Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
336 pages
Published 1997
Read from January 3 to January 5
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
There are some spoilers scattered through this, just a warning.
I
like Neil Gaiman. I think he's overrated, a lifestyle brand and idol of
Blogspot intellectuals, but I do like his work. (I loved American Gods,
but I read that years ago; I have no idea if it would impress me as
much nowadays.) Gaiman's prose is above the level of other airport
novelists but well short of prose-poetry, to say the least -- the
climactic scene where an unhinged billions-of-years-old angel reveals
his inner fury was rendered (deliberately?) comical when the angel was
described as "crazy-scary," completely deflating any terror or awe that
concept by rights should have carried. Gaiman's concepts can be neat in a
Volvo Gothic sort of way. The Earl's Court scene, for instance, was
charming, beguiling, delightful. Gaiman certainly has a skill for
vignettes, little scenes of theatrical fluorish and adventure that pad
out his somewhat thin plots. My primary disappointment with Gaiman is
how the sum product tends to be flimsier than the strength of its parts.
And much of that has to do with his characters. The side characters are
often memorable, but his central protagonists tend to lack a certain
spark. Neverwhere's male lead, Richard, is an authorial stand-in,
an everyman played for laughs, muddled and mumbling beneath the
suspicious perfection of his "rumpled, just-woken-up" hair -- until he
inevitably passes his road of trials and achieves competence. Door, the
female lead, is every teenage Tumblrite's mental conception of herself
(or perhaps every middle aged hetero man's ideal of a younger
girlfriend), an impossibly kick-ass magical pixie girl with a boutique
wardrobe and a dark past.
While archetypes aren't bad tools in
and of themselves, they leave me feeling an emotional disconnect from
the story. What Gaiman does is a more flamboyant and whimsical
elaboration of the aiport novel, telling simple and colorful stories
with simple and easily relatable stock types. Again, I have absolutely
nothing against that. It just doesn't seem enough to justify Gaiman's
vast and vocal following. You can't go two clicks on the internet
without someone producing Gaiman on a list of favorite authors. I don't
know, fannishness has always felt a little weird to me.
(I love
the Game of Thrones books, but I know they're clumsily worded and
sweatily exploitative fantasy trash. I have no special fondness for
George R. R. Martin as an author.)
To Gaiman's credit, the two
leads don't wind up romantically linked at the end. I kind of guessed
they wouldn't, but I was pleased by it all the same. I predicted pretty
much every other "twist" except for Islington being a fallen angel;
honestly I expected the Big Bad would be Mr. Stockton, the billionaire
behind the angel art exhibit, the one Jessica and Richard were going to
dine with in the first chapter. In a lesser novel he almost certainly
would have been the one holding the leash on the hired killers.
I
don't know how I felt about Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar. On one hand,
the thin man and the fat man (the brains and the muscle) is an
incredibly common stock pairing in everything from literature to comedy
duos. The thin man and the fat man played to sinister effect in a
strange, twisted, labyrinthine world that's more than it seems? Tad
Williams did that already in Otherland, the first volume of which predates Neverwhere. (I'm not saying Gaiman pilfered from Williams -- it is
an ubiquitous pairing, after all -- but I just now noticed the
neologistic similarity of the two titles. Lol.) On the other hand, I
feel Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar may edge out the Twins for the title of best
thin man and fat man played to sinister effect in a strange, twisted,
labyrinthine world that's more than it seems (in books published in the
mid-'90s, at any rate).
Enough sniping. I liked this book.
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