‘Gods Behaving Badly’

PHILLIPS, MARIE. Gods Behaving Badly. London: Vintage, 2008.

“Being immortal isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Life’s hard for a Greek god in the 21^st century: nobody believes in you, your own family doesn’t respect you, and you’re stuck in a dilapidated hovel in north London with too many siblings and not enough hot water.”

‘Behaving’ was in 2D on my book.

Slow and predictable at the beginning, this unputdownable book gets more and more interesting and funnier and funnier as you read as a result of an exponentially interesting succession of facts. Mythology and modernity amalgamate wittily to create the only scenario where this story could have ever been possible.

However, the epilogue is the fly in the oinment of this novel. I strongly dislike those last chapters after the conclusion of the story in which main characters live a happy-ever-after moment. Most authors fail to gather the courage to just end a narrative overcoming the need to show there’s a good ending.

Anyway, let’s not forget that I surely enjoyed the book and specially my favourite part: when the god Apollo wants to have sex with Alice, a human who rejects him, and asks her whether rape constitutes harm, and, after a positive answer, he wonders “Is that why they made it illegal?”