Cover of Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips

Today I finally finished Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips.

That makes it sound like it was a chore to read which took forever.  Actually it did not take long to read: it just took a really long time before I got round to starting it.  I think I bought it back in January with some Christmas book tokens, and only just opened it.

Part of the reason for that was having some enormous books from Amazon Vine to read first, and they need to be read and reviewed or I don’t get more free stuff. but I suspect there is another reason that took precedence – I was afraid to read it in case I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to.  Although I have never actually met Marie I feel like I know her because she worked at my favourite book shop.  She was never in the shop when I was browsing or purchasing, but she was often mentioned in the shop’s blog.

Because of that I wanted to like the book and knew that if I did not like it I would be blaming myself for that, and feeling guilty.  Given the circumstances of the publication, and the reviews,  I was sure it was a good book but somehow didn’t trust myself.

The basic premise of the book is that the ancient Greek gods are still alive and living, mostly in London, suffering a bit because nobody believes in them any more.  This worried me a little because this is Tom Holt and Douglas Adams territory: it is a cracker of a concept but it has been done before so it has to be really very good to avoid falling under their shadows.

In truth the early part of the book did make my heart sink a bit as it looked like it was going to be a fairly straightforward variation on the Tom Holt theme but then it became apparent that there was a fantastic plot development with one of the main (mortal) characters taking on a heroic quest that was not only a great idea but brilliantly written too.  The whole thing was well worth the wait.

My biggest criticism is that the quest part of the story was over too quickly. The ideas in it could have been examined more and expanded.  It should have been the second half of the book rather than the last third. When I reached that part I noticed how few pages were left and was borderline distraught that this plotline, which could have filled a whole novel on its own, was going to be over all too quickly.

It is strange how the mind works though. This is quite obviously a fantasy book and it requires the now-legendary ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in order to enjoy it properly.  The weird thing is that I had no problem allowing myself to accept that Artemis, Hermes, Apollo, Zeus, Eros and all the rest really existed, and still do, but found it difficult to believe that nobody had heard of them!