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Same Old, Same Old
Feb 2007
Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman - Headline Review, 2006
* * *
This is a sort-of sequel to American Gods, a book that I read some time ago and remember next to nothing about. This one is better - the first half in particular is an amusing comedy of manners - but the themes will seem very familiar to readers of Gaiman’s previous works.
Our hero, Fat Charlie, is an engagingly uncool everyman who clearly has Arthur Dent in his recent literary ancestry. His immediate family is more of a problem. For a start there is his embarrassing father, who heaped humiliations (including his nickname) on him when he was a child and who begins the book by dying in the arms of a blonde in a karaoke bar. At the funeral, Fat Charlie learns that his father is in fact the arachnid trickster god Anansi, and that he has a brother called Shadow who can be summoned by whispering his name to a spider. Inevitably he does so, which turns out to be an unwise move because Shadow decides that he rather likes Fat Charlie’s house, job and girlfriend and uses his inherited godly powers to acquire them. Fat Charlie’s increasingly desperate attempts to get his brother out of his life form the basis of much of the comedy in the first half of the book and much of the darkness in the second, as he inadvertantly stirs up old emnities with Tiger, a god from whom Anansi stole all the world’s stories.
There is a good supporting cast, including Fat Charlie’s girlfriend Rosie and her uptight and disapproving mother, his boss Grahame Coats (whose repellence is neatly summed up by his frequent use of the hideous neologism “absatively”, a combination of “absolutely” and “positively”), and a feisty cop called Daisy. Most of the characters appear to be non-white, a rare and brave move by a Caucasian writer.
All in all it’s an enjoyable read - the style is as witty and sparkling as Good Omens - but it is let down by some formulaic American movie-style plotting, particularly at the climax. Also, the themes are the same old Gaiman stand-bys of supernatural intrusions into the real world, families of gods and the importance of stories, which he handled brilliantly in the Sandman comics and has been revisiting with decreasing effect in all his novels since. This is one of his better re-treads, but it would be nice to see him do something original.
Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman - Headline Review, 2006
* * *
This is a sort-of sequel to American Gods, a book that I read some time ago and remember next to nothing about. This one is better - the first half in particular is an amusing comedy of manners - but the themes will seem very familiar to readers of Gaiman’s previous works.
Our hero, Fat Charlie, is an engagingly uncool everyman who clearly has Arthur Dent in his recent literary ancestry. His immediate family is more of a problem. For a start there is his embarrassing father, who heaped humiliations (including his nickname) on him when he was a child and who begins the book by dying in the arms of a blonde in a karaoke bar. At the funeral, Fat Charlie learns that his father is in fact the arachnid trickster god Anansi, and that he has a brother called Shadow who can be summoned by whispering his name to a spider. Inevitably he does so, which turns out to be an unwise move because Shadow decides that he rather likes Fat Charlie’s house, job and girlfriend and uses his inherited godly powers to acquire them. Fat Charlie’s increasingly desperate attempts to get his brother out of his life form the basis of much of the comedy in the first half of the book and much of the darkness in the second, as he inadvertantly stirs up old emnities with Tiger, a god from whom Anansi stole all the world’s stories.
There is a good supporting cast, including Fat Charlie’s girlfriend Rosie and her uptight and disapproving mother, his boss Grahame Coats (whose repellence is neatly summed up by his frequent use of the hideous neologism “absatively”, a combination of “absolutely” and “positively”), and a feisty cop called Daisy. Most of the characters appear to be non-white, a rare and brave move by a Caucasian writer.
All in all it’s an enjoyable read - the style is as witty and sparkling as Good Omens - but it is let down by some formulaic American movie-style plotting, particularly at the climax. Also, the themes are the same old Gaiman stand-bys of supernatural intrusions into the real world, families of gods and the importance of stories, which he handled brilliantly in the Sandman comics and has been revisiting with decreasing effect in all his novels since. This is one of his better re-treads, but it would be nice to see him do something original.