WEEK EIGHT: Mythical Fiction

Week Eight: Mythic Fiction (Neil Gaiman)

For this week’s reading I looked at Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. To start, I feel the need to say that Gaiman’s writing style seems to be one that the reader either loves or hates. He speaks in a voice that sometimes seems frivolous while at other times seeming incredibly direct. He takes his time in moving through things in a poetic sort of prose that becomes an art form of its own. He writes fantasy with a dash of realism that lets the reader immerse themselves entirely into his own world, which is simply a grand amalgamation of the things that have inspired him.

Anansi Boys is a fantastical journey through a young man’s life as he loses himself, only to reconnect with himself through spiritual beings and reasonings. Anansi himself is an African mythological character that Gaiman has appropriated for the telling of his story. Anansi is known to take the form of a spider, typically, and holds within him the power of knowledge and tales. Gaiman uses this story to connect a variety of myths and legends in order to tell the tale of one man whose life changes dramatically after a death in the family and a visit from a brother he never knew he had.

The interesting thing about this story is that Gaiman is taking a folk tale written many years ago and repurposing it for the contemporary instance. The folk tales of such a nature have a lot of promise and intricacy and entertainment, but a modern audience would have a hard time relating to them. This is similar to the way that other authors and artists will take common tropes and re-imagine them into concepts that are uniquely their own. Spider, Fat Charlie’s brother, an all knowing, cunning, and tricky man comes into Fat Charlie’s life with his own motivations. The two brothers are polar opposites and it is through their conflicting interests and drama that the story unfolds before us.

The beauty in Gaiman’s writing this story is that we are first thrust into a somewhat reality and then whipped through a world of imagination, magic, and mythology.