A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" (Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon) [1st ed. 2022] 3030964574, 9783030964573

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PALGRAVE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY: A NEW CANON

A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon

Series Editors Sean Guynes, Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, USA Keren Omry, Department of English, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon provides short introductions to key works of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) speaking to why a text, trilogy, or series matters to SFF as a genre as well as to readers, scholars, and fans. These books aim to serve as a go-to resource for thinking on specific texts and series and for prompting further inquiry. Each book will be less than 30,000 words and structured similarly to facilitate classroom use. Focusing specifically on literature, the books will also address film and TV adaptations of the texts as relevant. Beginning with background and context on the text’s place in the field, the author and how this text fits in their oeuvre, and the socio-historical reception of the text, the books will provide an understanding of how students, readers, and scholars can think dynamically about a given text. Each book will describe the major approaches to the text and how the critical engagements with the text have shaped SFF. Engaging with classic works as well as recent books that have been taken up by SFF fans and scholars, the goal of the series is not to be the arbiters of canonical importance, but to show how sustained critical analysis of these texts might bring about a new canon. In addition to their suitability for undergraduate courses, the books will appeal to fans of SFF.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/16580

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock Central Michigan University Mount Pleasant, MI, USA

ISSN 2662-8562 ISSN 2662-8570 (electronic) Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon ISBN 978-3-030-96457-3 ISBN 978-3-030-96458-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96458-0 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editors’s Preface

The infinite worlds of Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF) dance along the borders between the possible and the impossible, the familiar and the strange, the immediate and the ever-approaching horizon. Speculative fiction in all its forms has been considered a genre, a medium, a mode, a practice, a compilation of themes, or a web of assertions. With this in mind, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon offers an expansive and dynamic approach to thinking SFF, destabilizing notions of the canon, so long associated with privilege, power, class, and hegemony. We take canon not as a singular and unchallenged authority but as shifting and thoughtful consensus among an always growing collective of readers, scholars, and writers. The cultural practice and production of speculation has encompassed novels, stories, plays, games, music, comics, and other media, with a lineage dating back at least to the nineteenth-century precursors through to the most recent publications. Existing scholarship has considered some of these media extensively, often with particular focus on film and TV. It is for this reason that Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy will forgo the cinematic and televisual, aspiring to direct critical attention at the other nodes of SFF expression. Each volume in the series introduces, contextualizes, and analyzes a single work of SFF that ranges from the acknowledged “classic” to the should-be-classic, and asks two basic, but provocative questions: Why does this text matter to SFF? and Why does (or should) this text matter to SFF v

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readers, scholars, and fans? Thus, the series joins into conversation both with scholars and students of the field to examine the parameters of SFF studies and the changing valences of fundamental categories like genre, medium, and canon. By emphasizing the critical approaches and major questions each text inspires, the series aims to offer “go-to” books for thinking about, writing on, and teaching major works of SFF. Keren Omry Sean Guynes

Acknowledgements

This book has been a lot of fun to write—my thanks to Sean Guynes and Keren Omry for the opportunity to contribute to their Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon series. The approaches to the novel adopted here reflect my own experiences teaching the book in various contexts, so thanks as well should go to my students for their insights. Edwin Williamson transcribed the interview and did so amazingly quickly; I also appreciate the care taken by the team at Palgrave, including Allie Troyanos and Imogen Higgins, with producing the manuscript. Brian Attebery and Farah Mendlesohn are not only brilliant scholars of fantasy, but very generous with their time when it comes to answering questions. And, most importantly, deep gratitude to Neil Gaiman for taking the time to answer my questions and for his rich and wonderful body of work!

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Contents

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1

It Starts with Doors

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Bridges to Fantasy: Neverwhere and Genre

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“Mind the Gap”: Neverwhere, Language, and Intertextuality

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“Falling Through the Cracks”: Neverwhere as Social Commentary

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Fidelity and Innovation: Adaptation, Transmediality, and the Neverwhere Megatext

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The Key

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4 5 6

Interview with Neil Gaiman

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1

Laura Fraser as Door in the BBC TV miniseries and her comic book counterpart The Marquis and Anaesthesia in the comic book version The Marquis as rendered in the illustrated edition Door as rendered in the illustrated edition Neil Gaiman responds to a Fan on tumblr

73 74 77 78 84

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Abstract This introduction to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere explores how the opening chapter to the novel Neverwhere foreshadows much that is to come; offers some background into the transformations of Neverwhere from BBC television series to novel to comics; introduces the author, Neil Gaiman; highlights important aspects of the novel including the idea of a parallel world and Gaiman’s wordplay; and draws some connections between Neverwhere and other works by Neil Gaiman. Keywords Adaptation · Biography · Fantasy · Foreshadowing · Historical Context · Neil Gaiman · Neverwhere

“It starts with doors” predicts the old woman with sharp eyes and a “beaky, grimy face” (2)1 for the worse-for-wear Richard Mayhew in the prologue to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, the 1996 novelization of the BBC television series he created with British actor, comedian, and writer Lenny Henry. Richard is heading off to London the next day to assume a job in “securities” (understood here as tradable assets such as stocks and bonds, 1 Page references here and throughout this study will refer to the “author’s preferred text” version of Neverwhere, published by the Headline Publishing Group in 2013.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. A. Weinstock, A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96458-0_1

