Neverwhere

Written by Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere is an urban fantasy novel that can amuse with its whimsical world as much as it can annoy with its unbearable protagonist. Offering a funny but shallow story, the novel is far from being one of Gaiman’s best works.

Neverwhere accompanies Richard, a young Englishman who lives a quiet life, pretending to be happy with his office job and his abusive girlfriend, Jessica. One night, however, he comes across a mysterious girl wounded in the street and decides to help her, ignoring Jessica’s protests. 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 his existence.

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 fantastical 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, Richard needs to find the girl he offered aid, called Door, and find out why there are two assassins looking for her. The story follows his journey through London Below, with him getting increasingly amazed at the 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.

Characters here vary between being caricatures (Jessica wants to turn Richard into a “perfect matrimonial accessory”) and clichés (Marquis de Carabas is the typical conman and rogue who cannot be truly trusted because it’s impossible to know his true intentions). This is not the case of Gaiman not working well with these tropes –  he can craft some really funny moments with Jessica’s level of insanity, for example, such as with her solution to the problem of Richard having helped Door – but the author never tries to develop anyone remotely complex, which is a pity.

The only characters who manage to stand out 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 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 comedic 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 to exhaustion until the end of the book, leading us to wonder how Richard continues to be shocked by the same things over and over again. He’s a bit slow, it seems.

Richard is Neverwhere’s main problem. He doesn’t work with the 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, we laugh 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, however, we 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 knows anything and should just shut the hell up.

Richard can’t function as the reader’s proxy in the narrative, either, as he’s incredibly foolish in his refusal to accept that the fantastic exists. He’s being ignored by everyone he knows, 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 convince as a full-fledged character. He has no personality whatsoever. At a certain point, he 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 mark at the end (“‘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, in other words, doesn’t work as a compelling 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 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 the story needs to find a much less infuriating protagonist and better explore its core themes.

February 18, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on October 16, 2016.