Having heard so much about Neil Gaiman, I'll admit that this book was a bit underwhelming. I had to start it three separate times before I actually finished it. I understand that it was his first novel and so he's probably grown as a writer and a human since then.

What I liked: I loved the writing style. It's funny, punny, and manages to be light-hearted about very serious topics. The idea of a London made up of people who fell through the cracks is interesting, and I do think he achieves his stated (in the forward) goal of writing an "Alice in Wonderland" or "Narnia" for adults. He includes so many details in his writing that help build the world, and they all end up mattering in the end. His world is compelling because it is both so unfamiliar and so familiar at the same time, and there is just enough description to easily transport you there, but not so much to bore you.

What I didn't like: While the characters are well-defined and stay true to their characterization throughout the plot, I didn't find them that interesting and I couldn't bring myself to like them. The main character is a white man who starts out as a walking doormat, and through his trials becomes less of a doormat but something of an asshole. The supporting characters, who are the only female and non-white characters, are the ones who are actually driving the plot and end up saving the day, but they are written as side characters, and this story is clearly not about them. There is nothing about their happily-ever-after, and they are not the ones who get to live on in infamy for their heroic deeds (though maybe that's because they've already achieved that previously?). The villains are largely evil-for-the-sake-of-evil, and don't have any other driving force.

The main takeaways of this story felt pretty trite. If you go through struggle you can change, ordinary people can be the hero with the help of their friends, the real world is not what it seems and maybe not what it's cracked up to be, etc. I'm not sure I took away anything particularly deep.

Overall, it was an unoriginal read that was still somewhat enjoyable, but I'm happy to be done.

I would consider myself a fan of Neil Gaiman's writing, and Neverwhere has a lot of the charm and soul to it. The protagonist is Richard Mayhew, a boring Londoner in an unsatisfying relationship working a comfortable job that doesn't challenge him. Richard's life is interrupted quite abruptly when Door, a filthy and very injured teenage girl, appears in front of him and asks for help. When Richard accepts, he finds himself on a whirlwind adventure in London Below, an alternate invisible London populated by those who have slipped through the cracks of every day life. It's a place where the worst and the best of humanity are brought within reach through a pliable relationship with reality, and that made it easy to immerse myself in the story. Most of the ensemble cast felt two dimensional to me, but that doesn't mean the characters were boring nor that they didn't successfully fill the narrative role Neil Gaiman cast them in. I find myself revisiting this book when I need something adventurous with a strong emotional through line that I can read in 1-2 sittings. 

Everything in this review is based on a sample size of the three Neil Gaiman books I’ve actually read (this one, American Gods, and Anansi Boys), but discounting American Gods as an outlier since it was, you know, actually enjoyable. So feel free to take this whole review with a grain of salt. 

Now that that’s said – I hope Neil Gaiman is okay. 

Excepting American Gods, the two books of his I’ve read feature protagonists who are spineless, vaguely depressed young men with mediocre-to-horrible corporate jobs, dating strong-willed, domineering, beautiful women whom they let walk all over them. In this book, Richard made his first independent choice when he defied his girlfriend to help a girl bleeding in the street, and even though it was only about 15% of the way into the book I was SO READY for her to go. 

I think Richard was the reason I didn’t end up finishing this one. I could not bring myself to care about him. There were some vaguely interesting things happening around him – a very weird homeless girl named Door, people who seem to be able to talk to rats, sewer tunnels going places sewer tunnels could not logically go – but Richard himself was so boring. He didn’t even have enough personality to actively hate – the best I could manage was aggressive indifference. 

It’s funny to me that the same things I hate about Richard in Neverwhere – the bland generic everyman-ness, seemingly existing for the sole purpose of being the reader’s avatar through a weird and magical world – I didn’t mind at all in Shadow in American Gods. I think part of it was the spineless-man-with-domineering-girlfriend aspect, which is a horrible dynamic and not one Shadow was part of since he was a widower. 

I think the other part is agency. I’m always complaining about characters having agency. Whether they’re forced into dealing with something by the plot or by their own dealings, whether their actions make things better or worse, the only thing I require of characters is that they take actions of their own volition. I’ve stopped reading because characters did their best to avoid acting and because characters were prevented from taking any action. The one and only action Richard chose to take was to help the bleeding girl against his girlfriend’s wishes, and then he pretty much got dragged along for the rest of what I read. And I couldn’t bring myself to care about anything happening since it was all happening to him instead of him actually being involved in the story.