A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:

Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:


support the site


buy us books !
Amazon wishlist

the complete review - fiction

Gods Behaving Badly

by
Marie Phillips

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B+ : good fun, fairly well done

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Very good, a lot of fun

  From the Reviews:

• "Witty and entertaining, Gods Behaving Badly is an auspicious debut that outrageously libels the classical pantheon." - James Urquhart, Financial Times
  
  
• " (I)ngeniously imagined and satisfyingly lusty. (…) This swaggering caper follows a dark course and while the scenes between the humans appear sentimentally trite, the spoilt-brat antics of their other-worldly counterparts are vastly entertaining." - Catherine Taylor, The Guardian
  
  
• "Marie Phillips's first novel is a joyful frolic around a simple and funny conceit. (…) It is all very, very funny and, although the admin areas of this Underworld have a faint whiff of Will Self's Dulston, delightfully original as well as acutely clever in a makes-you-think-about-contemporary-morality-without-realising kind of way." - Lisa Gee, The Independent
  
  
• "(A) story so conventionally structured that it suggests the help of fiction-writing software (.....) (T)he novel's sense of humor goes from fluffy to nonexistant, but it always manages to come back again. Gods Behaving Badly is much more fun than it has any right to be." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times
  
  
• "It's like Hesiod's Theogony meets MTV’s Real World. (..) As it traces Neil and Alice’s sweet and predictable little love plot, Phillips’s novel sometimes threatens to descend as well, into something like bathos. But for the most part her nonchalant transposition of the ancients into post-postmodern life is seamless, amusing and blessedly unpretentious. It may not be ambrosia, but it’s some pretty good trail mix." - Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "It is a significant challenge for a novel to live up to a clever concept, even more so when the novelist in question has been feted for months as the Next Big Thing, the toast of last year's Frankfurt Book Fair after she was discovered, working in an independent bookshop, by a Waterstone's buyer. But in the case of Marie Phillips, it is deserving of the hype. She has done a spectacular job -- funny and unpretentious, witty and readable, Gods Behaving Badly lives up to all its potential." - Francesca Segal, The Observer
  
  
• "God Behaving Badly is peppered with these far-too-convenient coincidences, which are all the more amusing since most of them have been instigated by the petty, squabbling Olympians behind each others' backs. The result of all this truculent childishness is a fast-paced, slapstick story that also manages to illuminate some bittersweet benefits and drawbacks to both sides of the immortality issue, as the plot yaws from a send-up of Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy in Oz to a new twist on the tragic early Hellenic myths of Orpheus and Eurydice." - Irene Wanner, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "(A)bsolutely delightful (...) Part of the charm is in the juxtapositions -- the gods are arrogant yet naïve, foul-mouthed but innocent, powerful but pointless. (...)There's enough mordant tang to keep it from becoming just silly, and, at moments, a frisson of real horror" - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
  
  
• "The necessary mythology is filled in rapidly and casually in conversation, so it doesn’t matter how much or little the reader knows about the Greek gods; knowledge will only confirm that Phillips has captured their childish irresponsibility perfectly while amusing her readers with an unlikely successor to Hercules and a touching human love story while she’s about it." - Molly Guinness, The Spectator
  
  
• "Phillips’s whimsical fantasy has much charm but little bite. If anything, her gods just don’t behave badly enough. Beneath the comedy of ancient deities let loose in the modern world lurks a cosiness about human love and relationships that, at odds with the profoundly unsentimental myths she is reworking, would have been laughed off Olympus in the good old days." - Nick Rennison, Sunday Times
  
  
• "(W)hile this is undoubtedly good, old-fashioned page-turning fun, once the covers are closed, you might struggle to remember what all the fuss was about." - Elena Seymenliyska, The Telegraph
  
  
• "It sounds as if the device would tire, but it is all very, very funny. (...) The cleverness is that Phillips does with Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo et al precisely what the Greeks did with them. They become many-times-magnified versions of us. Immortals were all about the trouble with mortality, after all." - Bettany Hughes, The Times
  
  
• "Lucian knew the virtue of brevity (...). By the end of nearly 300 pages in Gods Behaving Badly, the jokes are not working as freshly or unexpectedly as they did at the start, but in many respects Marie Phillips is an amusing match for the ancient satirist." - Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "The tension doesn't ratchet too high; it's a romantic comedy, after all. The key is to fly through a book like this very fast -- on Hermes' wings. But Phillips has an Olympian sense of absurdity, and there's enough ambrosial wit here to seduce most mortals for an afternoon or two on the divan." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       Gods Behaving Badly finds a motley crew of Olympians living together in considerable squalor in London, in a house they haven't maintained too well since they moved in back in 1665. With what little powers they have left they are like old royalty, full of themselves but barely scraping by. Artemis earns some money walking dogs, Aphrodite is doing phone sex, Eros has been born-again, and Dionysus runs a nightclub "in a basement down a poorly-lit side street, popular with prostitutes and junkies, somewhere between Euston and King's Cross", the Bacchanalia.
       Ah, yes:

Things had all been so much easier in the years that they were now obliged to refer to as BC.

     "We can't afford that," said Aphrodite.
     "Yes we can," said Artemis. "We'll just have to stop buying food."
     "But I like food," whined Aphrodite.
     "Too bad," said Artemis. "It's not a necessity. Having a cleaner is."

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

• Vintage publicity page
• Little, Brown publicity page
• Editions Héloïse d'Ormesson publicity page
• Goldmann publicity page
• Guanda publicity page
• Profile in The Telegraph
• Profile in The Scotsman

• Always the Critic
• armchairinterviews
• BiblioHistoria
• Le Bibliomane (French)
• book-blog.com
• Bookwitch
• The Boston Bibliophile
• Collected Miscellany
• The Compulsive Reader
• Conduite en état livresque (French)
• Culture Wars
• eclectic / eccentric
• Evolver (German)
• Financial Times
• Green Man Review
• The Guardian (scroll down for review)
• hack writers
• Hamilcar's Books
• The Independent
• Jandy's Reading Room
• Jenn's Bookshelf
• Kirkus Reviews
• Lupa Romana.de (German)
• MostlyFiction Book Reviews
• The Observer
• The Onion
• Pink Sheep Cafe
• Rullsenberg Rules
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Scotland on Sunday
• Simply Everything
• The Spectator (scroll down for review)
• Sunday Times
• The Telegraph
• That's What She Read
• The Times
• Trashionista
• 26 books
• Vulpes Libris
• The Washington Post
• write meg !

• IMDb page

• Official site

• Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next-series, starting with The Eyre Affair
• See Index of Contemporary British fiction
• See Index of books dealing with Religion

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

       British author Marie Phillips graduated from Cambridge University.

- Return to top of the page -

© 2007-2011 the complete review

Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links