47 pages • 1 hour read
Neil GaimanAnansi Boys
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Which Concludes With an Evening of Wine, Women and Song”
At work, Fat Charlie is disoriented and begins singing to himself. Grahame Coats catches him and berates him for it, and a nearby coworker compliments Fat Charlie’s voice. He receives a call from Maeve requesting Grahame Coats get in touch, as well as a call from Rosie saying her mother is helping with their wedding. After Grahame Coats berates him for taking a personal call, Fat Charlie fantasizes about the kind of person he’d like to be. On his way home he meets Spider, who has just come from their father’s grave. Spider decides that they both deserve a night out. He takes Fat Charlie to a wine bar, conversing with the philosophical cab driver on the way. At the wine bar, the brothers drink an ancient wine and toast to their parents and Spider tries to explain why he didn’t seek out Fat Charlie sooner: He couldn’t find the right words for the right song, so he put it off. Fat Charlie tells Spider about his life, his relationship, and his job. Spider invites Fat Charlie to continue their journey seeking out women and song.
They arrive at a birthday party in a pub and join in. Spider is soon laden with women while Fat Charlie looks on enviously. As the group leaves the pub, a woman named Daisy joins Fat Charlie and walks with him. They go into a pub hosting a karaoke night, and several of the girls get up to sing. Daisy sings badly but enjoys the experience; she sits with Fat Charlie and encourages him to try. Spider sings “Under the Boardwalk,” one of Fat Charlie’s favorite songs from childhood. He agrees to get up and sing, preparing to put on a monumental show, but feels ill and is unable to continue. The chapter closes with a final anecdote about the realm of gods, which exists alongside the human world.
Chapter 5 Summary: “In Which We Examine the Many Consequences of the Morning After”
Fat Charlie awakes with a hangover and discovers Daisy naked in his bed. She helps him recuperate, and he receives a call from Spider; Spider has gone into his workplace and pretended to be Fat Charlie. Fat Charlie tries to work out whether he has had sex with Daisy, and she enjoys teasing him before confessing they just fell asleep. Meanwhile, Spider is enjoying having a job for the first time and getting to know the company; he convinces Fat Charlie’s computer to believe he’s Grahame Coats and explores the company finances. Grahame Coats appears and summons Spider to the office, where he tells him he’s being fired. Spider deflects by asking questions about Grahame Coats’s secret offshore accounts.
At home, Fat Charlie begins to feel better, and Daisy has a bath. They talk through the bathroom door, and Daisy compliments Fat Charlie’s singing voice. The doorbell rings as Mrs. Noah arrives with wedding plans, though is surprised to see him there; she heard Rosie was meeting him for lunch. Mrs. Noah announces that has taken over preparations and expects Fat Charlie’s cooperation. Daisy appears, wrapped in a towel, and introduces herself to Mrs. Noah. Fat Charlie hastily tells Mrs. Noah that Daisy is his cousin. Mrs. Noah leaves, and Daisy kisses Fat Charlie before she gets in her taxi. He calls Rosie but doesn’t get a response. At the same time, Rosie is considering her mother’s new attitude towards the wedding, and her own feelings towards Fat Charlie.
The narration pauses to examine the building housing the Grahame Coats Agency and its ancient, decrepit elevator. Rosie arrives to meet Fat Charlie and instead meets Spider, convinced they’re the same man. She feels more excited about him than she ever has before. They go out for lunch and ice cream together. Meanwhile, the real Fat Charlie arrives at his office looking for Rosie. Grahame Coats summons Fat Charlie to his office and offers him paid time off and a bonus cheque in exchange for his discretion. Before Fat Charlie leaves, Grahame Coats requests his computer password. Fat Charlie takes a walk and discovers Spider and Rosie kissing. He goes home and falls asleep, dreaming of a day out with his father. Anansi tells him that when a starfish is cut in half, it becomes two starfish. Grahame Coats goes through his records, deleting and adjusting to link his financial crimes to Fat Charlie.
The narration introduces another Anansi tale: Anansi coveted a field of peas his wife planted and didn’t want to share any, so he pretended to lay dying and made his family promise to bury him near the pea patch. After his apparent death, he rises in secret to eat the best peas. His family begins to starve. They consider what Anansi would do in their situation and decide to build a guardian out of tar. That night, Anansi rises from the grave and is enraged to discover the tar man in his garden. When the tar man refuses to leave, Anansi begins to fight him. However, each blow only glues Anansi to the tar. His family discovers him stuck to the tar man, dead, the next morning.
