Shadow.
Might as well end the review there. Because every single problem with American Gods is born from its protagonist.
Shadow has no motivation. Most of the novel is simply him milling aimlessly about a random village doing nothing. Literally nothing. He has no goal, no objective, no momentum.
His personality traits consist of “coin tricks” and…uh…having no discernible personality traits?
When American Gods isn’t wrist-slittingly bad, it’s actually good. This, paradoxically, makes me detest Shadow- and by extension the book- even more, simply because it’s the equivalent of trying to watch a movie past the folds of a fat bloke on the row in front of you. Everything not related to Shadow has a simple yet brilliant premise, all of which we’re hardly shown because Shadow hurls his ugly gurn across the pages every time the book veers anywhere close to interesting.
Its story is brilliantly simple: a war between the old gods and the new. Odin and Anubis and Anansi team up against the Internet, Media, and…uh, actually I don’t think we get much more than that. Yes, despite the immense possibilities Gaiman could have developed, most of the Gods lack any real substance to their characters; Odin, Anansi, Easter and Czernobog (and perhaps Anubis and Ibis) are the only Gods who feel even marginally interesting, a fact dampened even further with the climax essentially confirming that only two of these have any real relevance to the so-called plot. Sure, there’s no lack of vaguely interesting personality traits- Easter essentially cheating the system and getting power from people celebrating the totally unconnected holiday is an interesting concept- but they all have about as much depth as a puddle of congealed piss.
Not content with one, American Gods hurls three plot twists at us, all at once; the one regarding Shadow’s parentage is so obvious you’ve probably figured it out from the title alone, the second attempts to give the flaccid “Shadow dicking around a random village” subplot the slightest semblance of a point and is literally the only thing in the entire arc worth even an iota of your time, and the third is genuinely good. This is undone by the subsequent climax consisting of the protagonist just politely asking everybody to stop fighting. Every time American Gods builds up the slightest amount of narrative momentum, it hurls it away so we can focus more on the world’s most boring man.
The worst sin of American Gods is that is seems to have genuine contempt for its readers’ time. The long, boring scenes of Shadow in the town not only go nowhere, but Gaiman does not even bother with the pretense that it will, eventually, go somewhere. There simply is not a plot for vast swathes of pages.
American Gods is, at its core, a mediocre novel surgically grafted onto a terrible one. Had a harsh editor sat down with Gaiman and forced him at gunpoint to remove the tumorous growth of the small town subplot, American Gods may very well have stumbled into “all right” territory. Its story is still filled with shallow characters, lazy contrivances, and a protagonist with so little agency that a rock falling down a mountain displays more initiative, but at the very least what remains is vaguely formed into a functioning narrative. In its finished form, American Gods cannot even claim that.
Oh, and any remaining vestige of goodwill is instantly obliterated the moment the reader comes across the incredibly pretentious “reading group discussion questions”, in which Shadow is proclaimed as a “deep and engaging character”. I honestly think I knocked the rating down from a two to a one solely because of that.
Overall rating: 1/10
Next Week: The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley
No comments:
Post a Comment