Tag Archives: Neil Gaiman

Book review

Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman, 2005

Anansi Boys tells the story of Charles “Fat Charlie” Nancy. Fat Charlie is an accountant, engaged half-heartedly to Rosie, whose monstrous mother is set on disrupting their engagement. Their wedding preparations are put on hold when Charlie has to travel to the Caribbean to attend his father’s funeral. There Charlie learns that not only was his father an incarnation of the West African spider god, Anansi, but also that he has a brother, and that he can be contacted by asking a spider.

Charlie takes this news relatively well, considering, and returns to his humdrum life in London. Inevitably he can’t resist summoning up his brother, Spider. Spider is everything Charlie is not – confident, charismatic, persuasive. He sets up home in Charlie’s flat, and begins to take over this life, with, as they say, disastrous consequences, losing him both his job and his fiancee.

The supernatural is invoked powerfully in Gaiman’s previous novel, American Gods, because it is taken seriously; here the whimsicality undermines the impact of the narrative. There’s never any genuine threat from the gods who resent Anansi’s status, or from the more earth-bound Grahame Coats, Charlie’s sleazy boss, who has been embezzling his clients for years. Most readers will realise very early on that Charlie is going to end up with the petite officer investigating his case, Daisy, that Charlie and Spider and going to be reconciled, and that Mr Coats is not going to get away with his crimes. This lack of threat, even from the personification of the malevolent tiger god, led to one reviewer describing the novel as “whimsical supernaturalism” which feels about right. The New Your Times review of the novel used a similar phrase, talking of “an Uncle Remus folksiness to the stories that sends the airy blitheness of the farce plummeting down to earth”.  

The other aspect of the novel that I found a little disappointing was the humour. Whimsy is always a tough one to pull off, and stripped of its context just about any joke can fall flat, but the jokes in the novel are consistently weak. Here’s some examples:

Spider: Things came up.
Fat Charlie: What kind of things?
Spider: Things. They came up. That’s what things do. They come up. I can’t be expected to keep track of them all.

More dialogue between Charlie and Spider:

“The ties of blood,” said Spider, “are stronger than water.”
“Water’s not strong,” objected Fat Charlie.
“Stronger than vodka, then. Or volcanoes. Or, or ammonia.”

This isn’t repartee. Ammonia’s not a comedic example of something unexpectedly strong is it?

The narration aims for Pratchett or Adams, but consistently misses.

“It was England in the autumn; the sun was, by definition, something that only happened when it wasn’t cloudy or raining.”

Does this mean anything? Does it say anything about the English weather, or is it just repeating a very tired cliche? Compare how Adams turns that idea completely inside out with the cursed rain god/lorry driver in (I think) Mostly Harmless. 

“There was reality and there was reality; and some things were more real than others.”

“Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbott and Costello meet the Wolfman…”

Not all the jokes fall flat. Rosie’s mother is a fine portrait of a prospective mother-in-law who could put anyone off the institution of marriage. Here she is allocating guests to tables at the wedding reception, applying the fine judgments of status that matter so much on these occasions:

“I’ll put her down for table H,” said Rosie’s mother. “She’ll be more comfortable there.” She said it in the same way most people would say things like, “Do you wish to die quickly, or shall I let Mongo have his fun first?”

Later there is this fine description of an outraged dragon:

The beast made the noise of a cat being shampooed, a lonely wail of horror and outrage, of shame and defeat.

But these are isolated exceptions of otherwise disappointingly flat

This novel is really aimed at the young adult market. Adults will find it mildly engaging if a bit superficial, but younger readers will be gripped by the story and their hope that it all works out well for Charlie and his family. 

One final quibble – “nancy boy” in idiomatic English is a homosexual slur – was it really necessary to use this phrase in the book’s title?

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Book review

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, 1996

I don’t think you would be able to guess that Neverwhere is a novelisation of a television series – it has a dramatic range and scope ideally suited to the novel form, and must have been a challenge to film. It is rare for novelisations to be more than their original format, but here it is almost as if the novel was existing in concept all along, and it just took the development of the television series for it to come out.Neverwhere

In the introduction to this edition, which was published to coincide with the publication of American Gods, Gaiman describes editing the text to make it more accessible to American readers – explaining that Oxford Street is a main shopping thoroughfare for example. I suspect he was wasting his time, because this is a novel firmly rooted in place, written by a writer with considerable and obvious affection for the London landmarks that appear in the book: Blackfriars, Baron’s Court, the Angel Islington and Old Bailey, among many others.

Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries. It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names – Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl’s Court, Marble Arch – and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind.” 

