London-fantastical reading: "Neverwhere" by Neil Gaiman

Something of a pattern emerging, methinks. I'm getting predictable. As I start this post, I realise that there are a disproportionate number of presaging books for this, indicating that I have some sort of compulsive-obsessive disorder.

I do not refer to the fact that this is the second book by the same author, of course. Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods impressed me mightily a while back, so fair enough to return to him for some more crazy imaginative invention. However, I am beginning to wonder if I have Morlock-like troglodytic tendencies, focused on London. Consider some recent reads:

August 2013: second magical Met copper yarn, Moon Over Soho
July 2013: quirky history of the London underground, Underground, Overground
June 2012: Ackroyd's history of underground London, London Under
January 2012: first magical Met copper yarn involving underground rivers in London, The Rivers of London


So Neverwhere is my fifth relatively recent either magical or subterranean (or preferably both) London book.  This is a spate which outdoes my Berlin series a while back. But no apologies, London is a fascinating city, and part of that fascination undoubtedly lies in its mysterious multi-layered nature (something which has, for example, richly inspired London biographer, Peter Ackroyd). Indeed, Gaiman's imagination too is clearly fired by that idea of layers: the physical strata of earth and previous incarnations of itself on which modern London stands, its real, yet mysterious, substructures of tunnels, passages and buried rivers, as well as its intangible layers of history, fraught humanity, disease, ideas and teeming cosmopolitan variety.

In Gaiman's extraordinary imagination, all this adds up to two parallel cities, London Above, our familiar world of traffic, buildings, commuters, business, shopping and noise, and London Under, an alternative world of the "people who fall through the cracks" of London and live by a different, weirdly magical logic, but one which resembles the metropolis above perhaps more closely than might at first seem to be the case. The worlds are far from separate, and occupy many of the same spaces, though London Below and its denizens remain only fleetingly, dimly and occasionally perceptible to Londoners Above. It is a world living by rules and codes which remain largely mysterious and dominated by personalities whose names are familiar too us, the Angel Islington, for example (an angel), an aimiable dosser known as Old Bailey, and a powerful, if somewhat superannuated, Earl, who holds, yes, a Court on a tube train perceptible only to Londoners Under.

Need I say more? No, for the pleasure here, as so often in books like this, is discovering the new world devised by the author, and when that author is Gaiman, you can be sure the ride will be an exhilarating one. Suffice to say, as you might expect, this is the story of a hapless Londoner, a Scottish migrant as it happens, of somewhat timid and accommodating nature, who falls through the cracks and discovers that London is not what it seems - or at least that it is a lot more than it seems to the average Londoner above.

Recommendation? Are you like me, obsessed with subterranean London and weirdly imaginative new worlds? Then this is for you. But even if you're not, it's still a fair bet you'll like it, though I confess it's not quite up there with American Gods in the Gaiman oeuvre. Still, it'd take a hard heart not to enjoy this, taken, perchance, as reading during a London mini-break. The tube will never seem the same again.