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

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.

Re: SPOILERS IN REPLY

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. That exact thing has worried me at points in Doctor Who (because every book discussion we have comes back to DW). Jackie calls Rose on it at the end of season 1, and it's always been this problematic thread for me. Your life is boring and you work in a department store, therefore it's all meaningless and you can run off with a stranger at the drop of a hat? But of course in DW, they all go home eventually, whether they want to or not.

Didn't bug me in Neverwhere, though. Dunno why.

Re: SPOILERS IN REPLY

[readerjane]

You're right, that is a thread in DW.

I think Sarah Jane said it most plainly in School Reunion: "You know what the most difficult thing was? Coping with what happens next, and with what doesn't happen next. You took me to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, you showed me supernovas, intergalactic battles and then you just dropped me back on Earth. How could anything compare to that? [...W]e get a taste of that splendour... and then we have to go back."

I guess the reason it doesn't bug me (or at least not very much) in DW is that the companions still love the Earth. Most of them still have ties there, and they care what happens to the other people there. They'd rather be adventuring with the Doctor, but it's not like they can't find anything good to live for on Earth.

In Neverwhere I can't remember Richard Mayhew regretting the lost of anything at all from his life on Earth. Once he realized how shallow his fiancee was, he had no ties, no concerns about anyone back at home.