50 Book Challenge: Book 11

(God, I've got so many books piling up. This is from way back when I was in bed with a cold.)

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

Well, it only took me several months to get around to reading Neil Gaiman's latest book. Maybe I was afraid that it wouldn't be up to his usual standards. What could possibly live up to "American Gods"?

I needn't have worried. "Anansi Boys" doesn't have to live up to "American Gods", because it's completely different. "American Gods" was all about epic confrontations between old gods and new gods. "Anansi Boys" is about Fat Charly, who lives in London, works as an accountant, and doesn't much like his prospective mother-in-law. Oh, and his father happens to be a god. This doesn't prevent him from dying unexpectely during a karaoke session. That's when Fat Charly discovers that he has a brother he never knew about. A brother who's also a god, and nothing but trouble besides.

It's classic Gaiman, and it's hilarious. The story takes some pretty strange twists, but none that affect the book negatively. The only criticism that I can think of is something I've noticed before in Gaiman's prose: His protagonists have a strangely unsubstantial quality about them. It's not that they don't have well-defined personalities, but you never get the sense of them being real characters in the same way that the other characters in the story are. I'm not sure if this is deliberate or not, and it might even be helping the reader identify with the character, by inviting him to fill in the blanks.