Stories And Pain

There's a brilliant segment somewhere around the middle of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, one of the detachable segments entitled Coming To America, in this case given the date 1778 and featuring the enslaved twins Wututu and Agasu, which is so powerful it fairly burns off the page. It deals with something that only fiction can deal with in any sort of decent, honourable way, the pain of other people's lives, especially those whose lives have been extremely painful ones, partly by admitting that it's really impossible to 'deal with' such pain in any realistic sense.

Gaiman seems to me a bit of an on-off writer. When he's good, as he is in the segment referred to above, he's astonishing, but you have to deal with some fairly routine stuff to get to those patches. Fortunately there's always a tremendous narrative drive, even when you get a sense of something routine going-on and what's routine for this writer - I'm thinking of a sort of gothic attitudinising here - is never less than imaginatively engaging.

But I think it's that sense of the pain of others, the sometimes impossible demands of existence, that drives the fiction and is never far too far below whatever is going on at surface level. I'd also guess that Gaiman often doesn't quite know where his stories are going - much of American Gods feels improvisatory in that sense - and that leaves his fiction open to making the kind of discoveries that really hurt, even if the pain is only fictional. I've just finished a fairly battered copy of the author's preferred text of the novel, from the library at work - it seemed an appropriate way to read a story that itself seems fairly battered at times - and I know I'm scorched enough not to want to re-read any time soon. A good sign.