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although in Neverwhere words often have more literal meanings) and his friends are giving him a rousing send-off in a Scottish pub with suspicious enthusiasm. Mistaken for a homeless man while sitting on the curb after several pints followed by several more, Richard explains to the old woman her mistake: He has a job and he’s heading South to start it in the morning. The old woman, who confides in Richard concisely that she was once a dancer, married poorly, lived in London, and knows what it is to be homeless, then offers to tell Richard his fortune: “You got a long way to go,” she divines, and “it starts with doors.” “I’d watch out for doors if I were you,” the small Scottish town’s resident sibyl advises Richard, looking like “an owl who had swallowed a mouse that was beginning to disagree with it” (3). Then, as she starts to wobble off in the rain, the good-hearted Richard chases after her, regifting the umbrella he has just received printed with a map of the London Underground—London’s subway system—on it, prompting Richard to consider the names of the Tube stops, “Earl’s Court, Marble Arch, Blackfriars, White City, Victoria, Angel, Oxford Circus,” and to ponder “whether there really was a circus at Oxford Circus: a real circus with clowns, beautiful women, and dangerous beasts” (4). Returning to the pub looking like a “drowned rat” (4) for more forced conviviality, Richard later recalls only fragments: the white umbrella with cryptic symbols disappearing into the rain, being sick in the gutter, and the feeling “that he was about to leave somewhere small and rational—a place that made sense—for somewhere huge and old that didn’t” (4). Although first-time readers of Neverwhere are in no position to appreciate it, in the space of the opening five pages of the novel, Neil Gaiman has concisely mapped out the heart of the story to come. Richard is mistaken by the old woman as homeless because, in a sense, that is what he already is: While his friends are inside celebrating his departure, he is outside sitting on the curb debating the merits of being sick. His sense of alienation will only become more pronounced in London where his values do not align with those of the surrounding capitalist culture as embodied by his self-centered and demanding fiancé, Jessica, and her crass millionaire boss, Arnold Stockton, a “many-chinned self-made caricature of a man” who “owned all the Sunday papers Rupert Murdoch had failed to buy” (58). The formerly homeless old woman no doubt senses a kindred soul in Richard, whose good heart allows him to see those who have fallen “through the cracks in the world” (126), as the Marquis de Carabas will

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later put it, and aren’t visible to people who shield themselves from recognizing pain, poverty, and despair. Where Richard in fact belongs, where his home is, will become an important theme of the novel—a question only decided on the book’s very last page. That the old woman looks owlish and Richard like a drowned rat reflects the animal imagery that prevails in London Below and suggests the danger Richard will be in as, just three pages later, the monstrous Mr. Vandemar (who reminds Richard of a wolf) will spear a rat—creatures afforded unusual reverence in London Below—with his knife and begin to snack on it before being interrupted by the monstrous Mr. Croup (who reminds Richard of a fox), who explains, “There will always be another rat,” adding, “Now: onward. Things to do. People to damage” (9). The London Underground map printed on the umbrella, of course, foreshadows the central role the Tube will play in the novel and Richard’s musing on the station names turns out to be something other than idle speculation: While we never learn if there is actually a circus at Oxford Circus, we do discover an angel at Angel station, black friars at Blackfriar, an Earl at Earl’s Court, and so on, and there are certainly clowns in London Below (if perhaps in an older sense of the word as fool or jester), beautiful women, and dangerous beasts, revealing London to be just what Richard fears: huge and old and irrational. And, importantly, just as the old woman prophesies, it all starts with doors—most obviously in the guise of Lady Door Portico, whose name reflects her talent: She can open anything, from portals to bodies, since, as explained to her by her father, “All things want to open”2 (215). Which is where we start with Neverwhere: by opening a book—a book that wants to open for us so much that, in a sense, it opens even before the story actually starts with Richard, an old woman, a prophesy, and an umbrella in the prologue. The book then becomes for the reader, like Lady Door for Richard, a doorway into fantasy as we follow Richard Mayhew from London Above, a familiar if not necessarily safe place that conforms to our rationalist understandings of how things work, deeper and deeper into London Below, a world that operates according to different logic. Like Richard’s journey, Neverwhere the novel started before it started, having begun life as a television series that aired in 1996 on the British television network, BBC Two. As recalled by Gaiman in various interviews, including as a bonus feature

2 Here and throughout, unless otherwise indicated, italics appear in the original.

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attached to the DVD Neverwhere box set, the idea of writing a fantasy series about London’s homeless was first introduced by Lenny Henry— now Sir Lenworth George Henry, knighted in 2015 for his charitable activity and creative achievements (“Lenny Henry”)—in 1991 while he and Gaiman were working on an event associated with Comic Relief, a charity involving comedians in the raising of money to combat poverty and other social ills. (Gaiman, who wears many hats but not that of comedian, did some plotting, writing, and editing of a comic associated with the charity, creatively titled The Totally Stonking, Surprisingly Educational And Utterly Mind-Boggling Comic Relief Comic—see Johnston). As explained by Gaiman, both in the “original BBC interview” included with the DVD box set and in the one appended to this volume conducted in 2021, Gaiman resisted the idea of a show built around tribes of London homeless out of the concern it might make homelessness look cool or appealing, and thus attractive to kids in particular, but concluded that the problem could be side-stepped by introducing a fantasy framework—thus, “London Below” was born. Consisting of six half-hour episodes directed by Dewi Humphreys, a Welshman then early in his career but who has since had a successful run directing mostly British television comedy series, Neverwhere began airing in September of 1996 to generally tepid reviews that noted the lackluster look of a series, as The Guardian reports, that was lit for film but shot on video with a planned post-production “filmising” that never materialized due to budget constraints. The result was something that, in Gaiman’s words, looked a bit too “Doctor Who-y” (qtd. in Leader). Gaiman, however, as he recalls in the interview appended to this volume, became dissatisfied with other aspects of the production as well, including deletions from and alterations to the script and changes to the characters—Leader reports that Gaiman wasn’t pleased with demands by BBC producers concerning character accents, while Flanagan quotes Gaiman as saying the Beast of London, as rendered by the BBC series, resembled less a gigantic and terrifying boar and more a “large, hairy, and rather amiable-looking highland cow” (Flanagan); the novel version was thus created to better realize Gaiman’s vision of the story. Neverwhere, which was published as a novel in 1996, can be considered the companion novelization of the television series and was published by BBC books three episodes into the TV series’s run, accompanied by a spoken word CD and cassette release of the story narrated by actor Gary Bakewell who plays Richard in the BBC series. The characters and plot of

