To regular commuters, the idea that a portal to Hades opens from one of the stations on the Underground might not seem so strange. It would explain a lot about the hellishness of much Tube travel. That the Greek gods, driven from Mount Olympus, have chosen to take up residence in north London demands greater suspension of disbelief. Both conceits are at the heart of Marie Phillips’s debut novel. The former Olympians, their powers waning because nobody believes in them any longer, have come down in the world. Crammed into a squalid house near Hampstead Heath, the fractious deities are engaged in pet-tier squabbles than the almighty tiffs that divided them in Homeric times. Apollo, intent on a career as a television psychic, is irritated by the promise extracted from him by his twin sister, Artemis, that he will refrain from harming mortals. Aphrodite, now working in the telephone-sex industry, is bored by her siblings and excited only by the thought of causing trouble for them. Father Zeus, ageing and confused, is the madman in the attic, occasionally escaping to unleash his thunderbolts.

Into this household of divine discontent blunder mousy cleaner Alice and her would-be boyfriend Neil, a nerdy engineer. Their arrival sets in motion a sequence of events that eventually leads to Neil reprising the role of Orpheus and descending into the Underworld to rescue the woman he loves.

Phillips’s whimsical fantasy has much charm but little bite. If anything, her gods just don’t behave badly enough. Beneath the comedy of ancient deities let loose in the modern world lurks a cosiness about human love and relationships that, at odds with the profoundly unsentimental myths she is reworking, would have been laughed off Olympus in the good old days.

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips
Cape £12.99 pp282
Buy the book here at the offer price of £11.69 (inc p&p)

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