Chapter 6 Summary: “In Which Fat Charlie Fails to Get Home, Even by Taxi”
Daisy gets ready for work, sharing breakfast with her roommate, Carol. As she arrives at her office, her boss asks her to call Grahame Coats. Daisy introduces herself to Grahame Coats as “Detective Constable Day” (108), and Grahame Coats tells her that he believes his bookkeeper, Charles Nancy, is involved in illegal financial practices. Meanwhile, Spider returns home and he and Fat Charlie have an argument over him kissing Rosie. Fat Charlie encourages Spider to leave, but Spider wants to stay and get to know Rosie better. Fat Charlie asks Spider if he plans to marry Rosie in his place, and Spider is horrified at the idea.
Grahame Coats calls and asks Fat Charlie to stop by the office. Spider tries to warn Fat Charlie against him and announces that he’s taken over Fat Charlie’s spare room, which he’s enchanted to be bigger and more luxurious than it really is. Its windows look out onto a jungle instead of England. Fat Charlie calls Mrs. Higgler for help, and she promises to ask Mrs. Dunwiddy’s advice. He returns to Spider, who suggests Fat Charlie go for lunch and a movie. Fat Charlie does exactly that and watches five films in a row before being gently kicked out by the cinema staff. When he returns to his house, he sees the silhouettes of Spider and Rosie through the curtains of his bedroom.
Mrs. Higgler arrives at Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house to talk about Fat Charlie and Spider. Mrs. Dunwiddy is in the midst of preparing a turkey dinner. They discuss what to do, and Mrs. Dunwiddy says she’s expecting Fat Charlie and their other friends to join them for dinner the next day. In England, Rosie is enjoying her time out with Spider, who she still thinks is Fat Charlie. They go home together and begin kissing in Fat Charlie’s room. They’re disrupted by the sound of Fat Charlie’s cry outside. Fat Charlie goes for a walk and finds himself unable to return home. As he walks, he gets more and more lost. He takes a taxi home, even though it’s only around the corner, promising a bonus for the cab driver. However, the cab driver can’t find it either and they drive in circles.
Daisy arrives at Grahame Coats’s office and asks him about the financial irregularities. Grahame Coats attempts to smoothly cast suspicion on Fat Charlie and asks for Daisy’s discretion. Fat Charlie arrives at the office, and Grahame Coats introduces him to Daisy; they recognize each other from the morning Daisy woke up in his bed. Fat Charlie reflects that there could be nothing left to surprise him. After she leaves, Grahame Coats flaunts his victory over Fat Charlie and tells him the police suspect him of the crimes Spider accused Grahame Coats of. Fat Charlie returns home and argues with Spider, telling him to leave. Spider refuses, and Fat Charlie decides to go back to Florida for help.
Grahame Coats prepares to run away under a fake identity. He reflects on his successful crime legacy within the company. Maeve phones him, and Grahame Coats assures her that her money is on the way. While they speak, he doodles a cat on his notepad. Meanwhile, Spider begins to feel inexplicably guilty. He discovers that Fat Charlie has left and speaks to Rosie on the phone. She invites him over, and his guilt evaporates. Charlie sleeps on his flight to Florida; everything is going wrong on the plane, from the noisy passengers to the lack of food. While he sleeps, he has a nightmare about his wedding to Rosie where he’s being asked to sing, and the cake is full of spiders. He wakes up screaming and disrupts the flight.
Chapter 7 Summary: “In Which Fat Charlie Goes a Long Way”
Mrs. Higgler picks Fat Charlie up from the airport and drives him to her home. He eats dinner with the four women and silently compares them to the witches of Macbeth. He asks for their help in getting rid of Spider, and they tell him they can’t help, but someone else might be able to. Back in England, Spider experiences a feeling of foreboding, Daisy considers the case of the Grahame Coats Agency, and Grahame Coats sleeps peacefully and dreamlessly.
At Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house, she, Fat Charlie, and the other three women prepare for a ritual. Each woman was responsible for bringing a tool or ingredient, but Mrs. Noles got penguin-shaped candles instead of black ones and Mrs. Bustamonte brought mixed cooking herbs instead of ritualistic ones. Mrs. Higgler brought four different types of soil and sand she calls the “four earths” (147). Mrs. Dunwiddy tells Fat Charlie not to give anything without getting “something of equal value in return” (148). The four women begin to go through the steps of the ritual. Fat Charlie feels as though he’s floating, and then finds himself in the realm of gods. There he meets several of the gods: Lion, Elephant, Snake, Tiger, and more. None of them will help him because of the tricks Anansi played on them. Monkey tries to convince Fat Charlie to go home.