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the novel are the same as in the series, although the novel form allowed Gaiman the freedom to develop aspects of the story more fully and to restore some changes made by the series back to his original vision— notably, the TV series had switched the location of the Floating Market from London’s famous department store Harrods to the Battersea Power Station because Harrods decided against allowing filming in the store. In contrast to the lukewarm response to the series, the novel was very well received and has since been translated into more than 20 languages (see the “International Covers” page). For the American version of the novel published by New York-based publisher Avon Books in 1998, Gaiman then rewrote parts of the story, clarifying details of British geography, deleting humor that might not translate, and making other alterations (see Martinelli). He subsequently regretted some of these alterations and thus published the “author’s preferred version” of Neverwhere in 2006, which restores jokes and deleted passages. Gaiman narrated this version for audiobook in 2007 and noted, “there were places where I overdescribe things I’d normally allow the reader to fill in, mostly because I wanted to try and replace the BBC version in people’s heads” (sfx). Expanding into other media, Neverwhere was published as a nineissue comic book series starting in 2005, with the story by Mike Carey (notable for the Vertigo Comics series Lucifer) and art by Glenn Fabry, and separately broadcast as a BBC Radio 4 radio drama in six parts in 2013, featuring the voices of James McAvoy, Natalie Dormer, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Sir Christopher Lee, among others. Gaiman offers high praise for the radio play, calling it “absolutely fantastic” (Roper); he has described the comic book version as one he enjoyed, but comments that “[it] wasn’t something of mine. Still not used to Door as a busty superheroine! Wonderful Beast of London, though” (sfx). “Out of Gaiman’s storied and story-filled career,” reflects Leader, “no single narrative has proved to be as enduring, as flexible or as quixotic as Neverwhere” (Leader). Given Gaiman’s contemporary position as among the most prominent and influential authors of fantasy worldwide—his website credits him with being “one of the creators of modern comics,” mentions that he “is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers,” and characterizes his work as having “achieved cult status” (“biography”)—it is useful to recall that Neverwhere was in fact Gaiman’s debut solo novel, although far from his first publication. Gaiman, who was born in Hampshire, UK in 1960 and who

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describes himself as having been a “feral child who was raised in libraries” (“biography”), began his publishing career as a journalist, writing book reviews for the British Fantasy Society, penning interviews and articles for various British magazines, and completing a band biography of 80s New Wave act Duran Duran. In 1986, marking his love for British humorist Douglas Adams (who is among the more obvious influences on him), Gaiman published Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion. Gaiman’s pivot away from journalism and toward fiction occurred in the late 1980s after forming a friendship with British comic book author, Alan Moore (whose works include V for Vendetta, Watchmen, and Batman: The Killing Joke), whom Gaiman credits with teaching him “how to write a comic book script” (“Neil Gaiman and Comics”). Gaiman then teamed up with artist and illustrator Dave McKean—like Gaiman, an up-and-coming figure in the comic book world—on several graphic novels before being commissioned by DC Comics in 1989 to develop the character for whom he is still best known by many: the Sandman. With a focus on Dream, the titular Sandman, the Sandman series, which began in 1989 and ended in 1996, tells tales of “The Endless”: eternal incarnations of natural forces or human states, consisting of Dream, Death, Destiny, Desire, Despair, Delirium, and Destruction. Initially published monthly, mostly as 32-page comic books, Sandman story arcs were subsequently collected into ten volumes. The critically acclaimed Sandman comics reached a wide audience, including some readers unfamiliar with comics (see Tucker), and, with its sophisticated storylines and compelling art, has had a significant influence on subsequent comics. Audible released the first part of a Sandman audio-drama version in 2020, narrated by Gaiman and starring James McAvoy as Morpheus; as of 2022, Netflix is in the process of developing it into a series (see Amaya). While working on the Sandman, Gaiman tested the waters for novel writing by collaborating with British fantasy author Terry Pratchett on the novel Good Omens (1990). As Gaiman explains, he met Pratchett in 1985 as the first journalist ever to interview him following the publication of Pratchett’s second Discworld novel (“Good Omens”). In 1987, Gaiman had the idea of a funny horror story in which “a demonic baby-swap goes wrong” and the Antichrist ends up as a nice kid with friends and a dog. He drafted several thousand words and circulated the idea among friends, including Pratchett, for feedback. About a year later, he recalls,

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Pratchett phoned him and proposed the collaboration (“Good Omens”). Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch was published in 1990. Deeply beloved by fans of Pratchett and Gaiman, and praised as “one of the most successful collaborative novels of all time” (Jordison), the novel was adapted for television by BBC 2 and Amazon Studios. Starring Michael Sheen and David Tennant, it was released to very positive reviews in 2019. The novelized version of Neverwhere was the starting point for a steady stream of critically acclaimed novels and stories by Gaiman for both adults and children. These include Stardust in 1999, which was adapted for film and released under the same name in 2007 starring Claire Danes (dir. Matthew Vaughn); American Gods, which won the 2002 Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, and Locus awards and ran for three seasons from 2017 to 2021 in adapted television series form on the Starz network; Coraline, which received the 2003 Hugo, Stoker, Locus and British Science Fiction awards, and the 2004 Nebula Award—the film version, directed by Henry Selick, came out in 2009; Anansi Boys, which won the British Fantasy and Locus Fantasy awards in 2005; The Graveyard Book, which received the 2009 Hugo and Newbery Medal awards; and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which was awarded Book of the Year by the British National Book Awards in 2013, won the 2013 Nebula Award, and the 2014 Locus Award. Gaiman has also published six collections of short fiction thus far, and written for television and film. As Leader observes in a reassessment of the BBC Neverwhere from the vantage point of 17 years on, the “most notable star to rise from Neverwhere is Gaiman himself” (Leader). Neverwhere, however, is notable for quite a few reasons beyond its serving as an important launching point in Gaiman’s prolific and acclaimed career thus far. As testified to by its consistent popularity, it is first and foremost an immensely enjoyable novel in its own right—one that tells a creative, engaging, and ultimately satisfying story by carefully balancing humor with pathos and fantasy with truth. The novel’s plot follows a tight arc that, as we will see in chapter two, taps into the deep structure of the Hero’s Journey as the naïve protagonist, Richard Mayhew, discovers the existence of a more capacious universe than he ever imagined, is tested, and grows into someone who makes choices rather than simply drifting along. In this, the novel is essentially a Bildungsroman—a story that maps a character’s psychological and moral growth in the journey from childhood to adulthood.

