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Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Fat Charlie discovers after his father's death that he's the child of the trickster god, oh and he has a brother.

Aaaand I'm back to being unimpressed by Gaiman. After I enjoyed The Graveyard Book so much, too.

The problem with this book rests at a pretty high level of abstraction. At the most basic level it's a perfectly acceptable story, full of self-discovery and false arrest and a horrifying mother-in-law. And there are a few beats and turns of phrase that are just perfect. Which is why the three stars, by the way.

But thematically, this book is a real mess. See, the problem with trickster god stories is that half the time the trickster god is a hilarious guided missile of chaos – the sort of guy you invite to your party because if he's there, it'll make a mess, but it'll be awesome. And the other half of the time the trickster god is a worthless date raping son-of-a-bitch. Gaiman knew that, and he set up this pair of brothers to talk about that duality, and some others . . . and then there was just this big, splattered thematic mess and a date rapist I was supposed to, I don't know, actually like. Whatever.

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A village boy in Victorian England sees a falling star, and makes a rash promise to his beloved that he will bring it back to her. The journey takes him deep into faerie and entangles him with a succession battle, a peddler and a captive slave, and a powerfully evil witch also seeking the star. And as for that star, something which is just a lump of rock and metal in our world is, in faerie, a beautiful (and rather irritable) girl who’s just taken a nasty tumble.

Okay, confession, and don’t throw stones or anything: I’m not actually, you know, that into Gaiman. I mean, I adore Good Omens, but that’s a joint work and quite different from his usual stuff. And his usual stuff is . . . you know there’s nothing wrong with it, but it just doesn’t do much of anything for me.

Case in point, this pretty fairy tale for grown-ups. I do like these sorts of stories which haven’t had the spice of sexuality and violence sanitized out for the kiddies, and Gaiman writes with a deceptive simplicity that makes the prose almost invisible.

But I just didn’t care. The magic was occasionally kind of neat, and there were a few delightful references, but I never engaged beyond the very surface.

Gently charming, a bit wry, noticeably lacking in interesting female characters (though to be fair, I didn’t really find anyone interesting), a bit oddly paced through the middle. Probably more fun on the big screen, and how often do I say that?