Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere Review

Neil Gaiman has been a writer that I've had my eye on for a long time now. I've read a few of his works - American Gods, Coraline, Stardust, some of his more well-known novels. But an extensive reading list given to me over the past four years at university has kept me from scouring through his entire book list, the way I've been wanting to. Well, for better or worse, I'm free to read what I want now, and one of the first things on my reading list was Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

I went into the novel fairly blind as to what I was getting into, and I came out of it with a very slight obsession. The story follows Richard Mayhew, a fairly average Londoner whose whole life changes when he stumbles upon an injured woman on the street. Soon, he finds that he is unable (literally) to return to his normal life, and he is thrust into the magical world known as London Below, where the forgotten find their place.

My first impression of the novel when I was reading through it was that it felt very much like a movie. People would make comments like "well, at least we got out of that okay" just before they found out the opposite. The characters felt very much like tropes, rather than real people (Richard is the trope of the everyman, the Marquis de Carabas is the trope of the helper with questionable intentions, Door is the trope of the innocent but quirky girl just outside of society so she doesn't understand it all that well). And there was a short period of time where that sort of took me out of the story, until a cursory Google search of the novel informed me that... well, the novel was released alongside a BBC-released television movie, which explained a lot of the pacing. Once I realized that, I was able to forgive it a little bit, and once I was able to forgive it, I quickly found myself falling in love with it.

The story feels very familiar. I was going to say predictable, but no, that isn't quite the word - the word is very much 'familiar', because I feel like this is a story I not only heard before, but one that I grew up with, one that I loved. I haven't felt that way about a story in a long time. The characters may be very simple, but they are very likeable in their simplicity. The Marquis de Carabas' intelligent wit may just be a part of his trope, for example, but it is a wonderful part, and Neil Gaiman does write it so well. And if we're talking about characters that I thoroughly enjoyed, Croup and Vandemar, the novel's villains, are evil to an enjoyable extent, and gory and gruesome to the point of thrilling. I loved every moment that the novel turned to them. Furthermore, the magical world that Gaiman creates of London Below is a fascinating one, fleshed out just enough that you feel like this is a world that could (unbelievably) exist, while leaving just enough unexplained that I frequently found my imagination taking hold and creating explanations of its own.

I loved this novel. I loved this novel like I've loved a select few novels. I'm sorry to finish it, but I excitedly await Neil Gaiman's promised sequel The Seven Sisters.