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While Richard is the novel’s protagonist and his transformation is at the heart of the tale, he is initially a fish out of water in London Below and certainly less colorful than the unusual characters he meets in the fantasy space beneath the feet of modern Londoners. He is instead a sort of everyman character whose disbelief, confusion, and, occasionally, delight are intended to direct the reader’s response. As will be discussed in chapter two, this is typical of the portal-quest narrative, a tale in which, as described by Farah Mendlesohn, a “character leaves her familiar surroundings and passes through a portal into an unknown place,” and one in which our position as reader is tied to that of the protagonist as they seek to make sense of the fantasy world (see Mendlesohn, 1 and passim). While Richard is the main character, the focus of the novel—as in much fantasy—is in building a captivating fantasy world populated by strange and exotic figures and operating on the basis of different laws. Put concisely, the spell that Neverwhere casts over the reader is in large measure the enchantment of London Below, an impossible fantasy space in which magic supplements or, indeed, substitutes for logic; time does not progress in a rigidly linear way; animals such as rats possess humanlike intelligence; angels and monsters exist; and death is not necessarily permanent. Our surprise and wonder as readers echoes that of Richard as the narrative introduces us to Door with her magical abilities and the roguish Marquis de Carabas, the fragrant Sewer Folk and the Rat Speakers, and a panoply of monsters ranging from the inhuman Croup and Vandemar to the Angel Islington, and from the vampirish Velvets to the terrifying Beast of London itself. As with Gaiman’s tapping into the deep structure of the Hero’s Journey, his creation of a riotous magical otherworld is also very much part and parcel of the fantasy literature tradition. Richard’s foray into London Below echoes that of, for example, Alice to Wonderland or the Pevensie children crossing into Narnia. It is in keeping, as well, with Dorothy’s excursion to Oz and even Harry Potter’s discovery that a magical world coexists with the rational one of his depressing early life. Modern fantasy narratives such as these are then themselves indebted to much older myths and legends in which heroes wander off the map into misty, magical other realms; the difference is that, in our post-Enlightenment world, we generally bracket off the existence of such things as impossible. Nevertheless, we still wonder: what if? As will be discussed in chapter two, Victoria Nelson even proposes that fantasy has stepped into the place that religion once occupied, responding to a

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deep-seated human desire to believe in something beyond the material world of our senses (see Nelson). From this perspective, there is nothing new under the sun, and in Neverwhere Gaiman taps into the deep structure of fantasy by sending his protagonist into a magical otherworld that coexists with our own, allowing us to revel in its quirky strangeness. However, despite—or, indeed, precisely because—this genre territory is so familiar to us, it would be easy for Neverwhere to feel derivative or overly contrived. If we’ve heard it all before, if spectacle is all there is, or if the characters and their responses don’t strike us as truthful, the story is likely to fall flat. This is where artistry enters the picture: First and foremost, Gaiman succeeds in Neverwhere in making us care about the characters, principally Richard and Door. Despite the strangeness of the surroundings, their responses ring true—and Richard’s struggle in particular to find where he fits in is easy to empathize with. Next, is the brilliance of the governing conceit: London Tube stops corresponding to real entities. Richard’s speculation about this in the prologue actually mirrors Gaiman’s own youthful fascination. As he explains in the “Original BBC Interview,” as a child he would play a board game at school involving the London Underground and wonder about the stations such as whether there were clowns and lions at Picadilly Circus or if people actually turned green at the Turnham Green stop (see the A&E DVD Box set of Neverwhere). This literalization of language becomes the whole basis for Neverwhere, which gives us a bridge ruled by night at Knightsbridge, an Earl holding court at Earl’s Court, a street at Down Street that does indeed go down and down and down, and so on. It is important to note that Gaiman’s playfulness with language is also part of a particular fantasy tradition associated with figures such as Lewis Carroll, Douglas Adams, and Norton Juster—indeed, as discussed in chapter three, Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, in which protagonist Milo visits a fantasy kingdom on a quest to rescue the princesses Rhyme and Reason, corresponds in compelling ways with Neverwhere. As with Gaiman’s own youthful musings, such wordplay possesses the capacity to delight through its associations with childish wonderment. Gaiman’s use of language in this respect is part of the overall wittiness of Neverwhere, which balances its heavier themes. While Richard’s quest is serious, and certainly the final confrontations with the Beast of London and the Angel Islington are not played for laughs, Gaiman’s touch is often

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light as he peppers the text with elements of playful absurdity. Consider this initial description of Croup and Vandemar: There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar’s eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelery; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike. (8)

The final sentence of the paragraph—one that is very much an homage to Douglas Adams—undoes everything that has preceded it, rendering the four simple ways to distinguish Croup and Vandemar comically superfluous. At times, Gaiman evokes humor through the use of surprising figures of speech, as with these similes: “To say that Richard Mayhew was not very good at heights would be perfectly accurate, but would fail to give the full picture; it would be like describing the planet Jupiter as bigger than a duck” (50) and “Nice in a bodyguard is about as useful as the ability to regurgitate whole lobsters” (117). Another tool in the arsenal is the unexpected use of allusion, as when the Velvet Lamia both demonstrates her knowledge of classic film and tips her hat toward her vampiric nature by playfully declining Richard’s invitation to share his food with a “I do not eat… curry” (279). She’ll later similarly allude to The Wizard of Oz as she takes a jab at the humorless Hunter who suspects her predatory intent (287). Gaiman’s wordplay in Neverwhere, however, and the novel’s literalization of what are conventionally regarded as figures of speech are also the basis for one of its more serious themes: the people who “fall through the cracks.” Although Gaiman resisted the idea of a fantasy series set among tribes of the homeless in London, Neverwhere is nevertheless about homelessness, poverty, abuse, and various social ills that are often described as “invisible” or things that “go unseen.” These are the scenes from which people avert their gaze or that they “refuse to see.” In Neverwhere, like having an actual smith with a hammer at Hammersmith Station, Gaiman literalizes the metaphor that the homeless are invisible. Once one enters London Below, those in London Above simply stop seeing them. Even Richard’s fiancé, Jessica, has trouble recalling who he is when he confronts her at the British Museum and quickly forgets about him

