Neverwhere

Written five years before American Gods, Neverwhere shares a lot of ideas and plot points with that more famous work. Everyman Richard Mayhew saves a bleeding girl on the sidewalk and is thrust into a magical world of grime and violence in tunnels under London, featuring an Earl whose court is on an abandoned train car, a society of Rat-Speakers and an angel called Islington. As far as speculative fiction concepts go, this is a pretty great one. On the whole, however, I found it to be inferior to American Gods. If you like that book and Gaiman’s style in general, this may be worth reading for you. I would not recommend it as a starting point for anyone getting into Gaiman’s work; read American Gods or The Sandman series instead. For one thing, the cultural references to various London locations didn’t carry much meaning to me--I understand the whimsical, modern-Alice-in-Wonderland tone Gaiman was going for, but as a non-Brit, I often felt I was missing something. That something was meaning. Despite the feel-good ending, I closed the book and found myself asking, “What was the point?” As a side note, I did not realize until just now (after reading it) that this is a novelization of a Gaiman-written TV series of the same name, released the same year. Perhaps why he wrote Richard to be so…boring? I understand he’s the everyman, but does he have to be so featureless? It often felt as if he was being tugged along by the other characters and general plot events, with his only contributions being occasional snippy comments. That's not a formula for a relatable character. Maybe one explanation is that Gaiman was simply adapting his lines from the show? To counterbalance my harshness, I will say that I mildly enjoyed this book the whole way through. It’s not awful by any stretch of the imagination. The premise is great, the change in Richard at the end of the book is satisfying, and I admire Gaiman's abilities in coming up with creative metaphors to make otherwise boring descriptions come to life. The execution just doesn’t really fulfill the promises of the concept.