ity poor Charlie "Fat Charlie" Nancy. In his mid-30s, he's so far led a dull-as-dishwater life. Born in the USA, but long a resident of London, Fat Charlie is an accountant for a shady embezzeler named Grahame Coats. Charlie is engaged to a woman named Rosie who's saving her sexual favors for after their marriage. Rosie's mother is a harridan who hates Charlie. In short, our hero is positively Thurberesque in his downtrodden stature. But all that's about to change.
Charlie's father dies. Charlie's father happens to have been the living god Anansi, the spidery trickster of legend. The death of this patriarch reveals that Charlie has a long-lost brother named Spider. A brother who's inherited all the wild, impulsive magic of the family line. In short, Charlie's opposite. Spider pops back into Charlie's life, and the next two weeks become a riot of danger, excitement, chaos, adventure and promise. As Charlie himself summarizes late in the book: "In the last two weeks I've been arrested, I've lost my fiancee and my job, I've watched my semi-imaginary brother get eaten by a wall of birds in Picadilly Circus, I've flown back and forth across the Atlantic like some kind of lunatic transatlantic ping-pong ball, and today I got up in front of an audience and I, and I sang because my psycho ex-boss had a gun barrel against the stomach of the girl I'm having dinner with."
All the hectic tsuris cited above, plus much more, is ultimately traceable to an ancient antagonism between Charlie and Spider's father and another deity named Tiger. The two beings are contending for nothing less than the future of humanity. And unless the Anansi Boys can pull mankind's chestnuts out of the fire, things do not look good for our race. Tiger finds a human ally in the form of Coats. But Charlie gets his own source of strength in the form of a policewoman named Daisy Day. Whether that loving support will be enough to stand up against the depredations of the malicious Bird Woman and other celestials remains to be seen.
A mythic romp with a life lesson
Gaiman cites the legendary Thorne Smith—author of Topper (1926) and other ribald supernatural classics—as inspiration for his current tale (along with P.G. Wodehouse and animator Tex Avery), and he's certainly mastered many of Smith's trademark tropes and techniques. The eruption of boredom-shattering uncanny events into the life of a staid sort of character. The non-sequitur, zany, arch dialogue. The use of extravagant and absurd metaphors and similes. The assaults on cant and custom. These features abound in this novel, mostly to good effect. After you've read the attack on Spider by hundreds of crazed flamingos, or the pseudo-Nornish shenanigans of four old ladies in Florida, you will certainly know you are not inhabiting a mimetic, naturalistic dull old hat of a book. True, sometimes the quota of dotty and barmy events and language approaches the saturation point. But on the whole, Gaiman exercises a keen ear and a sure hand in his comedic cape!
ring.
But what's different from Thorne Smith's madcap escapades, what's lacking here, is a certain bracing anarchism, even nihilism. Both Spider and Daddy Anansi, for all their reputed wildness, exhibit less transgressive behavior than Paris Hilton. For Pan-like demiurges, they're remarkably demure and considerate. The whole tone of the novel is very much geared toward reassurance, despite some brushes with mortality. For instance, Gaiman gives a parenthetical aside about one character's death: "It's okay; she was a very old woman, and she went in her sleep. It happens." This kind of hand-holding ensures that any sense of jeopardy is always counterbalanced by a hearthside it's-only-a-story-that-will-work-out-all-right atmosphere. Likewise, the plot of the book exhibits none of the unpredictable veerings and loops that made Smith's books resemble Mr. Toad's Mad Ride.
But in the end, Gaiman's book delivers a superb roller-coaster, spook-house ride whose bright, vivid attractions conspire to convey a heartfelt message about the virtues of being oneself, kicking over the traces and enjoying our unique, shared lives.
