American Gods

"Basically, first of all, I am a huge fan of science fiction and fantasy books and I grew up with Douglas Adams and Arthur C Clarke . For me, this is the best of Gaiman’s books and I’ve got all of them. It’s set in the present time and talks about settlers who have settled a continent and have brought their gods with them. So, if you are Swedish and you cherish Nordic gods and move to the US, the gods go with you and the more you believe in them the stronger they are. But if fewer people start believing in them then they get weaker and eventually they become mortal and die. So, it’s about all these forgotten gods. It’s a horror story in which nobody dies. It’s a metaphor for our society – if you replace gods with values then you get the same thing. I am not the President of Croatia but I am very close to him and I think that the government should always act on behalf of the people, that businesses should always act on behalf of the people. It is like parents and children – you have to take care of the people you govern. So, I am interested in these kinds of metaphors."

"The premise of American Gods is that, as the various groups from Europe and other parts of the world migrated to the North American landmass, they took their gods with them. Gaiman proposes that there were earlier voyages which aren’t recorded in the sagas, in which the Norse gods made their way to North America and stayed there. There are lots of other gods as well, Egyptian gods and Indian gods all operating through the novel. But it’s the Norse gods who are of interest, because the form of Odin that we have — a con man called Mr. Wednesday — has a plan which he wants to put into action. He seeks out Shadow, a hard-living, hard-fighting man who has been in prison, with a mission for him. We also have Loki in the novel, where he styles himself as Mr. World. It turns out that Odin and Loki, between them, are unhappy about the way that the gods are losing influence in the modern world. The old gods are losing ground to the new gods, who are the gods of TV, of media, of technology, of planes, of automobiles… the gods of modernity. So the old gods have a plan to create a huge battle in the middle of Tennessee where a lot of blood will be shed, and it’s this blood of warfare that gives Odin his power. It’s a novel which makes a lot of play with themes from Norse mythology, particularly the sacrificial myth of Baldur, but also taking up a lot of details directly from the Norse myth that you recognise as you go along, because Gaiman knows a huge amount about Norse mythology. One of the interesting things about Gaiman’s novel is the way in which he picks up on the idea of America as the American dream: the place where everyone can come, where everyone can bring their gods, where they can make this new society. But the old gods linger, in a way as a kind of marker for ethnic identity that doesn’t get erased by the identity of being American. American Gods is really two books in one. After the storyline between Shadow and Mr. Wednesday, there is a second part to the novel, a kind of thriller detective investigation as to who is murdering girls in a town in the Midwest."