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.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Mine too, so far. Until now I always said that he was actually a graphic novelist who sometimes wrote novels too, and I didn't have fondness for Sandman to pull me along. But now I know I really can like a novel of his. Huh.