{"id":225,"date":"2008-06-27T16:52:27","date_gmt":"2008-06-27T05:52:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=225"},"modified":"2008-11-10T14:37:32","modified_gmt":"2008-11-10T03:37:32","slug":"a-book-anansi-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=225","title":{"rendered":"A Book: Anansi Boys"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou shouldn\u2019t say that about your father!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWell, it\u2019s true. He was crap. A rotten husband and a rotten father.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cOf course he was!\u201d said Mrs.Higgler, fiercely, \u201cBut you can\u2019t judge him like you would judge a man. You got to remember, Fat Charlie, that your father was a god.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cA god among men?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cNo. Just a god.\u201d She said it without any kind of emphasis, as flatly and as normally as she might have said \u201che was diabetic\u201d or simply \u201che was black.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

– Neil Gaiman in Anansi Boys<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Anansi Boys<\/em> may be the sequel to Neil Gaiman\u2019s American Gods<\/em> but where its predecessor was dour, tragic and epic in scope, this sequel is light-hearted, humorous and family-centered. In place of the hardened ex-convict Shadow of American Gods<\/em>, the protagonist of Anansi Boys<\/em> is a regular guy stuck with the unfortunate nickname of Fat Charlie. Not that Charlie is really fat, mind you, just somewhat rounded around the edges. Charlie\u2019s father has a knack for naming things and having the names stick, you see, and as the reader soon learns, that\u2019s just the least of his father\u2019s talents.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On the occasion of his father\u2019s death, Fat Charlie finds out from his old neighbor Mrs. Higgler that his father was none other than the spider god Anansi, the same Mr. Nancy who helped Shadow out in American Gods<\/em>. But just who is Anansi you might wonder as Charlie does who has heard of a famous god like Zeus but certainly not one as obscure as Anansi. But while you might not know the name, you surely know the god, for as the book never tires of reminding the reader, all the stories, every one that has ever been told wherever in the world, are Anansi\u2019s. You might hear them told in some places as stories of Br\u2019er Rabbit or in Malaysia perhaps as stories of Sang Kancil, but as Gaiman says, they are all Anansi\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n

This is because Anansi dates back to the time when all mankind were living in mud huts and caves in Africa, a time before civilization when people told each other stories to help make sense of the world and every animal was considered a god. In this world of simple truths, lion is the king of beasts, gazelle is the fleetest of foot, monkey the most foolish and Anansi the spider is the weaver of tales. And he has just died of a heart attack in a bar in Florida, singing on a makeshift karaoke stage while groping a blonde, busty tourist.
\nTo a dumbfounded Fat Charlie, who\u2019s just about to marry his fianc\u00e9e, all this is just the latest in a long series of episodes engineered by his father for the express purpose of embarrassing him. What\u2019s more, Mrs. Higgler reveals that he has a brother he never knew about who inherited all of the god stuff. He doesn\u2019t believe any of this of course until the day he offhandedly makes a remark to a spider found in his bathroom as Mrs. Higgler instructed and \u2018lo and behold, brother Spider shows up on his doorstep and proceeds to turn his hitherto unremarkable life upside down.<\/p>\n

What follows is a tragicomic adventure that will have readers turning the page just to find out what latest misfortune befalls poor Fat Charlie. This is because Spider is everything that Fat Charlie is not: supremely charming and confident, seemingly able to summon bevies of beauties to him at will and so cool that the world goes out its way to accommodate his wishes. It\u2019s all fun and games until Spider starts impersonating him to sleep with his fianc\u00e9e, makes a huge mess of his job, gets him arrested and even magically fits a huge villa into the spare room of his house and uses up all the hot water for his hot tub. But how can a mere, and somewhat bumbling, mortal hope to evict a god who doesn\u2019t want to leave? Fat Charlie is forced to call for some serious magical backup, but such entities exact a terrible price as they always do. The stories are all Anansi\u2019s as you know, but they haven\u2019t always been Anansi\u2019s for he stole them from someone a long time ago, and that someone wants them back.<\/p>\n

In Anansi Boys<\/em> Gaiman has written the perfect novel to bring to the beach for some light but highly entertaining reading. It won\u2019t be as mind-blowing as American Gods<\/em> was, but at least it isn\u2019t so top heavy with meaningful portents and poetic declamations that you have to work your way through it. Where American Gods broke new ground in telling a story in which the gods are alive and living among us, Anansi Boys is about mostly ordinary folks who happen to be godlike and that makes it a much more approachable and down to earth story.<\/p>\n

I do note that Anansi Boys seems to contradict American Gods<\/em> in at least one way. The first book makes it clear that the gods in it aren\u2019t the original ones but American-born versions that were brought there in the heads of emigrants. Gaiman seems to have abandoned the idea in this sequel and happily so for it would be very odd if there happened to be multiple versions of Anansi and his sons jetting around the world.<\/p>\n

So pick up a copy of this book, settle down in a comfortable chair and let Gaiman weave you a tale so tall you have to wonder what drugs he was on. You\u2019ll soon find the pages flying past as if by magic.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou shouldn\u2019t say that about your father!\u201d \u201cWell, it\u2019s true. He was crap. A rotten husband and a rotten father.\u201d \u201cOf course he was!\u201d said Mrs.Higgler, fiercely, \u201cBut you can\u2019t judge him like you would judge a man. You got to remember, Fat Charlie, that your father was a god.\u201d \u201cA god among men?\u201d \u201cNo. … Continue reading A Book: Anansi Boys<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[123,29,144],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book-review","tag-fantasy","tag-neil-gaiman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":740,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions\/740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}