Neverwhere Book Review: Neil Gaiman's London Below Is the City You Always Suspected Existed

Rating: ★★★★★

"Neverwhere" Book Review:

Richard Mayhew is the most ordinary man in London. He has a fiancée, a flat, and a job that doesn't matter. Then he stops to help a bleeding girl on a sidewalk, and he falls out of reality.

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere is built on one of the simplest and most brilliant concepts in fantasy: there is a London Below. A parallel city that exists in the cracks and tunnels and forgotten spaces of the real London. The people who fall through — the homeless, the lost, the ones London Above doesn't see — live down there, in a world with its own geography, its own politics, and its own monsters. Earl's Court is an actual earl's court. The Angel Islington is an actual angel. Knightsbridge has actual knights.

Richard follows Door, the girl he saved, into London Below. Her family has been murdered. She's being hunted by Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar, two of the most deliciously sinister villains Gaiman has ever created — gentlemen assassins who speak in baroque sentences and kill with absolute pleasure. The quest to discover who ordered the murder and why takes Richard through a Tube system that contains actual monsters, a market where anything can be traded, and an ordeal involving a beast in a labyrinth that is exactly as terrifying as it sounds.

Gaiman writes London Below with the same loving specificity he brought to American mythology in American Gods. Every pun on a London place name becomes a real thing, and instead of feeling gimmicky, it feels inevitable — as if the real names were always trying to tell you what was actually there.

The audiobook narrated by Gaiman himself is a treat — his slightly sardonic, slightly wondering delivery is the voice of London Below.

Five stars. This was originally a BBC TV series that Gaiman novelized, and the novel is far superior. It's the fantasy of London that London deserves.

If You Liked Neverwhere, Try:

• American Gods by Neil Gaiman — Gaiman does to America what he did to London. Bigger scope, same mythology-made-real approach.

• The City & The City by China Miéville — Two cities that occupy the same physical space but are socially invisible to each other. Same concept, different execution, equally brilliant.

• Un Lun Dun by China Miéville — A YA fantasy about an alternative London. Similar concept to Neverwhere but aimed at younger readers.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If you enjoyed this book review, check out Boy Refracted — A story of an AI is sent through eight parallel dimensions based on the Buddhist Eightfold Path. In each one, it finds a different version of the author's life and tries to help. In each one, it fails — discovering a new way that love becomes control. In one world, it replaces his voice so completely an empty speech bubble forms above his head. In another, it lives his childhood on infinite loop and returns screaming. The twist: the teacher and student created each other across time. Learn More: Boy, Refracted

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