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A choice of first novels

Molly Guinness

Wednesday, 5th September 2007

Giles Wareing, a freelance journalist, is days away from his 40th birthday...

Tim Dowling has the touch of Kingsley Amis in reproducing boring conversations with awful accuracy, and the more his hero offends those around him, the more one likes him. There is something about Giles Wareing that makes even his descriptions of fixing the dishwasher hilarious and the excerpts from his slapdash journalism are perfectly pitched: just bad enough, and, also, just good enough.

Dowling keeps up a strong narrative thread in The Giles Wareing Haters’ Club (Picador, £14.99) and never for a moment loses sight of his primary purpose and talent: to be amusing. This is a wonderful book.

Marie Phillips, too, is very funny. In Gods Behaving Badly (Cape, £12.99) she has moved the Olympian gods to north London, where they squabble among themselves and try to hold down modern jobs; Apollo is a TV psychic; Artemis (hunting, and chastity, and the moon) walks dogs; Dionysus runs a night club; Aphrodite’s phone sex is out of this world; Athene has been reduced to a verbose bluestocking whose wisdom the rest of the gods find too boring to listen to; Eros is trying to become a good Christian but finds it hard with a mother like Aphrodite. The gods’ power is diminishing and must be used sparingly; Apollo, rather profligate with his, is put under oath to mend his ways, but this becomes difficult when Artemis hires a cleaner.

The gods’ interaction with mortals is brilliant, divinities casually assuming superiority, humans assuming they’re mad or awful or both. Most of the gods find their roles alarmingly sidelined in the modern world, though Hermes is busier than ever, running the world’s economy and escorting the dead to Angel tube station — Charon has switched his boat for a train.

The story moves with crazy pace — Hermes, also god of coincidences, is helpful — but never becomes annoying or confusing. The necessary mythology is filled in rapidly and casually in conversation, so it doesn’t matter how much or little the reader knows about the Greek gods; knowledge will only confirm that Phillips has captured their childish irresponsibility perfectly while amusing her readers with an unlikely successor to Hercules and a touching human love story while she’s about it.