The Dreaming

He introduced the lecture series and then the first reader, one of his grad students…Then Chip returned to the podium and gave Neil a glowing introduction, which Neil returned in kind when he took the stage. Neil’s daughter Holly was in the front row. He announced that she had already read the story he was going to read us so he’d start with a poem in case she fell asleep.

That poem was The Day the Saucers Came, about the simultaneous end of the world as predicted by every culture, belief system, mythology, and fringe group and capped by a bit of a punchline. It was well received; at times the audience’s laughter threatened to drown it out.

Neil explained that in deference to Chip Delany’s early career both his pieces would be science fiction. Next his read the story, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, which he had previously read at the CBGB’s benefit. It also went over well. (I thought it really captured the tone and feel of a memory of adolescence: uncertain and vital.)

Then Neil took questions from the audience. I asked him for more information about he and Roger Avary adapting Charles Burns’ Black Hole, which I’d heard was their next project together. He smiled and sputtered, then marveled at the efficiency of “the rumour line”. His answer, which was phrased as a hypothetical and which can be seen here, was that he and Avary had a meeting with Paramount the next Monday to pitch their adaptation.

The other questions were variations on ones I’d heard him answer before, though an answer about how comfortable he was with making use of the myths of other cultures lead to a hilarious — and, for me, new — telling of the plight of his “Ramayana” script that included an impression of Christ tearing himself from the cross, taking up an uzi, and saying, “Right, men,we’re taking Rome!”

To conclude the event, Neil agreed to sign one thing for everyone. He spent a decent amount of time chatting with each person, perhaps because anything under a thousand people seems to be a small audience as audiences go for him these days. I told him that I thought the idea of he and Avary adapting Black Hole was thrilling and he agreed, saying that he was excited by the idea and thought they could do something really cool and do it justice.

Working off a Gaiman script, rookie director McKean takes the reins and tries his hand at arranging the action of MirrorMask. His unique vision of dreams and strange Dark Crystal-like creatures are wonderful to look at, but the human characters are a bit shallow. It has the makings of a superb comic-book fairy tale, but not the most engaging feature film.

The story follows young Helena, a 15-year-old artist chomping at the bit to escape her life as a circus performer with her mom and dad circus owners. When her mother suddenly falls ill and is sent to the hospital, a sorrowful Helena drifts into a dream-like state and goes on an adventure that soon becomes a crucible of her adolescent maturity. Will she turn bad, abandon her family and get into trouble in the real world, or will her fantasy self be able to hold back the darkness by finding the legendary MirrorMask, which will let her turn her creative energies to good?

Because the film emulates the lazy and sometimes nonsensical movement and visions of a dream, it can get slow in parts, but the ride is so unique it’s hard to turn people away from this.

Once people stop believeing in them, they have to fend for themselves, ekeing out a meagre existence on the fringes of society, dreaming dreams of the heady days of power when they ruled the heavens.

Now, for those of you who haven’t just screamed “blasphemy” and fired up the old “let’s burn a columnist in effigy” machine, note that I’m talking small-g gods, not anything to do with Judeo-Christian worship or Islam or anything like that.

Let’s back up, before we dive into Neil Gaimen’s excellent American Gods.

Throughout the history of the human species, people have believed in gods. Anytime they saw nature flexing her muscles, a new divine being leapt into existence.

A storm blows a tree over - must be a wind god; lightning sparks a grass fire - a thunder god at work; and so on and so forth.

From the early tribal gods and godlets of the cave dwellers to the somewhat more sophisticated pantheons of the ancient Greeks and Romans, Egypt’s animal-headed legions, the Aesir of Valhalla of Norse mythology - pick a country, pick an ethnic group and they all have trunkfuls of gods, goddesses, sprites, spirits, demons, gjinn, efreets, oni and pixies.

OK, here’s the question to get us rolling with Gaiman’s tale: what happens when people stop believing?

If the various gods of the differing ethnic groups were essentially believed into existence by their followers, what happens when their followers switched to a new god, like God, for example?

Every country has experienced this: from the banished Roman deities forced out by the Roman empire’s move to Christianity; the fading of Odin and Thor as the Norse countries wended their way towards baptism.

