The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 18 June 2014
by Neil Gaiman
Fat Charlie Nancy is the kind of guy who ends up with a nickname like "Fat Charlie", even though he isn't fat. He's a milquetoast right from the start. There are reasons for this, though. Magical ones. Fat Charlie's father dies in a tragic karaoke incident, and the opening chapters of this offbeat novel read like a straightforward, if witty, story about a young man and his nutty father. Soon, Fat Charlie discovers he has a long lost brother, Spider, and his life quickly becomes unraveled. Spider moves in and wreaks havoc throughout Charlie's London life, disrupting his engagement to vague Rosie and sowing trouble at his job. So, Charlie must return to Florida, to his past, to find out the unknown truth about his family. Here is where we enter the realm of the fantastic. Dad, after all, was an incarnation of Anansi, the god of storytelling. Or so we're told. One doesn't want to give too much away, though. Gaiman interweaves tales of Anansi through Charlie's conflict with Spider, and with the memory of his father. Charlie's story becomes entangled with an ancient battle between the gods Anansi and Tiger, for the posession of the stories to be told. When all becomes revealed, Charlie finds he must go on a journey to recover his life and to recover some of his lost identity. Maybe he can stop being such a pushover. While Gaiman's writing is fast-paced and witty, evoking Kurt Vonnegut or Tom Robbins, the passages in which the author takes us through the mythology of Anansi (a real enough tradition from West Africa) are somewhat deadening, as if he has discovered a great lost story he wants us to know. These fantastical asides, and the more bizarre and magical of Charlie's adventures, are imaginative, but somewhat bereft of depth beyond the necessary stations of an odyssey. Gaiman can also be quite coy. His characters have vague enough identities that the book can have an entirely different feel depending on how the reader interprets his clues. It is a quirky book, with the seeds of something greater. Its passages rooted in the strange facts of everyday life are well realized and often sharply observed. Its unexpected flights of fancy seem disconnected, as if descended from another book, entirely.