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as soon as her attention is diverted. As discussed in chapter four, the fantasy conceit of rendering homelessness literally invisible is ironically exactly how the novel remains engaged with the real world: fantasy not as flight-of-fancy or pure escapism, but socially engaged commentary. Neverwhere in this way is very much a response to its mid-1990s historical moment: the continued reverberations of an economic recession in the United Kingdom in 1991 and 1992, high rates of unemployment, and an increase in homelessness. The novel asks us to see what is right before our eyes, but that—like Jessica stepping over the bleeding Door early in the novel—we may prefer to ignore or hold at arm’s length. Neverwhere, in sum, taps into the deep structures of fantasy in an original and clever way through a tightly plotted and ultimately satisfying story arc that reads easily; it balances the wondrous spectacle of its fantasy world with memorable characters about whom we come to care; and it is, by turns, both playful and serious. Perhaps most of all, like its protagonist Richard, it has a generous heart. Richard finds a place in London Below because he was lost in London Above—a place where people work in cubicles, eat finger food at gallery openings, and step over the homeless on their way to massage the egos of corporate magnates. London Below, for all its magic and monsters, is finally a more authentic world: a place where deals are struck on the honor system, wealth is not based on material possessions, and no one works their way up the corporate ladder by doing what they are told in business clothes in small cubicles. In this, Neverwhere also serves as an excellent introduction to Neil Gaiman’s larger body of work, which has consistently used fantasy to insist on the importance of community, compassion, and storytelling to reinstill a sense of wonder in the world around us. What links Neverwhere to Gaiman’s later solo novels most immediately is the conceit of adjacent or overlapping worlds. In Stardust, which has significant parallels with Neverwhere, protagonist Tristran Thorn leaves behind the small town of Wall in rural England and ventures in the land of Faerie, growing up along the way and ultimately discovering that his heart lies in Faerie and with the anthropomorphized fallen star, Yvaine. In American Gods, the protagonist, Shadow, finds himself at the center of a clash between old gods, including Odin, Loki, Anansi, and Bast, and new gods representing contemporary obsessions with technology, media, commerce, and popular culture. With connections to American Gods, Anansi Boys concerns two sons of West African trickster god, Anansi. Closer to Neverwhere are Gaiman’s Coraline, The Graveyard Book, and The Ocean at the End of

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the Lane, each of which has a threatened human child discover the existence of a supernatural world, the negotiation of which requires both personal courage and the help of others. (The Graveyard Book inverts Gaiman’s typical formula to a certain extent by having the human child grow up in a fantasy otherworld of ghosts and monsters, only to leave it in the end). In all of these works, Gaiman creates protagonists who care about others—and who survive because their compassion and concern are reciprocated. Because of a tendency toward symbolism and personification evident across his career, including The Endless of The Sandman, the stations in Neverwhere and the character named Door, all the gods in American Gods —but particularly the new ones—the star and a town named Wall in Stardust, The Lady on the Grey Horse in The Graveyard Book (the angel of death), and the Hempstocks in The Ocean at the End of the Lane (incarnations of the Triple Goddess [Mother / Maiden / Crone]), Gaiman’s work often inclines toward allegory, the symbolic aspects coordinating to offer a larger meaning, moral, or message about, to channel Douglas Adams, life, the universe, and everything. Taking cues from Neverwhere, we might say that one recurring message in Gaiman’s work is that growing up involves mustering up one’s courage and walking through doors into strange, new worlds. Another is that there is strength to be drawn from tender connections with others. And a third is that the stories we tell both reflect and shape who we are. This short study of Gaiman’s Neverwhere walks through several of the doors opened in this introduction to explore the novel’s background, themes, and style in greater depth. In this, it reflects my experiences introducing the novel to students in various teaching situations. Chapter two, “Bridges to Fantasy: Neverwhere and Genre,” considers the novel in relation to the fantasy genre writ large and talks in more detail about portal-quests, the fundamental features of fantasy, and the Hero’s Journey—sometimes referred to as the “Monomyth.” Chapter three, “‘Mind the Gap’: Neverwhere, Language, and Intertextuality,” extends this consideration of genre to Gaiman’s wordplay and then looks at Neverwhere’s participation in the contemporary fantasy trends of the urban fantastic and the rogue angel. Chapter four, “‘Falling Through the Cracks’: Neverwhere as Social Commentary,” considers the ways that fantasy fiction in general and Neverwhere in particular can function as forms of social commentary and critique. Chapter five, “Fidelity and Innovation: Adaptation, Transmediality, and the Neverwhere Megatext,”

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considers the process of moving from TV series to novel to graphic novel to radio play and what different media can and cannot do well. The short final chapter, “The Key,” uses the novel to introduce even more questions about the roles fantasy can play in helping us reconceptualize our world. The study then concludes with bibliography of scholarly work on Neil Gaiman and an interview with Gaiman conducted in July of 2021.

References Amaya, Erik. “Everything We Know About Netflix’s The Sandman Series,” Rotten Tomatoes, 25 September 2021, https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/ article/everything-we-know-about-netflixs-the-sandman-series/. “Biography,” NeilGaiman.com, n.d., https://neilgaiman.com/About_Neil/Bio graphy. Flanagan, Mark. “Neverwhere: Author’s Preferred Text by Neil Gaiman,” Run Spot Run, 28 July 2015, http://www.runspotrun.com/book-reviews/neverw here-authors-preferred-text-by-neil-gaiman/. Gaiman, Neil. American Gods, William Morrow, 2001. ———. Anansi Boys. HarperCollins, 2005. ———. Coraline. HarperCollins, 2002. ———. Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion, Pocket Books, 1988. ———. The Graveyard Book. HarperCollins, 2008. ———. Neverwhere. First Edition. BBC Books, 1996. ———. Neverwhere. American Edition. Avon Books, 1997. ———. Neverwhere. Audiobook narrated by Neil Gaiman, HarperAudio, 2007. ———. Neverwhere. Author’s Preferred Text Edition, [2006], Headline Publishing Group, 2013. ———. Neverwhere. Illustrated edition with drawings by Chris Riddell, William Morrow, 2016. ———. Neverwhere. Radio play. BBC Radio 4, 2013. ———. Neverwhere. Television Miniseries. BBC Two, 1996. DVD Boxset from A&E Home Video, ———. Norse Mythology, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. ———. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, William Morrow, 2013. * A Note on The Sandman comics: The original run consisted of 75 issues published from January 1989 until March of 1996. They were published by DC comics; starting with issue 47, they were published under DC Comics’s Vertigo imprint. The 75 issues were subsequently collected together and published in twelve volumes. ———. The Sleeper and the Spindle, HarperCollins, 2015.

