Author(s): Marie Phillips

Fiction

It's not easy being part of the Greek pantheon. Especially when your family has been living (if immortals can be said to "live") in a too-small, revoltingly dirty and rat-infested house in Islington since 1665, "when the plague was keeping property prices rock bottom", and just before the Great Fire "sent them spiralling upwards again". It's particularly tough on Artemis. If being goddess of chastity and hunting isn't a thankless enough task in 21st-century London, she has to cope with her priapic twin brother Apollo's habit of turning girls into trees when he says "Hello. Do you want to give me a blow job?", and they don't. Marie Phillips's first novel is a joyful frolic around a simple and funny conceit. What if the Greek Gods were around now, sporting their ancient Hellenic responsibilities, attitudes and amoralities, but dangerously bored and with mysteriously waning powers? She has given some of them jobs. Artemis walks dogs, Aphrodite is a phone-sex operator, Dionysus runs a nightclub. Meanwhile, Athena, goddess of wisdom, is busy researching why they're not as strong as they used to be and what, if anything, can be done about it. Unfortunately, she has trouble getting the other gods to understand as "wisdom and clarity are not quite the same thing", and her practice of multiplying abstruse words into abstruse sentences renders her unintelligible. Until a meek cleaner and her would-be boyfriend come into their lives, and turn the world literally upside down. GODS BEHAVING BADLY is that rare thing, a charming, funny, utterly original first novel that satisfies the head and the heart.