Neverwhere

[lightreads]

Neverwhere: A Novel by Neil Gaiman

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hey, check it out. It's a Gaiman book that isn't Good Omens that I really like! Richard is a securities analyst who stops to help a bleeding girl on the sidewalk one night, and who then gets pulled from his orderly life into London Below, the world of angels and demons and talking rats. It's a nice fantasy in its own right – lively villains, real loss and betrayal, high power stakes – but it's also darkly funny and sweet. Plus, there's this nice little refrain about, well:



"I am so far out of my depth that ... Metaphors failed him, then. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him."



It's about how the pieces of a fantasy novel are metaphors – the girl who's power is to open doors, London Below where people go when they fall through the cracks – but how these things are real, too. Nice.




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Comments

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I know this is Gaiman's journeyman novel, but it's my favorite.

[insptr-penguin.livejournal.com]

Neverwhere IS wonderful.

Have you tried American Gods, also by Gaiman?

It's my favorite of his books, even more than Neverwhere.

SPOILERS IN REPLY

[readerjane]

I really wanted to love Neverwhere.

Because there were so many delightful elements to love. Quirky things like the mute sewer-picker. So disgustingly filthy and callously mercenary, and yet his mute melodrama ("So little! My family will starve!") was no different than you'd see in any bazaar. And the monks' trials, so horrifyingly compassionate.

It was the ending that spoiled the story for me. Because when it came down to it, Richard could find *nothing* good in the world above. The picture of real life that Gaiman painted was so stultifying, so grimly, unendingly dull and depressing, that Richard decides its better to live in the hell below, where at least things are exciting??

Sam Gamgee also went through hell, but he did it so he could come home; so his home could remain healthy and sun-lit and alive. For the hero's quest to end in a rejection of home and everything it stood for just... ick. Not for me.