In American Gods, Neil Gaiman uses a simple idea as the basis for his tale: if people once really believed in these gods, then they really existed.

That being the case, when their believers switched teams, instead of disappearing in a puff of logic, the old gods lived on, scraping out the ensuing millenia performing odd jobs and menial labours and sucking up the belief that is their sustenence wherever they could.

If belief was enough to create these gods in the first place, what do the beliefs of the modern era create?

In the days where people use the Internet as an integral part of their lives and won’t let a day go by without devoting at least an hour or two to watching the goggle box, might not their belief in these things spark the genesis of a new generation of gods?

With this in mind, we turn to Gaiman’s book.

Shadow is a guy who did some dumb stuff and ended up in jail but, overall, he’s a pretty good fellow - if a little bit odd.

He’s released early due to the death of his wife in a car crash. At an utter loose end, he’s offered a job by the mysterious Mr. Wednesday, a simple bodyguard-cum-gopher position that will earn him some green and keep his mind off his newfound widowerhood.

Soon Shadow realizes his boss is anything but ordinary.

In fact, Mr. Wednesday is Odin, the old chief god of the Norse.

And Odin is not a happy camper.

Fed up with centuries of feeding off the scraps of human belief, Odin has come to realize that even that hand-to-mouth existence is under threat from the new Gen-X gods: Internet, Media et al.

So, Odin, with Shadow’s help, tries to round up all of the other old gods to fight the newcomers.

It’s an intriguing romp through a modern America where, under the surface, old gods serve us our Big Macs.

But there’s much more to this than that. America is not a good country for gods, at least not for Indo-European gods.

As settlers from Europe travelled to America, they brought their old gods with them, as Gaiman shows us in a series of short, flashback vignettes.

Every immigrant that arrived forged a beachhead of belief that attracted some of the old gods to emigrate from the old country, too.

But America already had its own panoply of gods and spirits, leading to cramped quarters, to say the least.

Flipping back to Shadow, we find ourselves confronted with a slightly surreal tale where gods are seeping out of the woodwork, shaking into battle lines for a royal rumble that may or may not leave humankind unscathed.

Is this ragnarok, the Norse armageddon? Is this an apocalypes now? Or is there something else going on, some deeper, subtle sub-plot in which Shadow and the old gods are merely bit players jumping to the tune of a hidden controller?

And what will the indigenous spirts of North America have to say about it all?

I’ll let you figure it out.

Gaiman delivers a startling book, that deftly skates the line between chaos and sanity, reality and surreality.

It’s a tale about belief and its power, about ancestry and family, promises and betrayal.

Gaiman’s fans share these sort of personal stories, some dark, others punctuated with hope, on a daily basis. A few e-mail him (he tries to read and respond to everyone); some 20,000 more attended his readings and book signings across the United States and United Kingdom last year. It’s easy to see why Gaiman is a life-affirming god among men, like the living deity in his last novel, New York Times best seller Anasi Boys. His Sandman graphic novel series raised the bar for illustrated fantasy-and-horror storytelling in the ’90s by questioning death, religion and dreams in every issue.

Anansi Boys springs out of one of the minor characters from Gaiman’s first adult novel, the impressive American Gods. African spider-god Anansi is a trickster in the mould of Coyote and Loki and it is his slightly exaggerated death that sets the plot in motion.

But the story mostly centres around Anansi’s apparently human son, the puntastically named Fat Charlie Nancy, who not only discovers that his recently deceased father was a minor deity but also that he has a long-lost brother, Spider.

Unlike Fat Charlie, Spider has inherited their father’s supernatural gifts along with his irresistible charisma and womanising ways. Spider soon takes over Fat Charlie’s life, stealing his flat, job and fiancee.

Although it does contain a few grisly moments, Anansi Boys is a more light-hearted, gentler read than American Gods and, with its focus on just the one god as such, its scope is more intimate than epic.

Anansi Boys also marks Gaiman’s return to the humorous side he first displayed in his 1990 prose debut, Good Omens, which he co-wrote with Discworld author Terry Pratchett, although this time around his references are more Ealing comedy than Monty Python.

