Book Review: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Title: Neverwhere
Author: Neil Gaiman
What it says on the back: Under the streets of London there's a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.
Richard Mayhew, a young businessman, is going to find out more than enough about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his workday existence and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and utterly bizarre. And a strange destiny awaits him down here, beneath his native city: Neverwhere.
What I thought:
Interesting. Lovely to revisit London, albeit from an Above and Below perspective. Great read.
Over the years, I have heard and had several friends expound in great delight the wonder of Neil Gaiman and his books. At present, Neverwhere is the third Gaiman book I have read and the second that I liked. The Graveyard book I liked, while Stardust I did not. Yet there is a common, wonderful thread throughout the books so far and that is Gaiman's incredible imagination.
Neverwhere brought me into a very strange, unseen world and the brevity of our introduction to it was marvelous. Like the protagonists of old who crossed into the world of Fae, once touched, life can never be the same. I rather like those stories, the ones were the main character is irrevocably changed by their encounters in the book.
Richard is an ideal protagonist - boring and mundane and thrust into an adventure he is wholly unqualified to endure - and yet does so :) Door is a mystery, a damsel in distress, only she works out her own salvation, and Richard's. So many of the characters felt layered and interesting.
Definite good read.