Anansi Boys | |||||
Neil Gaiman | |||||
William Morrow, 335 pages | |||||
A review by Alma A. Hromic
By this stage in his career, Gaiman is in the enviable position of being a Household Name and legions of fans out there not only
buy his books as soon as they hit the shelves but pre-order them in droves in the months prior to that. Contraband pre-publication
copies even manage to turn up on Ebay. Gaiman is certainly one of those writers whose work I will buy without so much as having
set eyes on it, simply because I know he'll tell a rollicking good tale.
He does so in Anansi Boys, certainly -- this is a book that obviously enjoyed being written. There's a sense of fun about
it that's infectious. However, it is also more nebulous than any other Gaiman book I've read, and seems to want to be a number
of different things without quite being any of them. The thread that joins these somewhat disparate parts is the inimitable Gaiman
humour and wit -- and the book brims with that. If ever they make a movie of this they may have to give that lime of Fat Charlie's
a line in the credits. But the novel fractures a little as a straight narrative voice and is interspersed with chatty
storyteller-to-reader asides disguised as "and this too is an Anansi story" moments which look a little like padding to me,
especially since much of what the asides convey is already found in the body of the novel, in more subtle and more
sophisticated ways. And then there's the strange glimpses of what the novel apparently really wanted to be, something
darker and stranger and much less frothy and giggly as, for instance, the lime incident appears to point to. There are bits
of a crime novel in here, a coming-of-age story, a high-jinks comedy, not to mention a contemporary retelling of an ancient
set of legends complete with some fairly grisly moments involving Fat Charlie's brother Spider which I will not divulge here
for fear of sowing spoilers where they shouldn't go.
However, having said all that, it's still Neil Gaiman, it's yet another enchanting bit of word-wizardry by one of the
premier wordsmiths of our times, and it's still a damned fine read. It's just that, for this reader, it feels a little
like having walked out of the ocean that was American Gods and somehow finding myself cooling my toes in a paddling pool.
I look forward to the next one, as always.
Alma A. Hromic, addicted (in random order) to coffee, chocolate and books, has a constant and chronic problem of "too many books, not enough bookshelves". When not collecting more books and avidly reading them (with a cup of coffee at hand), she keeps busy writing her own. Following her successful two-volume fantasy series, Changer of Days, her latest novel, Jin-shei, is due out from Harper San Francisco in the spring of 2004. |
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