However, Gaiman struggles to maintain the balance between the story’s fantastical and humorous elements and his conclusion is a little too neat. At times, I longed for a story with a bit more teeth but Anansi Boys is still an absorbing read.

MirrorMask, meanwhile, adapts Gaiman’s feature-film debut of the same name and it is published in the same oversized format as the author’s highly successful children’s picture books, The Wolves in the Walls and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish.

Accompanying Gaiman’s whimsical prose are lavish illustrations by Gaiman’s frequent collaborator and MirrorMask film director, Dave McKean. MirrorMask is less like a traditional comic book than its two predecessors the words and pictures are mostly presented separately but unlike The Time Traveller’s Wife author Audrey Niffenegger, who sniffily proclaimed that her recent, disappointing Three Incestuous Sisters was a visual novel, not a graphic novel , Gaiman and McKean are proud of their pulp roots.

As for MirrorMask’s story, it closely resembles Gaiman’s excellent children’s novel, Coraline, which he will also soon make into a film; both revolve around a young heroine who ventures into a spooky otherworld, which is similar but at the same time eerily different to our own.

Story Line: Fifteen-year-old Helena (Leonides), whose parents oversee and perform in a traveling circus, enters a fantasy world when her mother (McKee) becomes ill. There, Helena encounters a wicked queen of shadows and the motherly queen of light, whom Helena must save before she’s destroyed by her own evil twin.

This one will haunt your dreams.

MirrorMask is that most delicate of cinematic creatures: a superficially childlike but actually quite rewarding fairy tale for adults … a description that will come as no surprise to fans of Neil Gaiman, who wrote the screenplay. This captivating, visually sumptuous feast for the senses belongs in the lofty company of genre classics such as Time Bandits and The City of Lost Children, although (alas!) Gaiman’s film isn’t quite as focused as those earlier works.

Those in the know need no introduction to this impressively agile author, who made his name by writing a lengthy run of the re-configured Sandman comic book. Gaiman, in the company of Alan Moore and a few other equally imaginative scribes, helped prove what some of us have been bleating for years: that comics ain’t just for kids. Gaiman’s stint on Sandman led to several novels, including the celebrated American Gods and the just-published Anansi Boys, along with a handful of equally entertaining children’s books - that also aren’t just for kids - such as Coraline and The Wolves in the Walls.

Like Ray Bradbury, Gaiman is a fantasist whose literary style transcends genre description: Both men write stories where the plot isn’t necessarily as important as the poetic imagry used to advance the narrative. In that sense, translating their works to film can be an iffy proposition; absent the author’s precise way with words, the visuals aren’t necessarily as evocative as the prose.

But.

MirrorMask is a collaborative project with Gaiman’s longtime friend and colleague, Dave McKean, an artist and infrequent film director well known for his singularly compelling, collage-style illustrations. McKean did many of the covers during Gaiman’s run on Sandman, and the artist’s idiosyncratic style is a perfect complement to Gaiman’s precise, carefully constructed text.

In a word, this film is mesmerizing.

The magic begins immediately, with title credits that only can be described as a pop-up book somehow turned corporeal and fully three-dimensional. MirrorMask is yet another theme and variations on Alice in Wonderland, with a young heroine plunged into a fantasy world not her own, which obeys oblique rules beyond her ken … if, indeed, there are any rules at all.

But this story also has a sly subtext that addresses teen rebellion, and the need to recognize that - generation gap notwithstanding - sometimes there really is no place like home.

Stephanie Leonidas stars as Helena, a 15-year-old British girl whose parents run a dilapidated family circus that teeters on the edge of financial stability. Helena has grown to loathe her nighttime routine of dressing up, juggling and capering about in the single large tent; she finds it embarrassing and - in a delicious note of irony - wishes she could run away and join real life.

Leonidas is an expressive young actress, and she makes a thoroughly credible heroine: resourceful and vulnerable by turns.

Helena derives personal satisfaction from producing countless pages of whimsical, eccentric artwork (all McKean’s work), much of which adorns her bedroom wall. She exchanges cross words with her mother (Gina McKee) one evening, mere hours before the poor woman falls ill and is rushed to the hospital for treatment of something unspecified … but clearly dire.