Fat Charlie enters an empty cave and meets Bird, who takes the form of both animal and woman. She agrees to help in exchange for “Anansi’s bloodline” (159). He remembers to ask for something of equal value, and Bird gives him one of her feathers. He wakes up in Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house; the four women are trying to wake him up. As he revives, he tells the women what happened with the Bird Woman. Mrs. Higgler drives him to the cemetery, and they notice the birds paying them unusual attention. Fat Charlie looks forward to returning home.
The narrative moves into a tale about Anansi and Bird. One day Anansi puts on a cookpot and shouts about how fit and healthy he’s feeling. Bird appears and seduces him to share the secret of his health. He tells her that he took a restorative herbal bath in the cookpot, but he doesn’t want to share it with anyone else. Bird jumps into the cookpot, and Anansi traps her inside. Since then, birds and spiders have been enemies.
Chapters 4-7 Analysis
Fat Charlie has just reached his first major turning point as he reconnects with Spider for the first time, and now they’re getting to know each other as estranged family. Chapter 4 opens with Fat Charlie unknowingly singing to himself and getting berated by Grahame Coats. Afterwards, however, a work colleague tells him he “should be making records, not wasting your time here” (66). This is an allusion to Charlie’s successful music career at the end of the novel. In this scene, Grahame Coats tells Fat Charlie he’s a “Crystal Palace” supporter. Crystal Palace is a football team based in South London. Though it might be a coincidence, Crystal Palace is also the name of a character in DC Comics’ Dead Boy Detectives series, a spinoff of Gaiman’s Sandman.
This chapter highlights the differences between Fat Charlie and Spider, putting them in direct juxtaposition against each other. Fat Charlie is presented as awkward, unsociable, and unlucky, while Spider is effortlessly cool and detached. By taking this time to show their differences, Gaiman primes the reader for their transformations as they become increasingly alike. During their karaoke evening, Spider sings “Under the Boardwalk.” This incenses Fat Charlie as it’s one of his favorites, leading to his embarrassing downfall. Later, when Fat Charlie gets on stage to save Daisy from Grahame Coats, he sings “Under the Boardwalk.” Again, Gaiman uses juxtaposition of the two experiences to show Fat Charlie’s growth.
After their night out, Fat Charlie wakes up with Daisy and is forced to recalibrate his space. When Daisy kisses him for the first time, he realizes it’s a different experience from anything he’s felt for Rosie. This is his first indication (and the reader’s) that he and Rosie might not be right for each other after all. Rosie, meanwhile, is having the same burrowing doubts about him. The narration pauses here to examine the elevator in Fat Charlie’s office, an antiquated and unreliable mechanism. While this might seem out of place, it serves to foreshadow a later arrival: “People would go into the lift with Binky Butterworth once, but after that they used the stairs” (94). When Maeve comes in to see Grahame Coats, she rides the elevator up, not knowing it will be her last living journey. On her way out, she tries to call the elevator but doesn’t get a response, so she uses the stairs. While this initial detail isn’t necessary for the plot, it does give another facet to the setting.
This section begins unraveling the discord between Fat Charlie and Spider, which will become the driving force of the plot. As someone with no thoughts to the consequences of his choices, Spider cannot see the damage he’s inflicting until it’s too late. He’s shown to have a dehumanizing attitude towards others, which is essential in illustrating his own internal character development. At this point in the novel, Spider and Grahame Coats are both presented as antagonists in Fat Charlie’s story; for them both to be effective, they need to be different from each other. While Spider is selfish and hedonistic, he lacks the cognitive malice of Grahame Coats’s character. We see this in the way the narrator explores Grahame Coats’s motivations for cheating his clients and his plans for his future. When he speaks on the phone with Maeve, easing her worries, he unconsciously draws a cat with “sharp teeth, so it looked a little like a mountain lion” (132). This shows the reader that Tiger’s influence is already seeping into Grahame Coats’s mind.
At the end of Chapter 6, Fat Charlie takes off for Florida and has a horrifically unlucky flight. The narrator details all the ways things are going wrong for him; this sets up the contrast of his return flight, in which everything goes right. The latter illustrates how Fat Charlie is beginning to come into his power as Anansi’s son. When he arrives at Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house, he sees several garden ornaments, including a gazing ball—a recurring motif, and the source of his separation from Spider—and pink plastic flamingos, which foreshadow Spider’s encounter with murderous tropical flamingos.
As Fat Charlie and the four older women conduct their ritual, they must make do with substandard ingredients and supplies. This is also the case the second time Fat Charlie performs the ritual. This shows that the heart of the ritual is not black candles or specific substances but intention and will. The section closes with Fat Charlie making a deal with Bird to rid him of his brother. At this point, birds come to mean something different to him, and the novel moves into its second half.
Related Titles
By Neil Gaiman