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———. Stardust. William Morrow, 1999. Gaiman, Neil and Terry Pratchett. Good Omens: The nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. Workman Publishing, 1990. “Good Omens: How Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote a book,” BBC News, 22 December 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-305 12620. “International Covers,” Neil Gaiman.com, n.d., https://www.neilgaiman.com/ Neil%27s_Work/International_Covers. Johnston, Rich. “Bleeding Cool and Comic Relief Need Your Help,” Bleeding Cool, 29 November 2010, https://bleedingcool.com/comics/recent-upd ates/bleeding-cool-and-comic-relief-need-your-help/. Jordison, Sam. “Is Good Omens one of the best collaborative novels ever written?” The Guardian, 29 January 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/booksblog/2019/jan/29/good-omens-successful-joint-authorshipneil-gaiman-terry-pratchett. Juster, Norton. The Phantom Tollbooth [1961], Bullseye Books, 1988. Leader, Michael. “Looking back at BBC Two’s Neverwhere,” Den of Geek, 19 March 2013, https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/looking-back-at-bbc-twos-nev erwhere/. “Lenny Henry dedicates his knighthood to all involved in Comic Relief,” The Guardian, 4 December 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/cul ture/2015/dec/04/lenny-henry-dedicates-his-knighthood-to-all-involved-incomic-relief. Martinelli, Marissa. “What Does It Mean When a Book Is Stamped With the Words ‘Author’s Preferred Text?’” Slate.com, 20 August 2015, https://slate. com/culture/2015/08/author-s-preferred-text-of-neil-gaiman-s-neverwherewhat-do-those-words-mean.html Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy, Wesleyan University Press, 2008. “Neil Gaiman and Comics,” NeilGaiman.com, n.d., https://www.neilgaiman. com/Cool_Stuff/Essays/Essays_About_Neil/Neil_Gaiman_and_Comics. Nelson, Victoria. The Secret Life of Puppets, Harvard University Press, 2001. Roper, Caitlin. “Q&A: Neil Gaiman on the Star-Studded BBC Audioplay of Neverwhere,” Wired, 26 March 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/03/ neil-gaiman-neverwhere-bbc/ sfx. “Neil Gaiman on Neverwhere,” GamesRadar+, 23 April 2007, https://www. gamesradar.com/neil_gaiman_on_neverwhere/. Tucker, Ken. “Cool Cult Favorites: Sandman,” Entertainment Weekly, 24 June 1994, https://ew.com/article/1994/06/24/cool-cult-favorites-sandman/.

CHAPTER 2

Bridges to Fantasy: Neverwhere and Genre

Abstract Neverwhere provides an excellent introduction to fantasy and presents a useful opportunity to illustrate many of the genre’s defining features. In this chapter, Brian Attebery’s characteristics of fantasy, outlined in his 1992 Strategies of Fantasy study, are introduced, as are Farah Mendlesohn’s categories of fantasy from her Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008). After exploring Neverwhere’s generic features, the novel is then considered more broadly in relation to the familiar framework of the Hero’s Journey, also referred to as the “Monomyth,” as popularized by Joseph Campbell. Neverwhere is shown to map quite closely onto the stages of this narrative pattern, illustrating how modern fantasy works can nevertheless remain deeply entrenched in narrative history and familiar patterns. In this sense, like the overlapping temporalities of London Below, Neverwhere exceeds its particular temporal moment and taps into the deep structure of fantasy. Keywords Brian Attebery · Fantasy · Farah Mendlesohn · Genre · Hero’s Journey · Monomyth · Neil Gaiman · Neverwhere · Portal-Quest

Neverwhere provides an excellent introduction to fantasy and presents a useful opportunity to illustrate many of the genre’s defining features. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. A. Weinstock, A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96458-0_2

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In order to approach Neverwhere as a work of fantasy, Brian Attebery’s characteristics of fantasy, outlined in his 1992 Strategies of Fantasy study, will be introduced, as will Farah Mendlesohn’s categories of fantasy from her Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008). After exploring Neverwhere’s generic features, I will consider the novel more broadly in relation to the familiar framework of the Hero’s Journey, also referred to as the “Monomyth,” as popularized by Joseph Campbell. Neverwhere, as will be shown, maps quite closely onto the stages of this narrative pattern, illustrating how modern fantasy works can nevertheless remain deeply entrenched in narrative history and familiar patterns. In this sense, like the overlapping temporalities of London Below, Neverwhere exceeds its particular temporal moment and taps into the deep structure of fantasy. A consideration of Neverwhere in relation to the fantasy genre must begin by acknowledging that “fantasy” means different things to different people. As Attebery explains in Strategies of Fantasy, the meaning of fantasy can actually be rather difficult to pin down. At its most broad, fantasy can refer to anything we differentiate from reality—this would include dreams, wishful thinking, and even language, which creates mental images or impressions of things that are not the things themselves. Language, in fact, depends on the ability to see things “in our mind’s eye”—that is, to attach an idea of something (sometimes called the “signified”) to its expression as a word or icon (the “signifier”). Together, the signifier and the signified create what is called the “sign”—a fusion of a concept and a form of expression that is distinct from the real-world thing, called the “referent,” toward which it points. Put simply, words conjure up phantasmatic impressions of things. Literature takes this the next step, using words to create stories about people who don’t exist doing things that never actually happened. This is true even of stories limited to events that are part of the ordinary course of our daily experience. With this in mind, one could reasonably assert that all fiction is fantasy. That all language and fiction involve an element of fantasy may be true, but this expansive understanding of fantasy also isn’t particularly useful when it comes to thinking about the focus of this chapter—the relationship between Neverwhere and the fantasy genre—so some contraction of scope is helpful. One must be wary, though, of going too far in the other direction and becoming overly restrictive by limiting fantasy only to stories with a particular set of plot points and conceits. This is what Attebery refers to as “formula fantasy” (Strategies 9 and passim). As the name