The grief-stricken Helena blames herself for the cruel words hurled during that final argument, although her father (Rob Brydon) insists, of course, that it isn’t her fault.

Then, having retired to bed one night, Helena wakens in a bizarre landscape that seems an odd blend of her run-down neighborhood and the artwork on her walls. She has no time to contemplate these surroundings, because a masked figure dubbed Valentine (Jason Barry) immediately warns her to flee an advancing inky wave of blackness that blots out landscapes and living beings alike … and often erupts with small, spider-legged nightmares that subsequently spy on those who evade assimilation.

Before long, and thanks to the preoccupied but still helpful Librarian (Stephen Fry, recognized in voice if not appearance), Helena learns that this strange land is ruled jointly by queens of light and darkness. But something has gone wrong; the dark queen’s daughter has disappeared, taking with her a fabled icon known as the mirrormask. This has sent the sun-bright queen into a coma-like sleep, which in turn has allowed her malevolent colleague to expand her control.

Parallels to Helena’s own life become more obvious when we see that McKee also plays both queens, while Brydon pops up as the prime minister of daylight lands. As with The Wizard of Oz, all the figures in Helena’s waking reality have new roles in this frightening fantasy realm, and her relationships with them are key to finding a way back to her own universe.

The creatures encountered in this kingdom are rendered with a blend of McKean’s artwork, computer animation and Muppet technology from the Jim Henson Studios; the results are - trust me - captivating beyond my ability to describe. The most obvious Muppet creations include monkeybirds gifted with both flight and amazing gymnastic skills, and a snarky little armadillo/porcupine that serves as the black queen’s lackey, and is given to mordant asides.

Enchanting as the Muppets are, though, the cinematically recreated bits of McKean’s artwork are breathtaking. Helena (and we) finally get some answers when the Librarian points them to a book that opens into the most amazingly elaborate mechanical paper device one could imagine; it proceeds to give an entire short-course history of this dreamlike realm. Some of the more malevolent creatures are three-dimensional cats with disturbingly two-dimensional, human-like faces (another McKean signature).

The only problem, which becomes increasingly more troubling, is the story’s refusal to follow any rhyme or reason. Helena and Valentine frequently are menaced by yet another strange set of creatures, often for no reason, and they escape via some crazy scheme that occurs to them at precisely the right moment. If we don’t know the rules, then it’s difficult to develop any sense of whether Helena is in jeopardy, or if she’s any closer to achieving her goal.

Fortunately, the narrative’s moral center - Helena’s trust in herself, and her growing recognition of the need to show some maturity - is pretty easy to follow, even if the various peril-laden hiccups seem made up from one moment to the next. Then, too, you may not care; merely reveling in the astonishing imagination on display might be enough to hold your attention.

Fiction, however, is a different game. Be it sci-fi, fantasy or historical fiction, the author must rely on his or her skills to make these imaginary characters seem real.

It has been done many times throughout history, and the modern master of this art is Neil Gaiman. The U.K. native, who is most famous for his graphic novel series Sandman, has in recent years been storming his way into readers’ hearts with his novels, especially with his newest book, Anansi Boys.

While this latest novel takes place in the same realm as his smash hit American Gods, it is not a sequel.

Anansi Boys is the tale of two brothers, Spider and Charles “Fat Charlie” Nancy.

After both of his parents pass, Fat Charlie is reunited with Spider, the brother he never knew he had. Their father was Anansi, the Greek spider god, who besides being the owner of every story ever told, also had a way of making everything end up in his favor.

Fat Charlie quickly learns that Spider seems to have inherited all of their father’s supernatural charm and has decided to use it to dethrone Charlie from his own life, including stealing his fiancee and making him lose his job.

In Anansi Boys, there are at least two or three other well-defined main characters whose stories all end up in the same place and are ultimately intertwined.

The skill that Gaiman uses in turning his characters into real people is breathtaking and forces the reader to keep the pages turning as more and more is revealed about the lives of the characters.

