2) Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman.

Previously noted by here, here, and Cheryl Morgan. (No serious spoilers on any of those.)

I love Neil Gaiman’s writing, though I was disappointed to discover that both American Gods and Coraline had hidden shallows, in that neither of them moved very far from his previous work, and neither had a really profound message despite the flashy packaging. Anansi Boys is different, taking a new look at Gaiman’s old themes of family, death, divinity and identity and doing it very well, with an impressive dollop of humour throughout. I creased up with laughter at the story about President Taft in the first few pages (OK, my sense of humour is peculiar) and basically couldn’t put the book down last night once I had started it properly. Yeah, it takes a wee while to get going (the plot only really takes off on page 146, when Daisy goes to work); yeah, the fact that all our characters are going to converge in the same place at the end is signalled so far in advance that I don’t think saying so can possibly count as a spoiler (but at least that makes it look more like Fate than Coincidence); yeah, it’s a bit corny that I got the “special edition” a la DVD (with a deleted scene, author’s note book, interview with the author, and discussion questions to make sure you’re read it properly); but I loved it. Cheryl’s prediction that it will win lots of awards is, I suspect, a good call.

I loved the central premise of the two brothers, one divine, one human. (In some accounts there are classical precedents, Castor and Pollux, Helen and Clytemnestra, but it’s never a central feature of the stories.) OK, perhaps it is then fairly obvious that the divine brother will discover his human side, and the human brother his divine side, but it worked for me. I am amused that they have much the same origin as the two Xanders in Buffy 5.03, “The Replacement”; do we know if Neil Gaiman is/was a Buffy fan?

Taleswapper complains that “Much like in Neverwhere, he starts with a character who is obviously entangled with the wrong woman, he isn’t really aware of it (though everybody else is), and it takes external forces to make him see the truth and rescue him from the horror of a woman.” The complaint is I think tongue-in-cheek, but I’d like to defend Gaiman against it anyway. Rosie is not a “horror” (though her mother certainly is), and in fact she ends up with a slightly different version of Charlie anyway. She too is drawn into the world of the gods and tested, whereas Jessica in Neverwhere is simply a cipher for the mundane world, rather more two-dimensional than Graham Coates here.

I wasn’t completely sure about one aspect of the book. Until I read the last of the “Discussion Questions” at the end it hadn’t really occurred to me that Charlie and Spider were both black, even though it is pretty obvious that their father was and Daisy is, and Rosie, I suppose, probably isn’t. (And Neil Gaiman thanks Nalo Hopkinson for help with the Caribbean dialogue, and Lenny Henry for general inspiration, so I am obviously very stupid.) Ursula Le Guin tackles this in a rather different way in the Earthsea books (see her furious reaction to the TV version in Slate and Locus), by telling us that most of the characters are not white and letting us just get on with it. Having grown up as an (admittedly white) minority in a divided and disputed territory myself, I do wonder whether Gaiman’s portrayal of what it is like to be black in Florida, London or the Caribbean really rings true; it almost feels as if the characters are “colour-blind”, apart from Rosie’s awful mother. But I am not really qualified to judge that.

Apparently Lenny Henry is going to read the audio-book. I’m not into those as a rule, but I just might get this one.