Exploring the London Underground (No, Really) with ‘Neverwhere’

When I was a kid, I often found myself making stories up in my head about things that, to most, would probably seem normal: a bird that had a call that sounded like the word “spiritual,” the fact that I sometimes felt a brush of something on the back of my neck when nothing was there, the metal doors leading to what I now know were underground storage facilities on pretty much every Manhattan street. I wanted to know where all the buses slept; I wanted to know what happened to my school at night, when the lights went off.

Maybe these are things everyone thinks about; I like to think, though, that these were some of the wonders that helped me to become a writer.

It is for this reason that I feel an incredible kinship with Neil Gaiman (some day, if I get the nerve, maybe I’ll tell him). I’ve loved his work ever since a friend of mine recommended The Graveyard Book (as an example of a novel with a child protagonist – a novel that, for a long time, was a beacon as I wrote my manuscript). It wasn’t until recently, however, that I got my hands on my library’s copy of Neverwhere, and it was here that I truly fell in love.

Neverwhere charts the adventures of a bumbling, normal Englishman in the vein of Douglas Adams’ Arthur Dent. Neverwhere’s protagonist, a displaced Scot in London named Richard Mayhew, finds himself the unwitting associate of a woman known as Lady Door, a member of a prominent family of London Below, a strange counterpart to London Above that, as only Gaiman can, becomes the answer to so many of those city-dweller questions, and more.

Through quick, witty prose and a fast-paced storyline that somehow never falls victim to plot holes, Neverwhere addresses where things go when you lose them (to the Floating Market, of course, to be sold or traded for other such things), who the Earl is of Earl’s Court tube station (an aristocratic fellow ruling over the line from the comfort of a darkened tube car), and even who the real rulers of London are (it’s the rats).

Laugh-out-loud funny in some spots and delightfully droll in others, the book managed to pull me all the way through it in a mere afternoon of reading – and sent me immediately to the Internet to confirm the existence of a sequel.