Anansi Boys is not as dark as American Gods, but it leaves readers with the same feeling of mysticism and the notion that maybe what they just read could be reality.

After jetting off to Florida for the funeral, Charlie not only discovers a brother he didn’t know he had, but also learns that his father was the West African trickster god, Anansi. Charlie’s brother, who possesses his own magical powers, later visits him at home and spins Charlie’s life out of control, getting him fired, sleeping with his fianc�e, and even getting him arrested for a white-collar crime.

Charlie fights back with assistance from other gods, and that’s when the real trouble begins. They lead the brothers into adventures that are at times scary or downright hysterical.

At first Charlie is overwhelmed by this new world, but he is Anansi’s son and shows just as much flair for trickery as his brother.

With its quirky, inventive fantasy, this is a real treat for Gaiman’s fans. Here, he writes with a fuller sense of character. Focusing on a smaller cast gives him the room to breathe life into these figures.

Anansi is also a story about fathers, sons, and brothers and how difficult it can be to get along even when they are so similar. Darkly funny and heartwarming to the end, this book is an addictive read not easily forgotten.

This sampler demonstrates the creative scope of contemporary comics and points out new directions for comics readers, old and new, to follow. It also provides a sense of a comics community, although unfortunately, Dark Horse and Marvel declined to participate.

The selections favor alternative comics, with a smattering of superhero material. But whereas a “year’s best” collection of SF short stories includes entire works, this anthology necessarily provides excerpts of longer comics.

Readers will get a good sense of the various artists’ styles, but this limitation does not always serve the writers well. For example, those unacquainted with Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen will not realize key story points from this brief excerpt. Short text introductions to each segment would have been helpful.

I’m recording the audio book of “STARDUST” right now. It’s fun, although by the end of the day I am more exhausted than I would believe possible from something where I just sit in a studio and read something I’ve written.

What I learned yesterday: 1) Do not give a minor character a funny voice that’s hard on the throat but fine for a couple of sentences when that minor character is going to come back and talk his way through an entire chapter in a hundred pages’ time. 2) Take a break at the end of a chapter, whether I think I need it or not. I do.

…

Over at http://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/1991_Gaiman_Pratchett.html is an interview with me and Terry Pratchett from 1990, about Good Omens and other things. And (gulp) a photo…

This morning’s post went straight to the beta-testing new version of this site, and I assume that whatever I write now will go there too an nobody will read it for a few days… I hope that things get sorted out soon, so that you can read this, and the last post. Still, it tells us that we’re cruising down the road toward the NEW IMPROVED easy to navigate Neil Gaiman.com with lots of cool stuff on it…

…

So I was reading Stardust aloud in a studio today and suddenly had one of those odd moments when you notice something utterly wrong in a book you’ve written and wonder why you’ve never noticed it before (and why apparently no-one else ever did either). There’s a scene where I have the witch queen sharpening her obsidian knives with a whetstone. And I thought, “That wouldn’t work, that’s not how you sharpen a volcanic glass blade”, and wondered how I’d comne to put that in — I think the knives had started out as metal in one draft (it was ten years ago, and I’ve forgotten) and then I’d changed them to obsidian because it would be more fun for Charles Vess to draw, and not noticed the whetstone, and almost a decade had passed until I came to read the sequence aloud, and then it hit me.

There’s a reissue of Stardust, with a new cover, coming in October from Harper Perennial. Now I have to decide whether to leave that scene as it is, or change it.

Just thought you might like to know that you’re the 5th “Most Owned Author” on mylibrary.com. Directly ahead of J.R.R. Tolkien and William Shakespeare. http://www.librarything.com/users.php

Which tells us lots of interesting things about mylibrary users. (Which I find, to be honest, an extremely attractive sort of website, and if I only had a month or so with nothing to do, I’d input my own books.) It’s a fascinating site — a couple of clicks and I was reading a discussion about race in Anansi Boys…

I thought you should know about this: http://www.livejournal.com/community/virgule/92396.html. It’s a call for papers for a conference on your work. Will you be writing one, perhaps?

Not on your nelly. Be like helping out at your own autopsy (as I just wrote to a friend in academia, who invited me to cowrite a paper).

