Author: Neil Gaiman

Title: Neverwhere

Year of publication: 1996

Page count: 448

Rating: ★★★★★

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The stunningly gorgeous new author’s preferred text edition illustrated by Chris Riddell was released at about the same time I planned a London trip, so I saved a reread to coincide with it. I started it on the plane, and read the biggest chunk of it on our commute… and reading it in the tube, amid calls of “mind the gap” and “stand clear of the closing doors“, made London Below feel almost real enough to touch, and vastly improved my appreciation for the novel, bumping it up to a full, shining five stars.

“When he first arrived, he found London huge, odd, fundamentally incomprehensible with only the Tube map, the elegant multicolored topographical display of underground railway lines and stations, giving it any semblance of order. Gradually he realized that the Tube map was a handy fiction that made life easier but bore no resemblance to the reality of the shape of the city above.”

I don’t think I’ve read any other book that falls into the urban fantasy genre, and no other example even comes to mind―this is the alpha and omega of urban fantasy, to me. It was essentially Neil’s first published novel (it was actually a BBC series first; and I’m not counting Good Omens, which he’d co-written with Terry Pratchett six years prior), and that makes it even more remarkable to me. His writing style does a fantastic job at carrying the absurd and whimsical narrative, both in dialogue and description; his sense of humor is dry and incredibly clever, and most of my favorite scenes featured the hired cut-throats Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar, through whom he provided me with both chills of horror and chuckles of comic relief. He tackles fantasy with an Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz approach: An ordinary protagonist gets whisked away to a strange and dangerous other world, and despite all the adventures on the way, the hero’s essential quest is to get back home―or is it?

Neverwhere is very plot-driven, and our reluctant hero Richard, whose life gets completely upturned due to his impulsive act of kindness toward a bleeding girl on the pavement, is just being swept along, mostly against his will, while he struggles to keep a grasp on his sanity by choosing to firmly ignore the things he perceives as impossible. London Below is a world he recognizes because it’s close to the world he knows… but it’s reality viewed through a wildly imaginative and fantastical lense. Real London landmarks are warped into strange and often sinister characters or places―there are real shepherds at Shepherd’s Bush that you really wouldn’t want to meet, and children are told to behave, because otherwise lady Serpentine will come and take them away. Hammersmith is an actual blacksmith, while Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court of England building, is an old man who lives on rooftops and tends birds. Knightsbridge turns into Night’s Bridge, a pitch-black crossing that takes a terrible toll, there’s an earl holding court in an underground wagon, we get to meet the Angel Islington, and so much more. You don’t have to be familiar with London to enjoy this novel, but if you are, finding all the Easter eggs will will make it all the more delightful.

“Understand this: There are two Londons. There’s London Above―that’s where you lived―and then there’s London Below―the Underside―inhabited by the people who fell through the cracks in the world. Now you’re one of them.”



London is appallingly full of homeless people―more so than any other city I’ve ever been in, save for perhaps New York―and Neverwhere can definitely be read as social commentary: The people who populate London Below are invisible to the people from London Above, unless they attract their attention… and even then, they are forgotten very easily. Just the way your eyes will slip right over the homeless, beggars, and panhandlers without seeing them. They are the people who slipped through the cracks of ordinary society. Mind the gap. Get it?

This story is also, without a doubt, a love letter to London and everything it represents. It’s mentioned that many major cities have or used to have beasts under them, based on either urban legend or relating to their location: A blind alligator beneath New York, a black Tiger below Calcutta, and a bear under Berlin; yet London’s beast is ill-defined and vague, something perhaps resembling a boar, but also a bull. It can’t be easily identified, just like London itself, a poorly designed city cobbled together from an eclectic and chaotic miss-match of architectural styles.

“Three years in London had (…) changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries. It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names – Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl’s Court, Marble Arch – and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind.”

Chris Riddell’s drawings were lovely as usual, although I much preferred the smaller sketches that wrapped through and around the text over the full page ones―seductive Velvet eyes looking at you from the top of the page, the wild array of people at the floating market framing the blocks of text, and cute little rats peering around paragraph corners. This edition also included the short story How the Marquis Got His Coat Back, originally published in a 2014 anthology edited by George R. R. Martin. It was more than forgettable; I read it just a few days ago, and I can already hardly recall anything about it, other than the fact that I was very let down by what the ominous Shepherd’s Bush shepherds turned out to be.



Despite the short story being a bit of a let-down, I’m very much looking forward to the promised sequel Seven Sisters – London Below is without a doubt the most fleshed-out and fully realized of all the worlds Gaiman has created, and it deserves to be revisited. This novel is also the one I’d recommend as the perfect starting point for anyone who wants to delve into Neil’s works, as it has all of the elements that pop up in most of his stories.