Neverwhere

Written by Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere is an urban fantasy novel that sometimes amuses with its whimsical world but it’s constantly dragged down by its annoying protagonist. Offering a funny but problematic story, the novel is far from being one of the author’s best works.

Neverwhere accompanies Richard, a young English man who lives a quiet life, pretending to be happy with his office job and his abusive girlfriend. One night, however, he comes across a mysterious girl wounded in the street and decides to help her, to the protests of his girlfriend, Jessica. The next day, Richard realizes that having helped that girl may have cost him dearly: now, no one else in town seems to notice his presence, solemnly ignoring him.

The magical universe presented in the book has a clear purpose: to work with the marginalized elements in British society. London Below, as it is called, is a fantastic underworld located in the sewers of the city, populated by beggars and witches and factions commanded by crows and mice. Everything that is left aside, ignored, or belittled by the people of the surface ends up in London Below.

It’s fascinating to observe the peculiar characteristics of the place, like merchants announcing lost objects as items of immense value (“Lost Property. Roll up, roll up, and see for yourself. Lost property. None of your found things here. Everything guaranteed properly lost”) and royal courts being organized inside the wagons of a forgotten train in the subway.

In this absurd setting, the protagonist needs to find the girl he offered aid, called Door, and find out why there are two assassins looking for her. The story follows Richard’s journey through London Below, with him amazed at the increasingly fantastic elements he comes across. Gaiman, however, fails at exploring the book’s theme as the protagonist’s journey serves only as a superficial tour through London Below: it presents but rarely develops its characteristics. This can be clearly felt mainly in the construction of the story’s villain. Without revealing their identity and plan, it’s enough to point out that their eventual victory or defeat in no way influences that fantastic world, connecting, in fact, to other scenarios and types of discussions.

The characters vary between the caricatures (Jessica wants to turn Richard into a “perfect matrimonial accessory”) and the clichés (Marquis de Carabas is the typical mischievous rogue who cannot be fully trusted because it’s impossible to know his true intentions). This is not the case of Gaiman not working well with them – the author crafts some really funny moments with Jessica’s level of insanity, for example, like her solution to the problem of Richard having helped Door – but the author never tries to develop anyone remotely complex or surprising, which is a pity.

The only ones who stand out among the characters are the duo of assassins who chase Door: Mister Croup and Mister Vandemar. Gaiman makes them fascinating by constantly varying their narrative function and making their dialogues be filled to the brim with dark humor, transforming the duo into a psychopathic version of “Laurel and Hardy”, who, with their sick personalities, often treat situations tinged with violence with an air of nonchalance:

“Mr. Vandemar was very proud of his handkerchief, which was spattered with green and brown and black and had originally belonged to an overweight snuff dealer in the 1820s, who had died of apoplexy and been buried with his handkerchief in his pocket. Mr. Vandemar still occasionally found fragments of snuff merchant in it, but it was, he felt, a fine handkerchief for all that.”

The comedy aspect of Neverwhere, however, doesn’t always work. The reason is easy to diagnose: Gaiman makes very specific jokes about London and also repeats them countless times. The jokes usually come from the shock Richard suffers from the subversion of his world, since subway stations, buildings, and bridges don’t correspond anymore with what he knows to be the truth. However, these jokes, besides working more for, well, people who know London, are repeated until the end of the narrative, leading the reader to wonder how Richard continues to be shocked by the same things over and over again.

Richard is the narrative’s main problem. He doesn’t work with its comedy aspect, because the jokes that involve him never evolve: the first time he questions that a certain thing should or should not exist and receives a cynical answer from his companions, the reader laughs at his confusion. The seventeenth time Richard categorically states that something doesn’t correspond with his previous knowledge of the world and is therefore wrong, the reader can only marvel at the patience of his companions, who continue to give ironic answers instead of simply telling him to accept that he no longer owns the truth and should just shut the hell up.

Richard doesn’t function as the reader’s proxy in the narrative, as he’s incredibly stupid in his refusal to accept that the fantastic exists. He’s being ignored by everyone he knew, as they pass right beside him like he doesn’t exist; he sees strange people teleporting through invisible portals; he watches a black smoke formed by nightmares eating people in front of him; but, if someone warns him to be careful about what’s in the gap between the train and the subway platform, Richard obviously ignores the warning because he knows there’s nothing dangerous there. And that keeps happening: “Somehow, this was one oddity too many,” he keeps thinking.

Richard doesn’t function as a full-fledged character either. He has no personality whatsoever. At a certain point, the character reflects that he hates people who reaffirm the obvious: well, he must be his worst enemy since most of his dialogues consist of Richard repeating what has happened or is going to happen with a question (“‘Somebody killed Door’s family?’ asked Richard. ‘We’re not going to get very far if you keep repeating everything I say, now, are we?’ said the marquis”) with the rest of his lines being misconceptions about how that universe actually works (“‘There isn’t a British Museum Station,’ said Richard, firmly”).

Richard, not surprisingly, doesn’t work as a protagonist. He acts passively in the face of most events, performing his first important act after saving Door only after almost two-thirds of the book has passed. Richard just accompanies the girl in her investigation and points exhaustively at things that are out of place in relation to his reality. He doesn’t even act too much during the climax, making his presence in the story even more questionable: he only does three important things in the entire novel, and the last certainly could have been done by any other human being with two arms and two legs in his place.

Finally, it is worth noting that Gaiman is more restrained than usual when working with symbolism, the only highlight being the scene in which a mysterious lady, at the beginning of the book, prophesies about Richard’s future. When he leaves, the woman opens an umbrella with the drawing of the London Underground map, which extends over her: the mystical element – the woman – remains below the city, reflecting the name of its fantastic counterpart.

Neverwhere is a good urban fantasy novel that sadly suffers from some major problems. Its fantastic universe is interesting enough to yield better sequels, but for that to happen Gaiman needs to find a better protagonist and craft a story that better explores the themes presented.

June 04, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on October 16, 2016.