Book Beat

"The Lightning Thief,” the first adventure in the "Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series, is, first and foremost, young adult fiction. The sixth graders with whom I work read the novel with enthusiasm, and as they concluded their semester, I realized how much I, too, became engrossed in its entertaining cast of characters.

But why? Why did the arrogant Zeus, the ruler of all gods and the sky, intrigue me? Or why did the deception of Ares create such drama?

Zeus. Hera. Athena. Hermes. When we hear these names, we think invincible. Beautiful. Wise. These gods and goddesses have immense strengths, but also severe flaws and insatiable desires.

I then began to ponder my obsession with the ensemble show "Lost,” and how, by the third season, distinctions between protagonists and antagonists were no longer clear: the good guys were tragic and flawed, while the "Others” had soft spots, too, responding in ways that were sometimes forgivable. God, mortal, hero, villain — in the most engaging narratives, these labels disintegrate.

We’re attracted to the imperfect gods in Riordan’s tale, and the increasingly complex characters on the mysterious island of "Lost,” because we see our own shortcomings in each of them. Whether we’re aware or not, we identify with and respond to these characters: ones with high hopes and aspirations, unmistakable flaws and hidden demons.

In class, I saw how excited the kids were when talking about the gods. I wondered if any new books weaving Greek mythology, for more mature readers, were out there.

I came upon "Gods Behaving Badly,” the debut novel by British author Marie Phillips, which follows the 12 Olympians, also alive in the present day. But in Phillips’ world, the gods have fallen quite a distance from Mount Olympus: they now live in a cramped townhouse in North London.

Phillips, born in 1976, is a Cambridge anthropology graduate who wrote the manuscript while working at a bookstore in London. Like Riordan, she’s given Greek mythology a facelift, but unlike "The Lightning Thief,” her comedic adventures turn a bit naughty.

Living in the house since the 1660s, the Olympians, now miserable roommates in a seedy place, still rule the world and battle each other, but their powers are waning, forcing them to take on modern "mortal” jobs that reinterpret their ancient supernatural abilities.

In this "Real World” for the Greek gods, Dionysus, the god of wine, is a DJ who runs a nightclub. Artemis, the goddess of hunting, is a dog walker. Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, is a phone sex operator. Apollo — god of the sun and poetry — is a TV psychic, and one of the more disgruntled housemates. (He turns a Goldman Sachs market trader into a tree, for instance, after she refuses an indecent proposal.)

Artemis hires an average-looking mortal woman, Alice, to tidy their house. Out to sabotage Apollo, Aphrodite instructs her son, Eros, to shoot Apollo with one of his arrows, causing him to fall in love with Alice. But Alice denies Apollo — a huge blow to his titanic ego — so he tricks Zeus into killing her with his lightning bolt.

Artemis then takes Alice’s boyfriend, an engineer named Neil, into the underworld, whose entrance is hidden behind a wall at a Tube station. Neil meets Charon, the ferryman of this surreal realm, and confronts Hades, who asks him to regain Alice — and save the world.

In Phillips’ lighthearted and occasionally raunchy tale, the gods are indeed powerful, but their weaknesses, exposed through their machinations and indulgences, reveal how far they’ve tumbled from their pedestals. Timid and nerdy, Alice and Neil at first seem to have no business mingling in such company, yet their entanglement reveals how that line between god and human, as well as good and evil and love and hate, is blurred.

For more on Marie Phillips, check out http://www.mariephillips.co.uk. (Her blog, which currently obsesses over "Strictly Come Dancing,” the British competition exported to the United States in the form of "Dancing with the Stars,” is at http://womanwhotalkedtoomuch.blogspot.com.)