Pam's Book Log

26 October, 2002

American Gods has garnered numerous accolades and a Hugo award. Many people claim that the Sandman series is his best work. However, Neverwhere is still my personal favorite of Gaiman's works, by far.

Richard Mayhew is an ordinary guy. He's got a job in London's Financial District, and is content to live his dull yuppie existance, letting his bossy fiancee run his life. This all changes when he stops to help a bedraggled young woman who he finds bleeding to death on the sidewalk. Afterwards, he discovers that he has "disappeared" from normal society-- nobody sees him, his ATM card doesn't work, his landlord relets his apartment, and his fiancee forgets that she ever knew him. Seeking to discover what has happened, and wanting to get his life back, he sets out to find the girl.

This leads Richard to a strange underground London, "London Below," which is populated by weird, fantastic people, many of whom are named after London neighborhoods and landmarks (or Underground stations, as it were). In London Below, the Earl's Court train really contains an Earl and his Court, the Angel Islington is a real angel, Old Bailey is a weird old geezer who lives on the rooftops of London, keeps birds, and wears a cape of feathers, and the Black Friars are a group of monks in dark robes. When Richard meets up with the girl (who name is Door), he becomes even more involved with her problems-- somebody has had her family killed, and she wants to find out who did it and why, all while being pursued by the hired assassins, herself.

So, why do I like this book so much? If I had to pick one aspect of it, it would be the setting. The fantastical London of the book is not only a brilliant piece of imagining, it feels like London. (That's not a touristy opinion; I used to live there.) If any city were to have a huge, secret underground counterpart, composed of pieces and places which were abandoned and forgotten over the course of thousands of years, it would be London. Neverwhere is a book written by somebody who's familiar with the city and its history, and who, it seems to me, really understands the city's soul. (Incidentally, this relates to something I consider a flaw in American Gods-- it's set in America; in many ways, it's about America, but it reads very much like something written by a foreigner who doesn't completely understand America.) In addition to being a well-developed setting, it drums up nostalgia for a place I really enjoyed living, which is why the book is such a favorite for me.

That's not to say the setting is the only good thing about the book. It's got lots of cool characters, like the rougish Marquis de Carabas ("Richard wondered how the marquis managed to make being pushed around in a wheelchair look like a romantic and swashbuckling thing to do."), the uber-bodyguard Hunter ("... it had been like watching Emma Peel, Bruce Lee, and a particularly vicious tornado, all rolled into one and sprinkled with a generous helping of a mongoose killing a king cobra. That was how she had moved. That was how she had fought."), and the bizarro pair of inhuman assassins, Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar (I can't even begin to describe those guys-- just read the book and you'll see). Richard himself starts out as a bit of a doormat (okay, a lot of a doormat), but he's got a good heart, and he does a lot of growing up over the course of his adventures in London Below. One thing I like about Richard's development is that, unlike a lot of books where the main character undergoes a major transformation due to his fantastic adventures, we actually get to observe how this transformation affects the protagonist's life after the adventure ends.

The plot is tight and fast-paced, with one event naturally leading to the next, and all of them leading into the climax. There's very little padding, here (again, an IMO favorable contrast with American Gods), just pure plotty goodness.

A particularly nice touch is the way magic is handled. In a lot of fantasy novels, even those which take place in settings where magic is supposed to be normal and commonplace, magic is treated as all whiz-bang, spectacular stuff. In Neverwhere, London Below is filled with magic, from angels, to sentient rats, to teleportation and telekinesis, but the characters act as if it's all utterly commonplace. It's a refreshing approach.

I certainly don't expect everybody to love Neverwhere as much as I do, since my reasons are personal and idiosyncratic, but it's still a good book, from an objective point of view.