My own self

"It's a big serious world out there; nothing to laugh about. Not ever. You must teach the children to fear, teach them to tremble. Teach them to be cruel. Teach them to be the danger in the dark. Hide in the shadows, then pounce or spring or leap or drop, and always kill. You know what the true meaning of life is?"
"Um," said Fat Charlie. "Is it love one another?"

Sitting down to read a novel by Neil Gaiman is an odd experience for me. In one way, it feels like I've read a good bunch of his stuff, but on the other, I feel like I've only read one actual novel. I've read his Sandman-series, but that is after all graphic novels compiled of many shorter stories, and thus very different from a normal novel. I've read Good Omens, but that book is co-written by Terry Pratchett and Pratchett's familiar satirical style was far more apparent to me in the reading experience than the more versatile Gaiman. I've read Odd and the Frost Giants, but that's a children's novel, and a short one at that. I've seen Beowulf, but he only co-wrote the script on that, and it's additionally based off of an ancient poem as well as being a movie, not a novel. Though you get a good impression of his tastes, I can't really claim to feel that having watched Princes Mononoke where he penned the English-language script taught me that much of his own writing style either. The movie that is indeed based on his own work that I've seen and loved, Stardust, had a script written by someone else, and I haven't yet read Gaiman's original tale. I've read his short story Monarch of the Glen, but that is a short story, not a novel, and one about a character I know from a previous work of his on top of that. That previous work, American Gods, is the only "proper" novel I feel I've actually read, in the sense that it's the only one that I feel have given me a clear image of how the man writes when on his own, unimpaired by a selective audience, a source material or a studio, and uninfluenced by a co-author.

And American Gods is probably the best single-volume fantasy novel I've ever read.

Thus I started Anansi Boys, torn between too high expectations and little expectations at all. Well, I'll say this straight up: I was not disappointed.

Anansi Boys is not at all like American Gods despite being set in the same universe. It's about the sons of a secondary character from American Gods, and how they cope with meeting each other. Mostly it's about one of them, a dreadfully shy and naive man named Charlie. Anansi Boys is a comedy, and though it's a comedy that sometimes ventures into darker places than most, it's still a light-hearted and easy read that I finished in a week. (A mind-boggling pace for me and my reading-habits in recent years) It's a story about family, about the relationship between parents and children and grown siblings who might not quite like each other, and about how it's all just terribly embarrassing.

The book (pretty naturally) reminded me a good bit of Good Omens, the other silly but somewhat dark novel of Gaiman's I've read. Turns out that a lot of the humour I thought of as Pratchett'y is also there in Gaiman's writing, but more laid-back. The type of humour is often the same as in Good Omens, but most of the time it's underhanded and as-a-matter-of-fact-ly phrased, which in its own way adds to the charm. While big parts of the plot were pretty obvious and easy to figure out ahead of time, this only barely subtracted from my enjoyment of the story as the joy in reading Anansi Boys is in following the characters to their finish line, not guessing fruitlessly what the finish line will be.

In no way as brilliantly memorable as the vastly complex and often sombre American Gods, Anansi Boys never tries to be. It's a fun, heart-warming and entertaining story of two brothers, and it sucked me in to not let go until I was on the final page. And it once again verified that Neil Gaiman is a man who can write just about anything and do so well.

Now, if I could only get around to reading Neverwhere as well...