Review: Anansi Boys

First off, this book is dedicated to me. Me, me, me. Gosh, how did Mr Gaiman know I’d always secretly wanted to be the subject of a book dedication? It made my whole day! Anyway, on to the review.

A friend once suggested to me that Aristophanes was a funnier writer than Shakespeare because, in addition to Sex Jokes and Gender-Changing Jokes, Aristophanes had also mastered the Fart Joke. So has Neil Gaiman. I’m not kidding here – early in the piece is a very long and elaborately told joke that refers to an old woman ‘flatulating’ as just one more of its precisely crude details. In fact, the whole book is littered with the commonplaces and little embarrassments of life: hair mayonnaise and turning up late to your father’s funeral and the shriek of a cat being shampooed. Why do I think this is worth mentioning? Because this is a story about gods and the myths that they wear, and amongst the minutiae of real life is the bitter taste of funeral wine, flavoured with aloes and rosemary, and the tears of broken-hearted virgins. The commonplaces give us, the humble readers, something to identify with, a way into the story, and a place to rest from the larger events of the story quietly gleaming behind them.

Anansi Boys is a lighter book than American Gods, the sort-of prequel. This doesn’t make it light-weight, but it floats more softly over the dark undercurrents of Gaiman’s mythology. American Gods dug right in to issues of transplantation and how to live in an alien country, an epic battle between entire pantheons of gods and the death and resurrection of the son of a god, always a powerful story, whichever god it might happen to be. Anansi Boys, suitable to the tale of a trickster god, is more about a private spat, and the horribly excruciating embarrassment that one’s parents can be. Gaiman still brings out the sense of separation from one’s point of origin, particularly for Fat Charlie, born in Florida to transplanted parents who was himself transplanted to London and who remade himself so successfully that his entire accent changed. However, while many characters are either living in different places than where they were born, or are the children of such parents, it is a more subtle feature than the set-piece descriptions of the arrival and failure of different colonisation expeditions that were a repeating motif in American Gods. (One of the thumbs up aspects of Anansi Boys is not just that Gaiman never assumes that characters will by default be Caucasian, but that he delays mentioning what ethnic background his characters have until we’ve already been introduced to them and gotten to know them a little (or a lot) first. For Gaiman, race is part of his characters’ identity, but it is not the thing that defines them. He gets another thumbs up for writing different dialects convincingly without resorting to phonetic spelling, which to me is more annoyance than it’s worth.)

It is also a story of integration. Fat Charlie at the beginning of the book is, in many ways, not whole. He clings to a bad job and a not-right relationship because they give him a sense of identity that he can’t provide for himself. His brother Spider, who at first sight seems to have it all, is also lacking a sense of completeness. The meeting of their antithetical personalities brings, as one would expect, an enormous clash – matter meets anti-matter kind of thing - that threatens to destroy Fat Charlie’s life and, more subtly, Spider’s as well. Over the course of the book, Spider’s personality seems more and more fragile, and I was never quite sure how much of the fragility came from crashing against the rock that was Charlie and how much was always there, hiding beneath his flamboyant outer persona. How the two brothers will resolve this conflict is the central theme of the book. Other writers have addressed this kind of Jungian division; for instance, Ursula LeGuin, who resolved it with the wizard Ged absorbing his own shadow personality in A Wizard of Earthsea by naming it as himself. Here, names are also an issue – Fat Charlie was named so by his father Anansi and spent his life trying to escape it. His means of growing out of his nickname, as his means of growing into his identity and coping both with his father’s death and the existence of his strange and fickle brother is wholly right.

This is a finely crafted story. Many of the minor details come around again later in the book in ways that are meaningful to the whole and not jarring to the reader. The story thrives on co-incidences and the surreal Just Because-ness of a fairy tale. Gaiman juggles the multiple threads of the tale so that they spiral together into the delicate pattern of a spider’s web. Without going into too much detail for those that haven’t read it yet, the end of the story shows the web completed. Gaiman comments in an interview at the end of the book that “in horror fiction people get what they deserve, whereas in comedies people get what they need.” In this story, both definitions apply, everybody ends up precisely where they ought to be.