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might suggest, formula fantasy is characterized by established marketing conventions of modern fantasy, offering sword-wielding barbarians, firebreathing dragons, dangerously alluring sorceresses, a battle between good and evil, a perilous quest, and so forth—the sorts of things that likely come to mind most immediately when someone at least somewhat conversant with the genre hears the word “fantasy.” It is important to bear in mind that just because something follows a familiar pattern or recipe doesn’t make it bad; indeed, that something has become a formula others follow generally means that it has been successful—as Attebery remarks, a “poor non-formulaic story may be far worse than a good performance of the formula” (Strategies 10). But defining fantasy fiction based on the presence or absence of particular stock characteristics ends up being unnecessarily restrictive. After all, there can certainly be fantasy narratives that aren’t set in a “vaguely medieval world” (Attebery, Strategies 10), lack hobbits, wizards, and dragons, and so forth. Guiding his consideration of fantasy between the Scylla and Charybdis of being too broad and unnecessarily restrictive—between what he refers to as fantasy as “mode” and as “formula”—Attebery concludes to address the genre of fantasy literature as a “fuzzy set”—a category that, rather than being all or nothing, is marked by degrees. Works at the center of the set, such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, he describes as “quintessentially fantasy.” As one moves away from the center of the set toward the periphery, works then can be described as “basically” fantasy, “technically” fantasy, “in some respects” fantasy, “like” fantasy, “not really” fantasy, and then, finally, “by no means fantasy” (Strategies 13). What marks works of quintessential fantasy, according to Attebery, are three characteristics related to their content, their structure, and the response they seek to elicit from the reader: the impossible, the comic, and wonder, respectively. First and foremost, what makes fantasy literature fantasy, according to Attebery, is that it contains the impossible: “some violation of what the author clearly believes to be natural law” (Strategies 14). This may include the use of magic, violations of the laws of physics as we know them, the presence of supernatural creatures, resurrection from the dead, and so forth. In fantasy worlds, characters may control the elements, command dragons, summon spirits, or freeze time. As Attebery explains, as one extends toward the periphery of fantasy as a genre, the impossible may shade toward the implausible and unlikely, so there may be fantasy

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elements, for example, to action-adventure movies in which musclebound protagonists pull off incredible physics-defying stunts and feats of strength. However, at the heart of the fantasy genre is a sharp break from what Kathryn Hume calls “consensus reality” (Attebery, Strategies 8). What marks fantasy literature as fantasy literature most plainly is the presence of the impossible. Next, the characteristic plot structure of fantasy literature is comic. By this, Attebery means not that fantasy is inherently funny (although it may be), but that works of fantasy “[begin] with a problem and [end] with [a] resolution” that is, at least in some sense, in the protagonist’s favor (Strategies 15). Importantly, this ending may not be what we would consider an entirely happy ending—indeed, there is often a great cost to the fantasy hero’s victory: companions may be lost, the hero chastened, the land scarred. However, “[d]eath, despair, horror, and betrayal … must not be the final word” (Strategies 15). If the hero dies and darkness envelopes the land forever, then the narrative would lack the “structural completeness of fantasy” (Strategies 15) and would instead belong to another genre, such as horror. Fantasy, in Attebery’s estimation, insists that protagonists finish what they start—even if the task they complete turns out to be something other than the one they thought they were pursuing in the first place. Finally, the third characteristic at the core of the fantasy genre, according to Attebery, is that it evokes wonder from the reader. Wonder is an emotional response connected to the role of the impossible within fantasy and fantasy’s sense of completeness, and it intertwines surprise, amazement, admiration, and curiosity. Attebery connects wonder to the concept of “estrangement”—the ways in which literature “draws us away from the world we live in—or think we live in” (Strategies 16), leading us to contemplate other ways of living, being, and understanding the world. Fantasy not only departs from our familiar reality, but allows us to look back at that reality from a new perspective—which, as will be considered in chapter four, is how it can function as ideological critique. Fantasy texts can certainly have aspects that evoke horror, fright, or disgust; however, for fantasy to be fantasy rather than a different genre, at the end of the day wonder must prevail. How the fantasy characteristics of the impossible, comic structure, and evocation of wonder pertain to Neverwhere may already be obvious. Before returning to Gaiman’s novel to address these aspects in some detail, however, an overview of Farah Mendlesohn’s different types of

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fantasy narratives as outlined in her Rhetorics of Fantasy will also be useful. Taking as her starting point established frameworks such as Attebery’s for categorizing works as fantasy, Mendlesohn isn’t concerned with defining what fantasy is but rather what makes it tick; her focus is on how the genre is constructed and her argument is that there are four primary forms of fantasy narrative: the portal-quest, the intrusive, the immersive, and the liminal (xiv). What differentiates these categories from each other is “how the fantastic enters the narrated world” (xiv)—that is, how the protagonist and the reader encounter the fantasy elements. The idea of a portal fantasy is straightforward: As in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), in a portal narrative the fantasy world is accessed via a doorway of some kind. Such stories are almost always also quest narratives, explains Mendlesohn, and proceed in a linear fashion until the goal is achieved (xix). Portal-quests typically consist of two “movements”: transition into the new world followed by exploration of it (2) and, as readers, our position in relation to such narratives is as a “companion-audience, tied to the protagonist, and dependent upon the protagonist for explanation and decoding” (1). Put differently, we are often doubled with the protagonist in trying to make sense of the fantasy world—the protagonist finds the new world strange and bewildering, and so do we. As described by Mendlesohn, the magic exists only on one side of the divide: There is the world of the protagonist’s commonplace reality, generally something that mimics our own world, and then there is the magical otherworld into which the protagonist enters by choice, accident, or design. While the starting point for such narratives is typically a world that mimics our own, this isn’t necessarily the case—one could, for example, have a narrative set far in the future in which a protagonist goes through a portal to the distant past. The key feature of the portalquest fantasy is the secondary fantasy world that operates according to a different logic than the primary world considered normal and home by the story’s protagonist. The intrusion narrative is in some respects the reverse of the portalquest. Rather than a protagonist going through a portal into a fantasy otherworld, something from another world emerges unexpectedly into the primary world of the narrative. As Mendlesohn details, “The trajectory of the intrusion fantasy is straightforward: the world is ruptured by the intrusion which disrupts normality and has to be negotiated with or defeated, sent back whence it came, or controlled” (115). The primary world in the intrusion narrative, as in the portal-quest, Mendlesohn points