The novel’s springboard is the hidden issue of homelessness – how rough sleepers can live in cities such as London and be effectively invisible to the rest of the population. Gaiman takes this idea and has the homeless become residents of ‘London Under’ – a city existing in plain sight alongside London Above. I was reminded of China Meiville’s The City and the City  which is based on a very similar concept. But Gaiman’s hidden world is magical, peopled by fantastical characters and where the normal rules of time and space do not apply. In this it is closer to the Rivers of London series which I believe it directly inspired.

Neverwhere’s central character is the Arthur Dent-like everyman beloved of fantasy writers. Richard Mayhew is a young businessman, who one day helps a mysterious young girl, Door, who appears before him, bleeding and weak, on a London street. Gaiman makes Richard a Scotsman exiled in London – he already feels a sense of alienation from his environment, so when his contact with the people of the Underworld makes him effectively invisible to other Londoners the process is complete. Door, only surviving member of a family of underworlders with the power to open any door, sends Richard to find the Marquis de Carabas who in turn can help her escape her pursuers. They hire a bodyguard, the Amazonian Hunter, and set off to find out why Door’s family was slain by the infamous assassins Croup and Vandemar, who are now on their trail. They criss-cross London Under in their quest, meeting a series of fantastical characters in extraordinary places. This is an action-packed adventure full of twists and turns and incident – it’s a great story.

I was a little uncertain as to Gaiman’s target audience with this novel. There is a horrific element to the novel’s casual and brutal violence, particularly that of Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, the former all refinement and elegance, the latter the complete opposite, usually to be found munching on the remains of a puppy or a pigeon. Some characters die and don’t come back, and the happy ever after ending is not guaranteed. But while the peril in the novel is serious it is resolved quickly, and the one main character who is killed is resurrected with minimum suspense that it is not going to happen.

There’s a lot to enjoy in Neverwhere. The dialogue is outstanding, if fizzes with ideas, the aesthetic as evoked in Gaiman’s prose is wonderful, and the central relationship between Door and Richard is sweet, understated, and touching. There is a darkness to much of the humour (“Do you like cat?” she said. “Yes,” said Richard. “I quite like cats.” Anaesthesia looked relieved. “Thigh?” she asked, “or breast?” ) that is entirely unsentimental. Gaiman has promised a sequel, which would be fantastic although this novel stands up well on its own. Highly recommended if you enjoy fantasy.

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Book review

Goods Omen by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman 1990

Why haven’t I read “Good Omens” before now? That’s not a rhetorical question – tell me why no-one has thrust this book into my hands and said “You love Terry Pratchett and you think Neil Gaiman is pretty good as well, so read this, now”? As you can tell I feel slightly narked at the fact that this wonderful book has not made it onto my reading list until now. Good omens

One reason might be that collaborations, especially on novels, have at best a patchy record. Name me a novel written by two people that is as good as any of the novels written by either of the co-authors? That one is a rhetorical question btw. “Good Omens” is the only co-authored novel on the BBC Big Read list of 100 best novels, if you needed any evidence on that point. But something about the way these two worked together, across different continents and time zones, just worked, producing something as good as if not better than their best solo work. It could easily have been written by Douglas Adams, and if you have been paying any attention to anything I have written in the last 5 years or so you will know that there is no higher compliment.

“Good Omens” started life as a Just William parody, and if I were to find a fault with the novel, the extended sections of the prepubescent schoolboys and schoolgirl getting up to no good in an essentially well behaved way are some of the weaker parts of the novel. But that doesn’t really matter, because the cornucopia of ideas and characters that fizz from every page of the rest of the novel more than compensate. Quite how a schoolboy story became a parable about the end of the world I am not sure, but it tells you something about Pratchett and Gaiman’s imaginations. There so much to enjoy here – utterly believable eccentric characters, such as the angel and demon working together to avoid Armageddon, Witchfinder General Shadwell and his assistant Newton Pulsifer, the witch Anathema Device (was/is there any author better at producing fantastic names for his characters than Terry Pratchett was – I give you Cut My Own Throat Dibbler in evidence), a breathless plotline that genuinely leaves it open to doubt whether the world is going to end or not, and on every page some of the best and at the same time wisest jokes you will find in any modern novel.

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

“An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards.”
“She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.”
This is Pratchett at his very best, and whatever Neil Gaiman contributed to the process and outcome – the appendix at the end of this edition contains interviews with the authors that are frustratingly vague on this point, including the possibility that some of the text was written by neither of them – the combination just worked. I suspect it made Terry a better author in the long run, although I don’t think he ever wrote anything better.
Finally some good news – the novel is being adapted for television by the BBC, with two of Britain’s best actors, Michael Sheen and David Tennant, in the lead roles, and with a wonderful supporting cast. Should be (the light) fantastic.
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