His latest novel, Anansi Boys, is much merrier fare than usual, but it touches on all of those categories and more.

The novel opens with Fat Charlie Nancy planning his wedding when his estranged father dies — in an embarrassingly funny way.

Typical, Fat Charlie glumly muses, remembering the pranks and ways his father thought up to embarrass him as a child, starting with his unshakable nickname.

Uptight, diffident, always a hair’s breadth from dropping dead of embarrassment, Fat Charlie is as different from his fedora-wearing, puckish father as is humanly possible. We soon learn this is because his father wasn’t human at all.

He was the king of tricksters and outrageous charmers, the African monkey god, Anansi, whom we briefly saw telling tall tales to a rapt audience in Gaiman’s American Gods.

His father’s funeral sets Fat Charlie’s life careering madly off its moorings as he is forced to face facts and learn lesson after unbelievable lesson, grim and hilarious, often at the same time.

The first — and simplest — thing he learns is that if you feel compelled to turn crimson and launch into a moving graveside speech, it’s best to first check you’re addressing the right stiff.

From there on, things get complicated. Four occult old neighbourhood biddies explain that not only was his father a god, but Fat Charlie has a brother.

Back home, Fat Charlie gives this brother a call and things start to go Gaiman-shaped at a dizzying pace.

Spider, Fat Charlie’s new-found, designer-dressed brother, seems to have greedily inherited all of Anansi’s charm, poise and chutzpah, as well as his magical abilities, leaving nothing for Fat Charlie.

Fat Charlie finds himself plunged into chaos — with his fiancee, the law, his obnoxious boss, ancient African archetypes and gods and several murderous flocks of birds.

Grim things happen in a matter-of-fact way and everyday events are loaded with drama as Gaiman’s genre-bending genius makes it hard to figure out which of Fat Charlie’s many interlinked crises is the most serious.

His story is equal parts ancient and ultra-modern, a quest, a coming-of-age tale and a fable rolled into one as he seeks help in a world he barely believes in and finds an ally where he’d least expect.

Rich as it is, Anansi Boys is a lighter read than some of Gaiman’s novels, but there’s no dearth of grim happenings.

But Gaiman tells the tale with such a deft touch, spiking the most sombre situations with wit and humour, the whole story goes by in a flash.

It is so fresh, so bold and so fantastical on the visual plane that it seems to reinvent the language of dreams and widen the possibilities of fantasy.

Dave McKean’s film chronicles a 15-year-old British girl’s harrowing, coming-of-age journey. Everything we see in the surreal world presented on the screen is a product of the girl’s fertile imagination.

The paradox of how new this looks is that there are dozens of references to the familiar. In the realm of children’s literature and/or movies, MirrorMask invokes fare ranging from The Wizard of Oz to Alice in Wonderland, Labyrinth and the underappreciated 1988 drama Paperhouse (a connection made by critic Roger Ebert, who recognized the dangerous trap that a dreamscape can become).

In the realm of fine art, MirrorMask employs images reminiscent of Michelangelo, Chagall, Max Ernst, Picasso and even contemporary filmmaker-artists Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam.

This could turn into a toxic stew in the wrong hands. But graphic artist and director McKean, working with collaborator Neil Gaiman on the story and screenplay, delivers a breathtaking phantasmagoria.

The central figure is the girl (a charismatic Stephanie Leonidas, channelling Helena Bonham Carter in her youth). She is a jack of many trades in her parents’ one-ring circus.

While most kids want to run away to join the circus, our heroine wants to run away to join real life.

One day, her resentment slides into cruelty. She tells her mother (the lustrous and versatile Gina McKee) that she wishes her dead. Her mother falls deathly ill.

At this point, the girl escapes into her fantasy world, a quixotic land of good and evil, of dark and light, of creatures so bizarre that the girl does not even recognize how she could have conjured them.

In the fantasyland, Leonidas must find an elusive, rare object, the mirrormask, to save the Queen of the City of Light from a dire fate and to stave off the gathering forces of darkness. Meanwhile, she catches glimpses of her own destructive alter ego.