Gods Behaving Badly is an entertaining romp of a book, even if it does kind of lose its way half way in. The pitch is as follows: the ancient Greek gods are real, alive and living in Hampstead in a tumbledown old house. Aphrodite, goddess of love, runs an telephone sex service, Apollo presents a programme on some obscure TV channel about physic phenomena and Dionysus runs a night-club while Zeus and Hera are confined to the attic. Into this potentially amusing mise en scène come two mortals Neil and Alice, who are nice enough but incapable of seeing that they fancy each other.
Neil accidentally gets Alice sacked from her job as a cleaner at Apollo’s TV station and she ends up cleaning up for the gods. As a result of a trick, Apollo falls in love with Alice and chaos ensues. The gods’ problem is that their power is drastically reduced from the halcyon days of ancient Greece, and they have to conserve it for emergencies. We discover along the way that the portal to the underworld is located off the Northern Line platform at Angel station.
While the idea is entertaining enough, it does suffer from being a high-concept that is not really capable of being extended to novel length. I think it would have worked better as a novella or short story. Having said that it’s a fun and diverting read with some cracking dialogue. It’s been over-hyped by the publisher and that’s resulted in a backlash from reviewers, but the hype is not Phillips’s fault, although she must know how the book trade works: she apparently wrote Gods Behaving Badly while working at a book shop.
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