Okay, try this one on…going with the theory that there are mortal equivalents to the world of the gods, the boy in the attic is Odin. Odin is introduced in the chapter immediately following the one about the boy (similar to the Draycotts and Toe Rag and the GEM meeting their vehicular fates close together at the end). There are several parallels to their living arrangements - both near a window, sprawled comfortably, only getting up to walk the few steps to the bathroom, fixated on nothing but totally zoning out (sleeping or tv) and having terrible smiting power far greater than their appearance suggests.
Also, as his only son, you would think the boy would have been lavished with gifts and attention and love, but since Antsey was so focused on success and money he had just shuffled him off up to the attic and stopped thinking about him or seeing him, yet still the boy lived on. Similarly, the once worshiped gods were ignored and became torpid. (The boy lives in the small cramped attic even though Dirk sees a perfectly good unused bedroom down at the bottom of the rickety white stairway to the heavens. The description mentions a chest that had been “revived by being plunged into a vat of acid” - maybe some kind of allusion to hippies and LSD based ‘spirituality’ that supplanted the gods?)
Perhaps “Bob”, the burly cop they call in to sort him out when he’s striking out at people is Thor, who gets swatted away, and the one who comes in the van with the calming portable TV is Standish from Woodshead, or perhaps Nurse Bailey. (they mention specifically he arrives in a van, and the only other mention of vans I remember in the book is the discreet grey transport van Odin takes when he travels to and from Woodshead.
This sets up an interesting commentary, in that everything about the boy’s den of repose is dark, squalid, cheap and soulless, Odin’s rest is all perfect cleanliness and light and crisp smooth sheets. Odin has a picturesque fruit bowl he never eats and the boy is constantly shovelling down Pot Noodle. The boy’s whole world has become nothing but television and random unfulfilling consumerism (the scattered objects of desire cut from magazines and stuck to the walls).
Glad you got something out of it, Ebow. The Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo is interesting. I think I can see it both ways. The leader of the group (Pain, which seems like both a likely name for a rock star and a likely piece of some kind of underlying metaphor) says there’s an interesting story behind the name (but, Dirk says, it turned out not to be, since the story he gave was “It can mean whatever people want it to mean”) I think it might just be another example of how art and music, once inspired by or dedicated to the gods, or composed with some kind of message or emotion in mind, has possibly become just a random, acid-fueled dadaist flailing about, with no real deeper meaning derived or intended, written to sell and make money, and definitely not “divinely” inspired.
The Asimov quote reminded me of a Robert Heinlein quote, that might be just as appropriate here: “Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.”
[One other thing I just noticed - I thought the hospital was just named Woodshead so he could make the “something nasty in the woodshed” joke. But the sickness that kills the gods is the onx, the giving up the will to live and lying down until a tree grows out of their head. And that’s basically what Odin is doing…at Woodshead.]
I did not understand that the Draycott contract and the Toe Rag bill were actually two different things. I was probably mislead by the fact that Draycott asserts that the Odin power is subdivided into many people and, at the same time, all the people that get the hot potato become rich and successful. So it turns out that the things are not connected, right? They are not the same people?