Translated material
Real Egegei
Gaiman has been consistently published in Russia - two novels a year - ever since four years ago when American Gods supplanted the former favorites on fantasy culture fan sites. In America, a real gayman boom happened only after the release of his last novel, Anansi Boys, in 2005.
In American Gods, Gaiman gave the New World what it had always dreamed of - its own new mythology, not mixed with Indian, British and Spanish drugs. But in conservative America this gift was greeted with caution, continuing to admire Gaiman’s impeccably British fairy tale “Stardust” - with princesses, sorcerers, magical forests and unicorns.
The idea for Children of Anansi predates American Gods. At first it was supposed to be a film script: an experienced reader will quickly recognize the jagged editing rhythm of the first scenes of the novel, replete with flashbacks and geographical forwarding (one reviewer described The Children of Anansi as “a madcap comedy in the spirit of the 30s”, and he was largely right). True, the writer himself soon abandoned this story and limited himself to introducing its main character, Mr. Nancy, as one of the characters in “American Gods.” Only three years later, Gaiman again remembered the charming spider Anansi, because, by his own admission, “suddenly he really wanted to write a novel that would make him feel good in the end and shout: “Hey, hey.”
The plot of “The Children of Anansi” is based on African mythology: the main characters of the novel are simultaneously people, gods, and animals; which is not surprising, since we are talking about a fairy tale, albeit played out in modern settings. The novel's protagonist, London accountant Charlie Nancy, flies to Florida for his father's funeral and during the wake learns that Mr. Nancy Sr. was actually a god, an incarnation of the West African spider god Anansi. Hearing this nonsense, the hero asks a logical question: why has he, Anansi’s son, not yet discovered any supernatural power? In response, the father’s girlfriends, vaguely reminiscent of Macbeth’s witches, popularly explain that all divine power went to his brother, who can be called at any time via spider mail. Returning to London, Charlie gets drunk out of grief and, having caught a spider in the toilet, tells him to find his brother. Soon Big Brother himself appears, who turns out to be handsome, smart and a ladies' man and progressively does all sorts of nasty things: he occupies Charlie's home, deprives him of his job and takes away his beautiful bride. Then the loser Charlie again flies to the witches in Florida, where he takes part in the ritual of expelling his brother, but in the process of witchcraft he does everything wrong and brings mortal danger to the entire Anansi clan.
The ironic Briton Gaiman, who himself left rainy London for permanent residence in America, remained stuck in the virtual space between “here” and “there”. The New World became for him something like a “looking glass”, refracted through which the signs of the Old World acquired some strange shapes: Shakespeare’s witches turned into American pensioners, and the traditions of the English Gothic novel famously intertwined with the plots of West African mythology. Gaiman himself takes the issue of genre purity lightly: “Who can tell you that you cannot add one thing to another? I'm not a very genuine believer in the genre, and I get bored pretty quickly. “The Children of Anansi” is flavored with horror, it has humor, and there are myths, and a detective story, and a horror film like “brains on the walls,” and various suspense and so on, but this is not the main thing. In fact, this is a book about people...”
In Gaiman's “book about people,” in addition to witches and spiders, there are talking tigers, police hackers, dissimilar twins, barrels of monkeys, and Hitchcockian birds attacking people. But in the end it turns out that “Anansi's Children” is a truly daring sitcom, with Shakespearean confusion, fairy-tale transformations, bloody murders and stupid running around; funny as hell story about the fact that it is difficult to be a god, and the son of a god is even more difficult, but the most impossible thing in the world is to live next to relatives and not poison them along the way. In "The Children of Anansi" Gaiman really outdid himself, so that in some places his corps de ballet makes your head spin, but in the end it really comes out as a complete "Egegei".