K-SCORE: 83
Author: Neil Gaiman
Spoiler Level: Minor
“it’s a wandering thing”
Neil Gaiman has either trained his imagination to be more powerful than most anyone else’s or it’s naturally so. Neverwhere is filled with unexpected personalities grafted onto fascinating atypical characters, whimsical places mashing realism and pure-untenable fantasy into a hopeless blob, and circumstances and settings that shift so dramatically so quickly that its plot is impossible to predict or really track. He didn’t outline this. There’s no map of London Below out there. One day he invented a character named Door. Another day he thought it’d be funny if run-of-the-mill office worker Richard was forced to interact with ancient angels and torturous inhuman assassins. The idea of a bizarre bazaar popped into his weird mind perhaps for linguistic reasons and he elected to write one shortly thereafter. He sat down in the evening, not knowing exactly what to put on a page, and came up with the Night Bridge, Lamia, or The Beast of London. This is a death sentence for most stories, a non-method and ineffective in the hands of the vast majority of writers, but Gaiman is simply too skilled. Neverwhere is great regardless of and partly because of the chaos that flows down its spine.
“there’s always another magic key”
Because of Gaiman’s godlike imagination, Neverwhere is fun to read. You’re genuinely not sure what is going to appear on the very next page, but you’re pretty sure it’s not going to be what you’ve been reading about already. His prose is highly amusing. Mixed in with descriptions that either create a sense of something or an image of something, is his humor, which is grounded in the impossibility of what he’s presenting. His characters aren’t jokesters. It’s just funny the way they interact with each other and the world, some accepting the fantastical easily and the commonplace with extreme difficulty and others being exactly the opposite. Richard, the protagonist, is right in the middle of this spectrum, dealing with people like Door one moment and his fiance or old boss the next. Hilarious or just plain goofy writing is easy to read, and Gaiman keeps everything moving and developing at a decent clip, so Neverwhere is fast, and a simple book to recommend.
Yet the style comes at a cost. The plot is stitched together and ugly. I never felt the stakes of a situation because I never got the sense that Gaiman was capable of writing himself into a hole. If, when planning a story, a writer creates a set of rules and characters that oppose each other like armies on a battlefield, then their inevitable clash will have to follow an internal logic. If you, the reader, can’t figure out how a hero is going to overcome such obstacles or if, inherent to those obstacles, there is no flawless solution, you get a little nervous for the stakes. That’s power in plotting. With Neverwhere, anything can happen on any page, so it never feels like Richard or Door are trapped. Croup and Vandemar are evil with monstrous abilities, but just because Gaiman might say “there’s no escape” one moment, doesn’t mean I believe it. There’s always another magic key or subculture of London Below that can help or secret ability born from Door’s family history or Richard’s strength of character. I can accept a chaotic plot, even though it’s not how I write or what I like to read most, but even a skilled writer like Gaiman has me shrugging at conclusions and unimpressed with conflict resolution when circumstances get out of control.
Neverwhere lasts some three-hundred pages, but, if Gaiman had been a little more addicted to his story, he could have written easily for a thousand pages before slamming (the) Door and Richard into Croup, Vandemar, and the Angel Islington. The idea of London Below is large enough that there really isn’t an upper limit to the amount of time it could be explored in a novel or series of novels. Since I loved the settings and the connects of London Below with London Above / real history, I would have been happy if the explorations lasted longer. Gaiman just needed to keep tweaking his plot as he went, introducing more micro-conflicts, characters, and equally small resolutions. Yet it’s also fine as is. Again, it’s not as if I thought there was a map of London Below out there, so I didn’t have a desire to have more pins pricked into its key locales.
The conclusion is where I find something closer to absolute fault within the novel. It’s rarely satisfying to have a story reset to a point at the beginning; it makes the experience of reading (watching, listening to, etc.) it feel wasted. Gaiman doesn’t quite do this, but it’s close. And Door was my favorite character. She’s abandoned by the end, her relationship with Richard left in the ether of the unknown, so that felt like failure in development. Ignoring her in the final pages is especially tragic considering that the foundation for her character is that no one in London Above is capable or willing to see her, wounded and in trouble. They ignore her, seeing her as beneath them.
So it’s a wandering thing, Neverwhere, uneven in content and quality, but usually funny and fun to read, so who cares? Sometimes I crave my stories to be tighter so their impact has higher potential, but I wouldn’t force that taste on others whose preferences differ. Gaiman’s writing style and imagination are so spectacular it’s worth reading whatever whimsical tour inside his mind he offers to take you on.