The debut novel from Marie Philips, Gods Behaving Badly takes a humorous leap at updating Greek gods’ attributes for the modern world: Apollo does low-budget TV, Ares is the cause of political problems in oil-laden countries, and Aphrodite is a phone sex operative. And immortality is now fluid instead of guaranteed — and the glass is far from half-full. Many of the main players in the Greek pantheon (Artemis, Apollo, Aphrodite, Ares, Demeter, Dionysus, Athena, Hephaestus, Zeus and Hera) now live in a decrepit house in London, in squalor, doing what they can to make themselves useful and wiling away the millennia in petty acts of revenge, which is more or less where Gods Behaving Badly begins.
After failing to warm up the shower for Aphrodite, Apollo takes a role as an appropriately Greek-styled TV fortune teller and finds himself in arrow-induced love with Alice, a cleaner who has brought a friend, Neil, to watch the show. Afterward, Apollo follows the audience list door-to-door unsuccessfully, and mopes in deep despair until Alice, recently fired and going freelance, shows up at the door and convinces Artemis to hire her. After Apollo realizes she works in the house, he begins to serenade her, only to be shot down and — even worse — unable to take revenge on her himself after swearing an oath to not harm mortals for ten years. He can, however, coerce others into doing it for him, and does, sending Neil on an Orpheus-esque quest to get her back and accidentally causing the return of their immortality and power.
Because Gods Behaving Badly is about mythology, it incorporates elements of myth story-telling, which gives it a plot construction which is not so much clichéd as several thousand years out-of-date. The “boy likes girl, boy doesn’t tell girl, girl dies, boy brings her back and they get married” aspect is nothing new despite the somewhat amusing antics of the gods — who, considering they used to wield the power of the, well, gods, and now live in a shack, seem like they should be a little more wrathful.
Some elements also border on strange, for example, Eros’ apparent conversion to Christianity. Or how it is taken for granted that once the gods have their ancient-Greece powers back, the world will have no objection to things being run the way they used to be. The result is a lukewarm read that, while moderately enjoyable, is far from essential.