Breakaway Books

Authored by Neil Gaiman; Published 1996; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

Neverwhere is a doorway to another world, but I’m not sure that it’s one I would like to revisit. Instead of a magically enchanting experience, it’s more of a grotesque and frightening one.

In Neverwhere, Richard is living an exceedingly ordinary existence, working in a London office and engaged to a woman he likes well enough. His life is going as planned until he stops to help an injured woman down on her luck, and he is unknowingly transported to London below, a magical parallel reality to the city he knows, with fantastical denizens. Suddenly, no one from his old life recognizes him, and, desperate to find his way back to normalcy, Richard seeks the assistance of the injured woman, Door, and is recruited to join her quest to discover who killed her family. Perhaps the same quest will provide him with his way home. 

It takes a real gift to maintain the grit and grime of a city and still make it magical. This seems to be what Gaiman accomplishes in London below, populated by rat speakers, slimy nobility, and other equally dangerous and/or bizarre residents. I found much of what is depicted in this world to be profoundly disturbing—the idea that this is what happens to people who slip through the cracks is so very pessimistic, and the way that Richard is treated by London above when he unknowingly crosses over to below is nightmarish. But even as it is disturbing, it is undoubtedly imaginative, and it paints an extremely rich picture of a new world. Do I want to spend time in that world? No. Not particularly. 

The characters themselves are quirky and impossible to predict, which certainly keeps the story lively, as the plot is fairly simple. Except for Richard, who inexorably serves as a foil for the residents of London below, the team of heroes (“heroes” might be overstating it) is unique and fun to get to know. Door’s power of opening just about anything creates limitless opportunities; the Marquis de Carabas seems to have a strange version of immortality on lock; and Hunter… well, she is truly obsessed with finding and killing monsters. Attempting to describe this novel, I had to find synonym after synonym for “bizarre” and “unique” because it’s unlike any story I have read before.

Neverwhere *is* an escape. It just may not be a place you like to escape to.