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.


The best part of this book - and its funniest - is the part when Fat Charlie's brother, Spider, descends on his humdrum London world, and duly dismantles it, with a mischievous destructiveness we can only partially hold against him. Of course, the upending of Fat Charlie's life, encompassing the loss of fiancée, job, reputation and, at one point, liberty, is the beginning of a new story, as Charlie sets out to take control again. To do this, he has to get in touch with his, um, god-side, something he achieves in a manner and with a series of consequences which constitute the meat of this page-turning book.

It is fun to read, no question, and Gaiman's formidable story-telling abilities and feats of imagination permeate its pages. Somehow, though, Anansi Boys does not quite touch the heights reached by the other novels I mentioned at the start. I wouldn't say that Gaiman is on cruise control here, but he does not stretch and mind-blow as he can. Not that this is not imaginative, just that, at least if you have read American Gods, it doesn't astound you in the way that, at least in my case, every other Gaiman book has done. Entertain, yes, amuse, yes, involve, also, but surprise, not so much.

So, a recommendation. As a nice recreational read, certainly, but for Gaiman at his best, start elsewhere.