Neil Gaiman is one of those authors that I always wanted to try reading but wasn’t sure if I would like and didn’t want to spend good money on a book I wasn’t going to finish. As an avid Terry Pratchett fan, I bought “Good Omens” which I thought was great, but, as an avid fan, it just seemed like a darker version of PTerry’s usual style, particularly as I then followed it up with “Night Watch”. Anyway, thanks to a BookCrossing bookring, I finally decided to give him a go for nothing more than the price of postage to San Antonio. Long story slightly shorter, I really enjoyed “American Gods” and I’ll certainly be looking out for Gaiman next time I’m at Half Price Books or Waterstones, depending which country I’m in.
Anyway, on to the question. Most of the gods in the book were either explained, at least in terms of their pantheon, or I could at least take an educated guess at who they were. One has left me completely stumped though - the god who is instantly forgettable. He appears twice as far as I remember - Shadow drives him from the House On The Rock (after the carousel scene) to the restaurant where he is abducted, and, later, he steps up to say something (which was generally agreed upon but, of course, forgotten as soon as the next god stepped up) before the battle begins.
Can anyone enlighten me as to who this god is and where he was originally from? Have I just glossed over something in the text that should have told me? Or is it that there is something deeper in his lack of presence that I’m being dumb and missing?
By the way, I think that Neverwhere was better than American Gods. Give it a shot. Sometimes I think that Neil was trying very hard to write in an “American” style, and it was occasionally a bit forced. (Not that I could define what I mean by “American style” writing…)
I briefly entertained the notion that it could have been Hypnos, God of Sleep. The Greeks had a goddess of memory, Menemosyne, but it’s clearly not her. After that, I drew a blank, and decided to leave at least one mystery.
I tried to read Neverwhere, I really did, but I just couldn’t get into it. I’ll have to give it another go at some point, but I found it rather torturous. Not nearly as bad as some I’ve read, but I just couldn’t bear to waste my time when I wasn’t that interested.
nitpick: Mnemosyne, not Menemosyne And no, it wasn’t me!
The American Gods section of the Neil Gaiman message boards has more discussion than you want to read about this and about the other gods in the book. You either come out of there convinced its one god or another, or you come out feeling like a total moron - at least that was my experience!
Despite my username, I know depressingly little about the various mythologies (I chose the name because I liked the sound of it, and I can be oddly forgetful about some things, and have a sharp memory about bizarre other things). I plan on catching up on my mythology before rereading AG.
Do try and read Neverwhere - it really is a great book (I’ve read it twice now). Coraline is good too, as are the short stories in Smoke and Mirrors…basically, I like everything by Gaiman that I’ve read so far!
Thanks for the replies and the links guys. I guess until the people on those message boards get around to lobbying Gaiman to release the name we all have to come up with whatever theory we think fits best. And there are some pretty interesting ones there that people have put a lot of work into.
Personally I liked the idea that he was the Judeo-Christian God for a short while, but now I’m liking him being Morpheus, the god of dreams. After all, the most common dream of mankind is of wealth even if we don’t always like to admit it. Of course it also helps that Morpheus is also known as the Sandman…
Oh, and oops. Completely forgot about the casino scene with him in. Not that that surprises me considering the topic.
I seem to be alone in this, but I don’t believe for one minute that this god is taken from the mythology or religion of any culture. If you “search long and hard and scour books and web sites and whatnot” you may learn a lot about world religion, but you’re not going to find the “right answer” because it doesn’t exist.
I kind of guessed he was one of the he was the personification Money which a lot of people worseship. And yes, the casino stuff caused a lot of that, plus the fact that he was a snappy dresser, if I re-call that correctly. The forgetting him all the time metaphore I explained by the fact that money isn’t really a thing at all, just a placeholder, something you exchange for something else.
Not an argument I would like to defend against some well informed fan who has read the book eighteen times, just the first thing I thought of when reading it.
Is there a god who is worshipped by other gods? The reason I ask is because Wednesday quite obviously had no problem remembering him, but humans were unable to it seems.
And if he was a god for humans, thier inability to remember him would be the end of his existence.
Here is a good site. It doesn’t have your answer, but it does have the names of the other gods.
My theory is that Gaiman made up his version of Lewis Carrol’s “why is a raven like a writing desk?” question. He didn’t have an answer but someone else came up with a really really good one.
What are you talking about? I don’t remember that part of the book at all.
IIRC, Neverwhere was written as a tv show first, and then as a book. I happened to see the end of the TV show (it was showing on PBS - I was channel surfing) before I read it, which I think helped when I read the book.
I think it might be Hades/Pluto, as he was the god of the underworld, and, as precious metals come from there he was also the god of wealth. Furthermore I remember reading that Hades was not his name, simply what people called him (big difference ya?) but they did not wish to say his name lest it attract his attention.
