Tim Danner

Last night I also finished reading Neverwhere. This is only the second book I’ve read by Neil Gaiman, and the first was Good Omens. Since that was cowritten with Terry Pratchett, it has a very different feel. Neverwhere is not a funny book, though it does have a few laughs here and there. It’s a character book, and I recommend it.

What impressed me most about the book was how Gaiman leads the reader to track Richard’s own feelings about his surroundings. Starting with the shock and disgust about being pulled into and trapped in London Below, through a growing connection with and respect for its people, to finally a feeling of alienation on return to London Above, the reader (well, I did anyway) feels the same way about the world in the narrative as Richard does. That’s cool.

If this were made into a Hollywood movie (it’s already a BBC miniseries), Croup and Vandemar would be played by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. Or not.

Neverwhere comes of course from a long line of novels in which a fantasy world exists beside the “real world,” accessible through some strange portal - The Wizard of Oz, Through the Looking Glass, The Chronicles of Narnia, etc. This is in contrast to the other two major ways of setting up a fantasy world: embed it in the real world, but make it secret, as in Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer; or just dispense with the real world entirely and set your novel in fantasy without reference to the contemporary mundane, as in The Lord of the Rings and essentially all science fiction, which generally relegates the mundane to the near or far past to make way for the [dys|u]topian future.

Also, it made me want to visit London.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 13th, 2004 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.