Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A dangerous, magical world underfoot and out of sight Richard Mayhew is a gentle, rumpled, passive securities trader living in London and getting engaged to his domineering (career- and man-shaping) girlfriend Jessica, when, on the way to a Very Important dinner engagement with her, he sees what appears to be a homeless girl lying wounded on the sidewalk and carries her back to his flat. Richard thereby fantastically upsets his normal life. It develops that the girl, named Door, is being hunted by foxy Mr. Croup and wolfish Mr. Vandemar, a pair of immortal assassins, that she originally hails from London Below, and that the side effect of helping her renders Richard an un-person in London Above. Finding himself unable to live in the "real" London (where he no longer exists), Richard embarks on a dangerous quest in the "magical" London Below (where he doesn't belong). In addition to Door and the assassins, in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (1996) Richard will meet many colorful and eccentric characters beneath the streets of London, including the marquis de Carabas (a sardonic and suspicious thief who likes trading favors), Anaesthesia (a young Rat Speaker who acts as hands etc. for the rats Below), Hunter (a beautiful, burnt caramel-skinned Amazon who hunts challenging prey in the cities Below the cities of the world), Islington (a beautiful angel of indeterminate gender who recalls Atlantis with mixed feelings), and Old Bailey (a roof and bird man who fancies starling stew). Gaiman writes a fair amount of London Above history and atmosphere, sewers, trains, origins, wall, streets, neighborhoods, museums, department stores, bridges, squares, and so on, as well as creating a lot of London Below equivalents. His fertile imagination is in fine fettle here, as he imagines an entire magical and repurposed underground world full of things and people that have fallen through the cracks of London Above: homeless, misfits, detritus, vermin, etc. usually invisible to or immediately forgotten by Abovegrounders. The world Below is oriented around Tube Stations whose Above names become fantastic concretized metaphors (like Earl's Court), around the Floating Market held each time in a different spot (like Harrods Department Store), and around fealty to various clans (like the Sewer Folk). Door's family house is a fine (unfortunately underused) conceit, being "An associative house, every room of which is located somewhere else." Gaiman never really explains just how all this works, other than saying things like, "Time and space in London Below had their own agreement" (a lost Roman Legion is rumored to be wandering around down there somewhere), but it feels right. Door (red hair, opal eyes, elfin face, layers of anachronistic clothes under a big leather jacket) and her family (father Portico, sister Ingress, etc.) are interesting: they can unlock any lock and make a door appear in any wall because everything is always wanting to be opened. So who killed them and why? Could it have something to do with Portico's goal to unify the fragmented people of London Below? The marquis de Carabas is a splendid character, charismatic and dodgy and cocky: "The world above or below was a place that wished to be deceived, so he had named himself from a lie in a fairytale, and created his self, his clothes, his manners, his carriage, as a grand joke." And what does he keep in that fancy silver box he asks Old Bailey to keep for him? Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar are an entertaining pair of psychopathic supernatural killers, a comedy team liable to cut out your liver and feed it to you when they stop parsing language. So just who did hire them to pursue Door? The story is exciting and funny. There are some surprising surprises. The climax is fitting and the resolution satisfying. Gaiman writes many of his imaginative extended similes, and if some of them misfire or seem a touch precious, most of them are fine, wittily constructing his fantasy world from sublime or absurd parts. For example, "it [an assassin's laugh] sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers." And he also writes plenty of vivid descriptions, like this: "The yellow-green fog became thicker: it tasted of ash, and soot, and the time of a thousand urban years. It clung to their lamps, muffling the light." The audiobook production uses some special features to gussy things up, like an echo effect when Gaiman reads italicized memories and some stylish and catchy music when (I think) a CD side is ending. Gaiman reads his novel with his usual panache and charm, pausing and emphasizing and dramatizing everything just right. His voices for the loquacious Mr. Croup and the laconic Mr. Vandemar are super. He does a neat shopping cart wheel "squea." My only criticism is that I wished he'd have sung "Cheek to Cheek" instead of just reading some of the words. The audiobook version ends with an entertaining and well-constructed short story Gaimain wrote in 2013 called "How the Marquis Got His Coat Back," featuring the posh coat of many pockets, the Mushroom, the Elephant, a love letter, a magnifying glass, Raven's Court, Shepherd's Bush, and a too perfect big brother. Fans of Gaiman would enjoy this audiobook a great deal, while people who like well-written and well-read, imaginative, funny, and scary urban fantasy (especially featuring lore of London) should like it, too. View all my reviews
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Jefferson Peters
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