Pre-enlightenment reading: "Ingenious Pain" by Andrew Miller

After two quickly-read, but not totally satisfying, books, this was a still quickly-read, but unambiguously excellent novel from Andrew Miller. This is in fact Miller's debut novel, published in 1997. Like his latest novel, Pure, which greatly impressed me a few months ago, Ingenious Pain is set in the eighteenth century in a world undergoing a fundamental shift, towards the Age of Reason. In Pure, the story is told in Paris, with hints of the impending Revolution infusing the story of a rationalist project in still largely pre-rationalist times. Ingenious Pain, notwithstanding episodes in France, Prussia and imperial Russia, is rooted in Georgian England, a mostly still-traditional pre-modern society, but one in which even relatively humble village parsons can grapple with loss of faith, and where gentlemen amateurs exhibit feverish scientific interest in anatomical dissections and freaks of nature.

Into this world, as the outcome of a sort-of rape of a young village woman in the icy darkness of the severe winter of 1739, is born James Dyer. He is a remarkable child: tall, handsome, confident, blue-eyed (when he should not be), but indubitably strange. Though he understands perfectly, he does not speak until he is ten years old. He seems impervious to pain. His first words come after he has fallen from a tree, shattering his leg. The leg is set and he recovers remarkably quickly, never complaining even of discomfort. At the same time he is oddly detached, uninterested in stories and plays, strangely unaffected when most of his family are carried off by smallpox. His interests are more what we would call "scientific"; his favorite object is an orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system, which accompanies him throughout his life, and his closest interest that of human anatomy. You might even say he rather resembles something which today we might call "autistic".

It transpires that James is indeed impervious to pain. This is spotted first by a travelling showman, actually the one who set his leg and - it is hinted - may be his father, and is exploited by him up and down the land in a stage show to sell quack remedies. The second to see the truth is a scientific gentleman, member of the Royal Academy no less, with an interest in freaks of nature, who sees through the showman's act and abducts the boy to safety in his vast country house (a weird disorientating prototype of the Versailles Palace in Pure) to become an object of study, along with a pair of conjoined twins and (perhaps) a mermaid. James lives through these experiences, which involve lots of needles being pushed through his hands, a tooth extraction, and the ripping out of fingernails (all for the sake of a sale or scientific investigation - the two come to seem oddly equivalent) with a curious detachment. He is only spurred to act when he witnesses a gruesomely botched public operation to separate the twins, an event which persuades him it is time to move on.

Mischievously upending reading: "Anansi Boys" by Neil Gaiman

Since my discovery of the wondrous Gaiman, I have periodically turned to this extraordinary writer for intensive reading relief. His astonishing imagination (American Gods), his powers of evocation (The Ocean at the End of the Lane) and his adept intermingling of the real and unreal (Neverwhere) are all extremely satisfying and come in page-turning packages.

So it was that on my last book-shopping spree in Nottingham, I decided to add "something by Gaiman" to the pile. I was slightly surprised to find that I have already read all the Gaiman  novels on the shelf (if we include Stardust, where I have seen the film), except one, this one, Anansi Boys. And so it was that this book was added to the pile.

In some ways, Anansi Boys revisits the world of American Gods. It depicts the real world, inhabited mostly by real people, but dispersed among them a set of their rather ragged, half-forgotten gods, still capable of malevolence, mayhem and mischief but nonetheless still largely ignored, forgotten or unknown. In Anansi Boys however, it is the real world story which predominates; the gods meddle and interfere, but the human outcome is ultimately the one that counts.

The story centres on Fat Charlie, who is not really fat, but whose nickname, like others bestowed by his father, tends to stick irrespective of reality. This is because, as we discover following Fat Charlie's father's unexpected death in the middle of a karaoke party, his father was no ordinary father, but Anansi, a notorious trickster among gods. This revelation, courtesy of a foursome of redoubtable Florida-based ladies Fat Charlie knows from his childhood, is swiftly followed by another. Fat Charlie, who has since settled in London living out an undistinguished life as a bookkeeper for a (it transpires) thoroughly crooked theatrical agent, discovers he has a brother, a brother who, seemingly, has inherited all the magical tricksterishness of the father so evidently absent in him.