primeideal

[Edit October 2024, since I link back to this post from other reviews: Neil Gaiman has recently been accused of sexual assault by five different women. muccamukk has an extensive link roundup here.]

Let's talk about the setting/worldbuilding/magic system in "Neverwhere," because it's great.

Neverwhere is set in a "London Below" that parallels the mundane "London Above." Except, in London Below, names like Angel, Black Friars, Night's Bridge, Earl's Court, and Shepherd's Bush aren't just the names (or soundalikes) of Underground stations: they're very real, and home to anachronistic earls, friars, and shepherds, who can be very dangerous. Travelers journey through tunnels and sewers, or along rooftops and ladders, and two points that appear distant in London Above might be reached more easily--or more perilously--in London Below. All these liminal spaces come together to make something compelling, and I am absolutely here for it.

The labyrinth itself was a place of pure madness. It was built of lost fragments of London Above: alleys and roads and corridors and sewers that had fallen through the cracks over the millennia, and entered the world of the lost and the forgotten. The two men and the girl walked over cobbles, and through mud, and through dung of various kinds, and over rotting wooden boards. They walked through daylight and night, through gaslit streets, and sodium-lit streets, and streets lit with burning rushes and links. It was an ever-changing place: and each path divided and circled and doubled back on itself.

Adding to this whimsy are the affable assassins, Croup and Vandemar. Croup is loquacious and foxlike, Vandemar blunt and wolflike, but they're united in their taste for murder. A couple of enjoyable Croup-isms: "Her days are numbered, and the number in question isn't even in the double digits." "We brought the Black Plague to Flanders. We have assassinated a dozen kings, five popes, half a hundred heroes and two accredited gods. Our last commission before this was the torturing to death of an entire monastery in sixteenth-century Tuscany. We are utterly professional."

So those are the strengths of "Neverwhere." What are the weaknesses?

In the introduction to the "Author's Preferred Edition" (merging some of the descriptions from previous UK and US printings), Gaiman gives us a clue of where this is going: "I wanted to talk about the people who fall through the cracks, to talk about the dispossessed—using the mirror of fantasy, which can sometimes show us things we have seen so many times that we never see them at all—for the very first time." London Below is not for people who have stable lives in London Above; it's for the homeless, the marginalized.

Our protagonist is an everyman named Richard Mayhew who discovers London Below when he sees a badly wounded girl on the run. When he stops to assist her, she tells him that she doesn't want an ambulance or the authorities to get involved, so he'll just have to bring her to his home to recuperate. He carries her with him, and "did not, any point on his walk, stop to think. It was not something over which he had any volition." There's that pesky free will again! Richard's fiance, Jessica, "who gave to charity and invested ethically," is of course too sensible to do things like seeing and noticing homeless people as people.

Well, no good deed goes unpunished; for the mistake of showing empathy, Richard is made invisible to London Above, reduced to the glanced-over condition of homeless people. So he has no choice but to follow the girl he rescued, Door (her deceased family had names like Portico and Arch) into London Below, where she's still on the run from people who want to hurt her. People in London Below speak to rats, and have complicated systems of owing one another favors or bartering: "food cost him a ballpoint pen, and a book of matches he had forgotten he had." (The absurd "trades" reminded me of Wayne from Mistborn Era 2: he likes to think that his trades are a way of mocking the pretensions of rich people, but his "partners" aren't asked for their opinions on the transactions.) All Richard wants is his normal life back, no matter how many times people tell him it's impossible, so he tags along with Door, partly in the hopes that helping her will see him rewarded.

But Gaiman seems to be trying to have it both ways: "if you were really a good and heroic person, you'd eat cats and hang out with rats and you'd like it! Just like this guy, who...is not impressed with the portal fantasy and would prefer the mundane." Or, as another character puts it: "I’ve passed the people who fall through the cracks, Richard: they sleep in shop doorways all down the Strand. They don’t go to a special London. They freeze to death in the winter." Okay, the internal logic of the world contradicts this statement...but what are those of us who live in this world supposed to take from it?

Door is a character with talents (unlocking things) and goals (avenging her family) in her own right, not exclusively a manic pixie dream girl or an outlet for Richard's pity. But. The word "opal" is used on eleven different occasions to describe her eyes. The word "caramel" is used seven times to describe another woman's appearance. We get it!

(It's possible that this is just an unfair criticism time-wise, the original book came out in 1996, writing styles may have shifted since then. Compare the first page of "Tress of the Emerald Sea:" "Men often described the girl as having hair the color of wheat. Others called it the color of caramel, or occasionally the color of honey. The girl wondered why men so often used food to describe women’s features. There was a hunger to such men that was best avoided." But since I've already opened the door, as it were, to temporally unfair criticisms, the "Lego Movie" issue of "woman works long and hard to develop her skills, but falls just short of The Quest; random everyman succeeds in her place just because...the Narrative??" is relevant here, too.)

I personally didn't find aspects such as Richard having his fortune told in the prologue, or having prophetic dreams about a monstrous Beast, as interesting/compelling as the weird urban worldbuilding. In fairness, Richard noticing the old woman who reads his fortune counts as a display of his character. But the foreshadowing wasn't really that necessary.

You know what they say about the life of an amateur con artist: the pros are the cons, and the cons are the pros. In "Neverwhere," the upside is an engaging and richly constructed "downside"--but the discrepancy between the dubious rewards for virtue in Gaiman's London and our own fell flat for me.

Bingo: using it for Urban Fantasy. Is also a Standalone, Award Finalist But Non-Winner, No Ifs Ands Or Buts. I would make the case that Richard counts as an anti-hero, his stated motivations are self-interested for most of the book.

And that's it, with most of the month to spare! I'll probably do a wrap-up post tomorrow before crossposting to Reddit. :D