Gods Behaving Badly, by Marie Phillips

It's not easy being part of the Greek pantheon. Especially when your family has been living (if immortals can be said to "live") in a too-small, revoltingly dirty and rat-infested house in Islington since 1665, "when the plague was keeping property prices rock bottom", and just before the Great Fire "sent them spiralling upwards again". It's particularly tough on Artemis. If being goddess of chastity and hunting isn't a thankless enough task in 21st-century London, she has to cope with her priapic twin brother Apollo's habit of turning girls into trees when he says "Hello. Do you want to give me a blow job?", and they don't.

Marie Phillips's first novel is a joyful frolic around a simple and funny conceit. What if the Greek Gods were around now, sporting their ancient Hellenic responsibilities, attitudes and amoralities, but dangerously bored and with mysteriously waning powers? She has given some of them jobs. Artemis walks dogs, Aphrodite is a phone-sex operator, Dionysus runs a nightclub. Meanwhile, Athena, goddess of wisdom, is busy researching why they're not as strong as they used to be and what, if anything, can be done about it. Unfortunately, she has trouble getting the other gods to understand as "wisdom and clarity are not quite the same thing", and her practice of multiplying abstruse words into abstruse sentences renders her unintelligible.

In contrast, Phillips's prose is straightforwardly clear, allowing the comedy to burst through the events that unfold after Apollo refuses to heat the water so Aphrodite can have a hot shower. "According to everything he'd heard about the place, hell hath no fury like Aphrodite scorned. Improbably, though, he felt slightly cheered. Her revenge would be swift and no doubt deadly, but at least it would pass the time."

And so it does. Aphrodite's score-settling implicates her son, Eros (a convert to Christianity, wings concealed under nerdy sweater), a cleaner named Alice and Alice's not-quite-boyfriend and Scrabble-mate Neil. These two typically insignificant humans experience a complete undermining of their belief systems and are then required to behave heroically. With a capital H.

Although most of the action takes place in, around and under north London, we are, obviously, way out west of realism. Given this, it seems odd that the only hang-on-a-minute moment in the plot occurs in a real-world situation. Alice loses her job and, somehow, both the reason why and the manner in which she finds out fail to convince. That incident aside, Phillips covers all her unlikely bases with a deftly-woven toga of plausibility, making suspension of disbelief both easy and pleasurable.

It is all very, very funny and, although the admin areas of this Underworld have a faint whiff of Will Self's Dulston, delightfully original as well as acutely clever in a makes-you-think-about-contemporary-morality-without-realising kind of way. If, like me, you've forgotten almost everything you ever knew about the subject, this novel will not only make you laugh and give you a nice warm fuzzy feeling; it will also provide a good basic grounding in Greek mythology.

Lisa Gee's 'Friends' is published by Bloomsbury

Jonathan Cape £12.99 (277pp) £11.50 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897