Neverwhere

So I’ve just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE on the advice of my Seton Hill mentor. Look, there it is on the right!

This is not, in fact, the cover I had on the paperback edition, but it is much nicer.

My rating: Underwhelming.

I’ve enjoyed what Neil Gaiman I’ve read, for the most part.  I can very easily appreciate his craft as a storyteller–particularly his sentence construction and attention to detail in his description and pacing.  His sentences are often prosaic and fun to read, and flow with a poetry that only the British seem to be able to bring to the language, which I guess is only fair: they did invent it, after all.

My only real complaint with the novel is that it is, in fact, too British.  It’s quite good, but you can’t eat popcorn to it. (See the Eddie Izzard clip below, about 1 minute in to see what I mean)

Gaiman spends so much time establishing Richard Mayhew as a nobody (so that he can become somebody by the end) that I kept turning the page thinking “Dear zombie jesus and gods above and below, please let something happen!” and was, for the most part, disappointed.  I am admittedly an American pigdog, so I can’t be expected to maintain a traditional “oh this is a nice stroll through this intricate and wholly unnecessary world” mindset.  London Below is richly appointed and described, but I remain unconvinced that it all needed to be there to move the plot along.

It had moments of power, quite a few.  As I say, I can appreciate the craft.  The hatchetmen, Croup and Vandemar, are downright hilarious.  Flat and unchanging, yes–undone by their own nature, yes–but entertaining.  It’s often quite fun to play outright evil and I suspect Gaiman giggled a bit whilst he was writing parts of their scenes.  I would complain that by the end of the book the gimmick was getting a bit old and, however much I might have liked them, they were becoming in my mind caricatures of the pair of henchmen rats in “Flushed Away.”  Not that I don’t still want a “Croup and Vandemar” t-shirt.  “We burned the City of Troy–we don’t do safe.”

As I read this book I was continually thinking of the urban fantasy I intend to write in the next couple months, looking at its components and weighing them against NEVERWHERE to see how I may measure against the great man.  I can safely say that whatever I finalize, my novel will not involve such a well-tapestried underworld.  NEVERWHERE may be a true urban fantasy in the most sincere sense, since it does posit a fantastic community lurking in the sewers and Tube stations of a mundane London.  As slow as it was I could clearly see and hear much of Gaiman’s London Below, and even if I did have nagging doubts about the character interactions (several where little more than archetypes, but then often all you need is archetypes) I did feal as though I were there–even when I didn’t really care or want to be.

My previous Gaiman experience consists of shaking his hand a decade or so ago at ICFA when it was still held in Ft. Lauderdale, and the only book of his I have strong memories of is AMERICAN GODS.  I know that I enjoyed the book, and that I was less than no one at the conference in 2000 or 2001–but NEVERWHERE, while credible and even stylish, does not enamor me to read more Gaiman.  As a tool for thought of my own novel, however, it did help me to solidify that, urban fantasy or no, I want my characters to be the basis of my novel–not the world itself.  Whatever city I pick, it will not have a [--] Below.

8)

It’ll be dark enough in the alleys.

January 15, 2010 | Categories: Original, Reviews | Tags: Eddie, Gaiman, Neverwhere, Reviews | Leave A Comment »