dead are happy,' said Shadow. 'It means you cannot judge the shape of someone's life until it's over and done.'
So I would strongly urge people reading this (particularly people who like fantasyish stuff) to pick up a copy!! Its long, but well worth it!
xxx
-All quotes from American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Published by Headline Review.(2005)-
