Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.
Summary
A recently released prisoner named Shadow is on a return flight home when there is a mix up and his seat gets upgraded to first class. Waiting for him is a mysterious stranger with a job offer.
Thoughts
Unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed this book. A book that almost lives up to the hype, but would have been slightly better to have stumbled on without knowing anything about it. Neil Gaiman draws out scenes and situations so vividly that they became almost scars in my memory. In the age of pictures, it is difficult to make people see with just words. That is not a problem in this book, you will see what is happening, even if sometimes you didn’t want to.
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature
The main story, told from Shadow’s perspective, is punctuated by a handful of a short and often tragic stories about individuals who brought their Gods to America. These act as nice diversions from the main story and are on the whole interesting, but sometimes I was anxious to get back to the main plot and didn’t love the interruptions. But what I did love was the main theme of this book which is God as idea, and that ideas rise and fall.
Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.
America is a young country with even younger gods. Why shouldn’t the death of an idea be as violent as murder?
“Liberty," boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, “is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.”
This book has a lot of great quotes and little ideas packed into it. If I had wrote it, I would be worried that I wouldn’t be able to think of new things and need to recycle some of the ideas in here in the next book I wrote.