Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spider-webs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.
The last book I read and reviewed, Caught, had me musing on the nature of literature and genre fiction, and my snobbish preference for one over the other. In fact, if anyone had asked me before I encountered Anansi Boys how likely I would be to dabble in Urban Fantasy, I would have replied, "Not terribly likely at all". It was only based on a recommendation for another book by Neil Gaiman that led me to see if my library had any of his audiobooks, and I am thankful for whatever fates not only delivered this book to me but also allowed me to enjoy it as read by the incomparable Lenny Henry . His distinct voices for each of the characters (how perfect was Grahame Coates' voice? And Anansi's!) brought the story alive in the way I believe all of Anansi's tales are meant to be experienced-- aloud.
Anansi Boys is many stories in one: it's about family and mythology and finding the courage to be true to your own story. It was laugh out loud funny in many places, and since it deals with meddling with the gods on their own turf and inviting them to meddle in ours, it is also exciting and dramatic and full of menace. It is also charming, which may sound insignificant or lightweight, but I mean charming as in spell-binding and magical. A lot of the humour comes from that trickstery British sense of wordplay that can grow wearisome, but Gaiman deployed it here exactly to my tastes:
He was having more fun than a barrelful of monkeys.*
*Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all - except possibly on an organic level - had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night.
I appreciated the philosophical bits:
It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or propriety.
And I enjoyed the way the main narrative would periodically stop to explain who Anansi was, why he had feuds with the other animal-gods, and then relate a traditional Anansi tale. I was cheering for Fat Charlie as he began to relate to his trickster-godlike side:
The creature laughed scornfully. "I," it said, "am frightened of nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing," it said.
Charlie said "Are you extremely frightened of nothing?"
"Absolutely terrified of it," admitted the Dragon.
"You know," said Charlie "I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?"
"No," said the dragon uncomfortably, "I most definitely would not."
There was a flapping of wings like sails, and Charlie was alone on the beach. "That," he said "was much too easy."
There was so very much to like about Anansi Boys and something about it spoke to me at a very deep level, somewhere primal and atavistic. Gaiman seems to have tapped into the Jungian Collective Unconscious, which is not so surprising for a storyteller, and might well always be a consequence of dealing with Anansi, the oldest storyteller of them all.
He sang of names and words, of the building blocks beneath the real, the worlds that make worlds, the truths beneath the way things are.
Whether through fiction (literature or otherwise) or my abiding fascination with quantum mechanics, this notion of the "truths beneath the way things are" is an area in which I love to linger and Anansi Boys is a thoroughly enjoyable world within our world.
