Anansi Boys

In my last book review I said I would be doing The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest as my next book; however, on reflection, having already reviewed the first two books in the series, I don't feel like I have anything important left to say about them. The third book basically continues on in much the same way as the second, and there wasn't anything in particular to differentiate the two - it's like the second half of one really long novel. So instead, I decided to review another book I read recently, Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.

The main character of Anansi Boys is Charles 'Fat Charlie' Nancy. Fat Charlie spent most of his formative years living under his embarrassing prankster of a father; twenty years on, when he receives an invitation to his father's funeral, he learns that Mr. Nancy was actually a God (magic powers, psychic suggestion, the whole lot) and that he actually had two sons - and it was Fat Charlie's brother who inherited the God-ness. And of course, all hell breaks loose when Fat Charlie invites his newly discovered brother round to stay...

First off, the writing. I don't really have anything to say about it, other than this: it's Gaiman. If you've ever read one of his novels, or graphic novels, or short stories, or film scripts, you know exactly what I'm talking about. As far as I'm concerned, Gaiman is unmatched when it comes to writing. Even if his stories were god-awful (and they aren't, by the way), reading them would still be fun because he tells them so interestingly. There's a quote from a review somewhere that says Gaiman's prose 'dances and dazzles', and I couldn't put it better myself. It is simultaneously fascinating and unusual in it's style, and clear in such a way that every sentence feels hand-crafted. It combines the verbosity of Micheal Moorcock with the concise readability of Chris Wooding. It dances and it dazzles.

The novel has often been reported as a sequel to one of Gaiman's more well-known works, American Gods, as Mr. Nancy, who is a minor character in this novel, also appears in that story, again as a minor character. Gaiman himself, however, has stated that '...it's set in the same world as American Gods.' I have to go with Gaiman on this one; the books are connected, certainly, but this definitely isn't a sequel. There are some similarities between the two, such as the 'dreams' that are actually connections to the world of the Gods, but Anansi Boys is a very different style of tale to American Gods, as the former is a small, personal story, with a main cast of maybe six characters, and the latter is a grand, country-spanning, almost war film level epic. The two also have very different themes, as American Gods is all about the heart of America, which Anansi Boys (set as it is mostly in London) obviously is not.

The story of the book is typically brilliant (I expected nothing less from Gaiman), though it isn't quite up there with Neverwhere and American Gods. Some of the characters are just a tad one dimensional, though these characters are mostly played for comic relief and so it doesn't harm the story too much. The more interesting characters (special mention to the wonderful creation that is Grahame Coats) make up for this, and some of them are among the best of Gaiman's fictional persons. It is these characters that make the story, as the plot itself is fairly straightforward, with no real twists or turns after the initial revelation of 'your father was a god'; aside from one rather obvious betrayal that I saw coming a long way off. But the characters, as I say, are what makes the book so special, with the likes of Fat Charlie and Spider developing in interesting and unexpected ways. Fat Charlie in particular has a really spectacular arc during the course of the story, and by the end of it he's changed in the most wonderful of ways. He becomes everything you want him to be, and it's a sign of how excellent Gaiman's characterisation is. I really empathised with the character, more so than I have with most protagonists.

There isn't much else I want to say about the book, so in conclusion; it's another absolutely outstanding novel by one of my favourite authors. Definitely check it out, or check out one of Gaiman's other works at least.

I'm probably going to take a break from book reviews for the time being, as I haven't got anything new to read and I was falling behind on them anyway. Not sure what I'll write instead, but I guess I'll find out? Thanks for reading.