National Post (National Edition)
TV ADAPTATION OF AMERICAN GODS DOES RIGHT BY NOVEL.
NOVELIST’S AMERICAN GODS GETS EVEN BIGGER ON THE SMALL SCREEN
BOOK REVIEW
American Gods By Neil Gaiman William Morrow 560 pp; $24.99
When considering the screen adaptation of a novel one usually has to confront a single question: what does it lose? Typically, the adaptation process is one of distillation, of capturing the highlights while sacrificing other material (too often character notes, subtler themes and nuance). This is largely a matter of logistics. Even with the running time of an extended series (think Game of Thrones), there simply isn’t enough time to incorporate even the most significant material from the novel, let alone everything.
Those logistical restrictions don’t seem to exist for American Gods, the television adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel, currently three-quarters of the way through its first season on Starz (Amazon Prime Video in Canada).
American Gods is the story of Shadow Moon, who is released a few days early from a three-year prison sentence on the news of his wife’s death. Through a chance encounter with the enigmatic Mr. Wednesday, Shadow is drawn into a war between the Old Gods (incarnations such as Odin and the Norse pantheon, African trickster Anansi, Kali, and Thoth and Anubis — all who came to America with their immigrant believers) and the New Gods (Media; The Technical Boy, an incarnation of technology and the internet; and The Intangibles, the “invisible hands” behind modern economies).
According to early reports, the first season of the adaptation will cover only the first third of the novel; at this pace, the complete adaptation will span three seasons and twenty-four hours of television. American Gods is a long book, but twenty-four hours is a lot of TV (ask Keifer Sutherland). Clearly, this adaptation, helmed by writer/producer Bryan Fuller of Hannibal renown, is best viewed as an expansion, not just of the novel but of Gaiman’s fictional universe. The extra material, far from padding, provides a shift in the focus of the novel, a deepening of its characters and a deeper exploration of its topical themes.
The most immediate shift comes in the nature of Shadow Moon himself. Gaiman’s Shadow is taciturn and inwardly focused, lending a stoic insularity to even the most cosmic of events. Internal monologue doesn’t work especially well in visual media, however, so Fuller’s Shadow is a more expressive, more questioning character, actively exploring his circumstances. It’s a necessary change, but one which may unsettle fans of the novel.
Those same fans were likely surprised when Episode Four shifted focus away from Shadow’s journey to Laura Moon, Shadow’s wife. Beginning just prior to her first meeting Shadow, the episode explores Laura’s life, before Shadow and with him, during his imprisonment and after her death (and mysterious resurrection). These are the sort of character grace notes usually cut due to time and space in adaptations, but not only are they present here, they’re new. In the novel, we see Laura primarily through Shadow’s eyes, and nothing of her life prior to his involvement. The adaptation not only deepens her character, it also complicates Shadow: their relationship wasn’t as idyllic as one would have thought from his perspective, and the fact that Shadow is unaware of that, or has glossed over it in his mind, is a powerful new wrinkle — further complicated by the fact that Laura seems to have returned from the grave more loving, and more defensive, of Shadow, than she ever was in life.
The television show is also explicitly rooted in contemporary issues. The novel featured a number of “Coming to America” scenes on the arrival of the Old Gods in the New World; Fuller has added a number of these sequences, deliberately pointed, if not incendiary. After the violent lynching at the conclusion of the pilot, the second episode, for example, begins aboard a slave ship in 1697, with one of the captives praying to Anansi for intercession. When the nattily dressed Mr. Nancy arrives, he offers the captives a prophecy, an encapsulation of 300 years of black history in the United States. He begins, “You want help? Fine. Let me tell you a story. ‘Once upon a time a man got fucked.’ Now how is that for a story? ‘Cause that’s the story of black people in America.” Anansi’s prophecy incites a rebellion, and the god arrives in America on the burning shards of the ship. It’s a powerful, galvanizing moment, and Orlando Jones as Anansi is a force of nature.
Equally powerful is the most recent episode, which begins with a vignette set on the contemporary southern border, following a group of Mexicans who swim across the Rio Grande only to be greeted in the promised land by a hail of bullets. Those bullets come from a factory town in Virginia, populated by guntoting, well-scrubbed American fascists. The town — like the factory, like the bullets — is named for Vulcan, Roman god of fire and metalworking. You should be able to guess why by now: bullets and the blood of racial violence are a new American religion, an ongoing, potent sacrifice.
As the story of immigrants — both human and divine — American Gods was always going to feel topical, but Fuller and his team have doubled down, turning subtext into what feels like an explicit rebuke not only of the current American government, but also of a swath of the American population as well. It’s a deeply unsettling gesture.
Fuller and his team (with Gaiman’s participation) have created the rarest of adaptations, a work that will more than satisfy lovers of the book, deepening the fictional experience, while at the same time engaging with the world at large. It’s impressive not just as an adaptation, but also in its own right.