My Weekly Book

Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

Here we are, hot on the heels of The Sandman, and it occurs to me that reading an author’s works back to back like this certainly does give you an insight into their way of doing things. The other day I encountered someone on a blog or discussion group who wanted to come up with an all-purpose name for horror, fantasy and sci-fi. I think ‘imaginative fiction’ was the one suggested but I reckon this should be actually be awarded solely to Mr Gaiman in the same way that Robert Rankin has become the proprietor of the term ‘far-fetched fiction’. It is clearly his job to imagine that little bit further than the rest of us can be bothered to do - and Neverwhere, with its familiar London setting twisted through one hundred and eighty degrees, is the perfect example of this.

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This is a story (adapted from a television series) for anyone who’s ever wondered about the court of the Earl’s Court earl, thought of meeting an angel called Islington or understood the awful perils of crossing Night’s Bridge. It’s required reading if you’ve ever experienced a frisson of fear at the mention of the shepherds of Shepherd’s Bush, or wondered what exactly it is that lives in The Gap that you have to be so very careful to mind. To my everlasting delight, there is a train that calls at British Museum - a relic of underground history you can still spot to this day from the windows of a Central Line train travelling between Holborn and Tottenham Court Road. This might sound a little bit foolish - but really, this book is based on a terrifying premise that is the stuff of nightmare. It is this: that as we go about our lives in London Above something might happen to make us fall down the cracks to London Below - thus becoming dispossessed, invisible, in danger. It is the guilty secret of every adult who still recalls exactly why stepping on the cracks in the pavement used to seem like such a very bad idea. It has a tightly woven plot, some terrible villains hidden neatly in plain view and appears to have acted as a powerful piece of inspiration to the writers of a recently popular cop show… hang on, that’s a spoiler. Ignore me, please. (Or maybe there really are only so many stories in the world.)

One thing that resonates all the way down to the soles of my feet with this book is the way bits of good solid fact are woven into the outrageous fantasy for the reader to bite into in the same way that you might encounter a great big bit of fudge or lump of chocolate in Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. The introduction to Neverwhere shows the protagonist (why do I hesitate over the term hero? Probably because he’d be so uncomfortable with it himself) sitting on the kerb outside a pub fighting down the urge to vomit after an extravagant leaving party given by colleagues and a good deal of drink taken. An old lady comes up to him, mistakes him for a homeless person and gives him fifty pence. A moment’s consultation of Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion reveals how art is imitating life and that this exact same course of events was visited on Neil Gaiman himself. Only that, instead of a pub, it was a restaurant. And the cause of the nausea was not over-partaking in alcohol but comics guru Alan Moore telling the assembled company a particularly lurid and sanguinous tale about a Jack the Ripper murder. Neil Gaiman, fearing for the future of his dinner, had to leave the table, and was later found outside sitting on the kerb in exactly the circumstances described above, attempting to persuade a well-wisher that he was not a beggar. Which just goes to prove that, the very best stuff, well, you just couldn’t make it up. Another example occurs on page 96 of my Headline paperback edition and is quoted here for convenience:

The deep tunnels had been dug in the early days of the Second World War. Troops had been quartered there in their thousands, their waste needing to be pumped up by compressed air to the level of the sewers far above. Both sides of the tunnels had been lined with metal bunk beds for the troops to sleep on. There had been plans to assimilate the tunnels into a high-speed extension to the underground system, but these plans had come to nothing and when the war ended the bunk beds had stayed in the tunnels, and on their wire bases cardboard boxes were stored, each box filled with letters, files and papers: secrets, of the dullest kind, stored down deep, to be forgotten. Economies had closed the deep tunnels completely in the early 1990s. The boxes of secrets were removed, to be scanned and stored on computers, or shredded, or burned.

If this isn’t hard, solid fact then it is so believable that you couldn’t get a cigarette paper between it and the truth. It’s the little details - the compressed air, the underground extension, the scanning or shredding of the old papers as a cost-saving measure, that makes this so utterly convincing. All in all Neverwhere is a highly-recommended, very good read, and not just for the Londonophiles and Tube trivia nuts in the audience. A great introduction to Mr Gaiman’s work in novel form (even though he inadvertently posted a great big fat spoiler for this very tale on his blog just the other day, right about the time I was coming to the relevant bit in the plot…) and arguably now accepted as much more successful than the TV series, conceived with Lenny Henry, that caused it to be created. Thanks to the kind Bookcrosser who made this available through a book ring.

Some links:

• Wikipedia: Neverwhere (novel)
• h2g2: Neverwhere
• The SF Site: Neverwhere review
• Neverwhere: Harper Collins reading guide
• Wikipedia: British Museum Tube station
• Underground History: disused stations

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 3:15 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge, Reads I recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.