Let's Pretend This Never Happened

Let me just say that I'm a dummy and I know a lot of people really like this book. But, the more I think about it, the less I like it. I'm just going to complain a little bit here.

There may be some mild spoilers after the jump.

So, toward the end of the book, Shadow realizes that his old cellmate Low Key Lyesmith is actually the Norse god Loki ("Lyesmith" because Loki is a trickster god and lies a lot, get it? "Low Key", as if that would ever be a real name, ugh.) Shadow asks Loki why he just didn't walk right out of the cell as soon as they locked him in. Loki says:

"It's easier just to do the time." He paused. Then, "You got to understand the god thing. It's not magic. It's about being you, but the you that people believe in. It's about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. It's about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize."

It sounds good, right? Kinda poetic and deep. The long-suffering Loki, doing his time, like, crystallizing.

But if you actually think about it, that whole paragraph is meaningless. And not only that, it contradicts all the rules that Gaiman has set up for his story. In Gaiman's world, a god can be born from anything (a story, an idea, a religion, a person who did some great things a long time ago, etc.) and the god becomes powerful enough to manifest a human form with which to interact with the human world. And as belief grows, that physical manifestation of the god becomes stronger and stronger. Begins to become more than human. Begins to crystallize. Then, as belief wanes, the physical manifestation grows weaker, begins to be bound by physical laws, can be imprisoned, can be killed even.

Fine but here's the thing, Loki doesn't come out and say "I couldn't get out of prison because nobody believes in me anymore and I'm too weak and I'm beginning to be bound by the laws of the physical world." He says "It's easier just to do the time." and "It's about being you..." It doesn't make any sense! If it was about being "the you that people believe in" then he would have just busted right out of jail like the god that people want to him to be. Why, why is it "easier just do do the time"?? How is it easier?? If anything, just doing the time makes him even less believable. It's these meaningless, dashed-off sentences, passed off as deep & simple explanations, that drive me crazy about this book. It just makes it obvious that Gaiman doesn't understand his own world. It's like he can't keep track of his own story.

There's one way to save this, and I hope it's true. Loki, the god, was a big-time liar. When Shadow asked him why he didn't walk out of jail, maybe Loki just made up that nice-sounding (meaningless) story to answer Shadow's question. The real reason Loki didn't leave the cell was that he was there to keep an eye on Shadow, but he couldn't tell him that. If Gaiman intended Loki's answer to be a lie, then that's pretty sharp and very subtle. But I doubt it's true.


And another thing:

Wednesday and Shadow are running from the authorities and they come up to a roadblock. Wednesday tells Shadow to turn off the road and they slip "backstage" into god-land, a sort of parallel universe outside of time and reality. They run around "backstage" for a while and then pop back out into the real world at a safe place. A little later, Shadow sees the date on a newspaper and realizes that while they were backstage for only a few hours, an entire month has passed in the real world.

Cool! But why? And even worse, this whole parallel, non-linear time effect is NEVER brought up again. It shows up for one single sentence and then there is no explanation, no re-visiting the idea, nothing. Here's why: Gaiman was sitting there, writing that page, and he had a cool little idea so he stuck it into the book. It's completely out of context, completely out of any overall plan or arc that he had in mind, and it betrays a kind of off-the-cuff, unplanned storyline that never knows where it's going.



One more thing:

Here is Gaiman looking down at the great battlefield of the gods and describing the scene:

"There were so many of them waiting there, in the moonlight, at the foot of Lookout Mountain."

I feel like Microsoft Word would underline that sentence with green squiggles. (UPDATE: It doesn't, but it should.) By the way, that sentence is singled out as its own paragraph and serves as a break between two sections of the book. He sounds like a 12 year old girl..."There were, like, sooo many of them down there."