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Recently, I read Anansi Boys, a fantasy novel from accomplished author Neil Gaiman. These are my thoughts.

Anansi Boys begins with a man called Fat Charlie. This nickname, it explains, comes from his dead father, Anansi. If you know anything about African mythology, then you may recognize the name Anansi. He is the trickster god of African myth, frequently taking the form of a spider. Fat Charlie is the son of a god, but he doesn’t know this yet.

Fat Charlie is going to be married to his long-time fiancée, Rosie. She suggests that he invite his father to the wedding. However, he hates his father due to a series of embarrassing and highly entertaining incidents that occurred during his childhood. Unfortunately for Fat Charlie, Rosie possesses a significant influence over him, and forces him to recant. It is while calling a family friend to get his father's phone number that he learns that Anansi is dead.

Fat Charlie is not particularly upset to hear this. However, his father’s death was incredibly embarrassing. Anansi died due to a heart attack, one brought on during a karaoke session while attempting to seduce a young tourist. Charlie realizes that he must go to his father’s funeral.

The funeral is where events really start to kick off. Charlie leaves the funeral after another series of mishaps, and learns he has a brother he never knew about. What does Fat Charlie have to do to meet his brother? Simply ask a spider.

It is also around this time that a murder is committed, kicking off a lengthy subplot involving ghosts, tigers, ghost tigers, and financial crimes of varying degrees of severity. I won’t go into this in detail because due to the magic of Gaiman’s writing, this ends up becoming the main plot.

What I will go into instead is the masterful way in which the prose is crafted. This book has some of the best plotting and sub-plotting that I’ve ever seen. A minor plot about the widow of a musician looking for her lost money somehow expands in importance to become one of the major plots, encompassing every single character. The main plot is essentially put down for a good one to two hundred pages in order to delve further into something that appeared to be a one-off short scene. In this way, Gaiman reworks the text so that everything feels fresh.

This novel remixes elements from other previous genre-defining works and common fantasy and mythical tropes, blending them into a concoction that somehow feels new, even though it’s (literally!) one of the oldest stories in the book.

In conclusion, Anansi Boys is one of the greatest novels in the categories of both comedy and fantasy in recent history, if not in all of history. It grabs DNA from ancient myth and modern works such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in equal measure, making this an entertaining and compelling read.

Final Score: 9.3/10

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