They also seemed to be holdouts against a rising tide of rationalism on behalf of a magical past. Protestantism tried to purify Christianity of mysteries and priests and to ground itself in a direct relationship with the Scripture.

N.G.: Then again, the English didn't go for Protestantism because of all that. They went for it because it got them a kind of cheap Catholicism and a happy king. The oddness of it is that England went Protestant because Henry VIII wanted a divorce. It's not a country full of sensible Swedish people.

S.C.: But that's not to say there weren't those kinds of intellectuals there. They came along afterward and rationalized it. Well, it was a mess.

N.G.: You've always got a mess in England. That's the fun of it.

We've been talking about the English folklore, Neil, but lately you've gotten outside that. "Anansi Boys" is Caribbean. How does it feel to be writing from a tradition that you're not personally rooted in?

N.G.: For me, my previous adult novel, "American Gods," was very much about what happens when you're English and you come to stay in a country that you've seen in movies and on TV and think you know everything about, and suddenly you're noticing these odd little bits that nobody else notices because they grew up with it. And you think it's weird. You say, "Don't you think it's weird to park a car out on the ice every winter and wait for it to melt and fall in?"

Those little cultural differences can really make an impression. I remember being astonished by how many flavors of potato chips they have in England.

N.G.: Gherkin! The English grow up with pickle-flavored potato chips, so I probably wouldn't think to put them in a story. With "Anansi Boys" it was frustrating. I had the idea for the story first. I had Anansi [a West African trickster god], his son Spider and this other one who eventually got called Fat Charlie. Then I spent about seven years lazily reading every Anansi story I could and finding a book from the 1920s, when someone went out to Jamaica and talked to people. It's out of print, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I was able to get a copy. Reading stories about Anansi and death, this was all part of it. And then I had to go out to the Caribbean. And then I had to go to my friend Nalo Hopkinson and say, "I am a floppy-haired, white English person and I'm going to be writing Caribbean dialogue. I need somebody to read this and make sure that I am not making an absolute idiot of myself." Bless her, Nalo read all of my dialogue and offered suggestions where needed. I didn't actually breathe a sigh of relief until I heard the audiobook with Lenny Henry reading it. Lenny's from Dudley, but his mother came over from Jamaica, and he does all the accents. And they all work.

I particularly like that fact that you never tell the reader that the characters are black. It's something I realized a few pages in, and that made me think about why I would assume they were white unless I was told otherwise.

N.G.: If you look carefully, you'll notice that all the white characters are described as being white. If you're raised in comics, when you go to prose, you think about all the things you can do in prose that you can't do in comics. And one thing is that in comics you can see what everybody looks like immediately. So I thought, I wonder what I can do with that? It's happening in people's heads. I wonder if I can write a book in which almost everybody is black, and play completely fair -- it's not a trick or anything -- but I'm just not going to say "Fat Charlie was a black 33-year-old" because you don't start a book saying "Fat Charlie was a white 33-year-old." You'll have to pick up on cues, and they will all be given.

S.C.: That's fascinating. I always start out saying exactly what everybody looks like. I don't know why.

There's a great scene in "The Phantom Tollbooth" where a character gives the hero, Milo, an envelope and tells him there's a sound inside it. And the author, Norton Juster, simply writes, "Milo looked in and sure enough that's just what was in it." He doesn't have to describe it.

N.G.: There are so many cool things that you can do with prose! It goes in through your eyes and goes straight to the back of your head and noodles. I love footnotes, because they change your relationship to the text and what's happening. I like the fact that I finished reading "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" absolutely fascinated with the question of who'd written it. Because it very obviously wasn't being narrated by my friend Susanna Clarke, here and now. It was narrated much the way I decided that "Stardust" was being written in 1930.

S.C.: Do you know who writes it?

N.G.: I don't. One reason I'd like to go back and write another story set in that world is that I might find out.

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