Anansi Boys

Anansi Boys was a wild ride of unbelievably fantastical events and situations that could only be made up while going through some sort of intense acid trip. 

Right off the bat, the story makes itself known to have some sort of mythos or concept of oral tradition tied to it. The narration describes a sort of creationist tale of how the world was brought about by songs sung by a Singer, which brought gods and beasts to life. Then the narration takes the folklore-esque storytelling straight ahead into the story of Fat Charlie, our protagonist. 

The myth aspect of this novel already weaves itself from the beginning, since Fat Charlie's trickster of a father is made known to be Anansi, a god from West African folklore that is said to be the god of stories and quite the con artist. Neil Gaiman takes this concept and ties it with a protagonist that is very boring, stuffy, and mundane to a T, Charlie. However, Gaiman changes the ordinary plane of existence and begins to warp it as Charlie unravels more about his father and also meets his brother, Spider. Gaiman seems to want to take the myth of Anansi and try to accentuate the importance of storytelling and the legacies they leave behind. We only know Gaiman's take on Anansi purely through the tales that the other characters tell of him, since he is dead as soon as the novel starts. Anansi had no way of telling his life through his own words, but he left enough impact on the people who has come into contact with him, to rebuild the broken relationship he had with his son, beyond the grave. This concept of having stories be a strong device of communication holds up pretty well and can be especially relevant to today's society, as divorce rates increase and the concept of "family" becomes weaker. It seems that Gaiman argues that though a family can be as dysfunctional and have a lack of communication as Fat Charlie's, the stories we leave behind can be enough to bridge the gaps we couldn't fill when we were alive. Gaiman seems to both highlight the importance of healthy family relationships and trying not to fall into the concept of missing something after it's gone. Once Anansi is gone, Charlie is described to feeling quite lonely, though he doesn't tie his loneliness to the death of his father. It ties into a lot of the irony between the relationship between Charlie and his father, due to the fact that though Charlie claims to hate him, he rushes home as soon as he hears of his father's death and is still willing to take the time and effort to bury him, even though he still fell into his father's deceitful tricks, despite postponing his own marriage to go to a funeral that ended up not even being Anansi's. Although Charlie may never come to love or completely forgive his father, he can still learn to accept who Anansi was and come to terms with how that affected him as a person and therefore grow from it. I think it's an important lesson and one that is always relevant, no matter the time.