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were bottled and passed around a fervent readership
each month seemed to say all that could be said about a
certain style of fantasy writing. Gaiman even managed
to make Milton – that old puritan codger – seem sexy
and that’s praise enough, right there.
They were pulp fiction at its best.
Recently, though, Gaiman has published American
Gods, and I’m not so sure about him anymore. A
breezeblock-sized novel that suffers from its excessive
length, American Gods is basically just a re-write of
The Sandman. We have another strangely passive male
protagonist – called Shadow here, he might easily have
been called Dream. There’s the same extended cast of
squabbling gods, demons, sprites, faeries and spirits;
the same coy might-be-real/might-not-be real jig
around the maypole of mythology. There’s even a cute,
quirky lesbian college student – all dressed in black,
no doubt – whose only narrative purpose is to deliver
a cute, quirky monologue that could just as easily have
tripped off the tongue of Death.
In other words, if you’ve read The Sandman you’ve
read this novel. There’s nothing new in American Gods,
and that’s the greatest disappointment from a writer
previously so good at showing us old things with new
eyes. I’m worried that Gaiman has no new stories in
him, and that the remainder of his career will be haunted
by the ghost of Sandman, just as surely as Arthur Conan
Doyle’s was haunted by Sherlock Holmes.
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But at least there’s a sense of conflict in American
Gods, and that’s something to be grateful for. All writing
is, of course, about conflict, and not just conflict
within the story, but informing the story as well. What
defines a genre is the nature of the conflict that lies at its
heart. For me, all fantasy writing is specifically about
one conflict, the conflict between the way we think the
world is and the way we feel it ought to be. The best
writers in the genre may not be consciously aware of
this conflict, but they do embody it. In his public and
private life, for instance, Tolkien was a devout Catholic,
but when he wrote he was a pagan. His imagination
inhabited the world of the Beowulf poet and mourned
the passing of the old barbarian ethos, with its old gods
and monsters, even as he professed the creed which had
been responsible for that world’s passing away.
Today’s fantasy writers seem to be mostly pagans,
too – at least on this side of the Pond. And when I say pagan
I mean that literally: in the sense that many modern
authors of fantasy seem to be Wiccans, re-constructed
druids, or neo-shamans, penning tales full of right-on
pagan characters fighting the deadening influence of all
those earth-destroying religions, and speaking in earnest
thees and thous of the healing power of the Goddess.
These writers believe whole-heartedly in what they
are writing – and fair play to them – but it does mean
that there is no animating tension to make their stories
interesting. In the end, it becomes little more than new-
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