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out, is often one that mimics our own but, again, this doesn’t have to be the case—a narrative can start off in a fantasy otherworld and have something emerge into it from someplace else. Intrusion narratives also frequently tend toward horror as the intrusive element is often a monster of some kind, as when the demonic Pinhead in the Hellraiser franchise or the Candyman of Clive Barker’s story “The Forbidden” (1986) and its cinematic adaptations is summoned; again, though, this doesn’t have to be the case. Unlike portal-quest and intrusion narratives, immersive fantasies, like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series, lack a shift from a primary world to a secondary fantasy one; instead, the fantasy otherworld is all there is—it is, as Mendlesohn puts it, “a complete world” (57). Disorientation here is primarily for the reader who has to discover the logic governing the fantasy world that the characters typically take for granted. (It can make for awkward storytelling when, for the reader’s benefit, characters explain to one another things they both already know by virtue of living in the same world.) And then there are what Mendlesohn refers to as “liminal fantasies.” The most elusive of her four categories, the liminal fantasy is one in which the fantastic intrudes into a world that seems patterned on our own, yet the characters are not really surprised by it, instead accepting it as part of their ordinary experience. One example Mendlesohn gives is a story by fantasy author Joan Aiken in which a family is surprised by a unicorn on their lawn, but because it is Tuesday rather than Monday (xxiii–xxiv). Attebery’s characteristics of fantasy and Mendlesohn’s categories together provide a useful framework for considering Gaiman’s Neverwhere as a work of fantasy—and a focus on Neverwhere can, in return, help elaborate how much fantasy fiction functions. Neverwhere is, as Mendlesohn explains, first and foremost a portal-quest fantasy. Within the narrative, Richard Mayhew starts off in a world that mimics our own, London Above, before transitioning into the magical other world of London Below, which is overlaid on our familiar reality (Mendlesohn 38). London Below is what Mendlesohn describes as a “parallel world” (151) coexisting with our mundane one—one cannot exist in both simultaneously. Even while Richard remains in London Above, after assisting Door he has in essence been absorbed into London Below. True to her name, Door acts as the portal for Richard’s transition from one world to the other. This is similarly the case on subway platforms; while the characters seem to mingle with London commuters, they nevertheless remain

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in their magical reality, which is why they fail to register for London Above denizens and why they are subject to attack by the creature that lives in the gap between subway platform and trains while London Above residents are not vulnerable. Once in the magical world of London Below, Richard’s quest ostensibly is to return to his prior “normal” life in London Above. What becomes clear as the narrative progresses, however, is that Richard’s true quest is really something quite different: to figure out who he actually is and where he belongs—to find a home. In this respect, Richard is characteristic of the broader class of fantasy protagonists in portal-quest narratives who in some way are marked right from the beginning as outsiders or as unusual in their mundane world. Magical other worlds often seem alluring to such protagonists or pull them in precisely because their normal worlds are deficient in some respect and/or they feel they don’t belong. From the start, Richard is shown as uncomfortable with London Above and the world of mundane reality it represents. His values—giving away his umbrella in the rain to an elderly woman who needs one and stopping to assist an injured person on the street—are shown not to correspond to those of the people around him: notably, his demanding and callous fiancé, Jessica. And both the old woman’s reading of his palm and his prophetic dreams of the London Beast show that, even at the start, London Below is calling him. Gaiman, it is worth noting, makes use of this conceit in much of his fiction: In Stardust, for example, protagonist Tristran—very much like Richard in Neverwhere—doesn’t fit into the provincial life of his small town of Wall and, like Richard, discovers that his destiny lies elsewhere; in Coraline, the eponymous main character initially is attracted to the fantasy world of the Other Mother because she feels ignored and neglected by her parents; something similar is the case for protagonist in The Ocean at the End of the Lane in which our main character recalls taking a back seat to his sister and suffering from his parents’s neglect. Children in Gaiman’s work generally don’t stay in the fantasy other worlds they encounter; instead, they must reconcile themselves to the “real world” and their situations tend to improve in the end; in contrast, older protagonists who don’t fit in, like Richard and Tristran, sometimes depart our mundane reality for greener magical pastures. What Neverwhere and these other examples from Gaiman’s body of work demonstrate is that the “quest” part of the portal-quest narrative is often for something other than what presents itself at the start as the

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desired goal. Richard, it turns out, doesn’t really want to get back to his old, boring life in “securities,” nor does he really want to spend his life with someone like Jessica who will step over the homeless and the injured without a second thought as she seeks to ingratiate herself with her crass and wealthy employer. What Richard discovers in London Below is not only magic and excitement, but senses of belonging and self-worth. The challenges he confronts and overcomes don’t transform him into someone new as much as prompt his metamorphosis into what he always had the potential to become—he grows into himself and, as a consequence, outgrows his previous life, realizing that what he thought he wanted wasn’t ever really what would satisfy him. This is often how the quest functions in fantasy—as an aspect of the Bildungsroman in which the journey undertaken and the challenges confronted precipitate a process of maturation such that the protagonist returns changed: more mature, less impetuous, often chastened, and generally with a revised sense of what matters. This pattern present in Neverwhere is also the case in Gaiman’s Stardust. In that story, Tristran originally crosses the wall dividing his town from the land of Faerie in the attempt to win the love of the supercilious girl, Victoria, whom he is— much to her amusement—courting (a variation on Neverwhere’s Jessica). What he discovers, however, is that Victoria was never what he really wanted and his adventures in Faerie allow him to grow into the man he always had the potential to be. A consideration of Neverwhere as portal-quest fantasy also makes clear that Mendlesohn’s categories for fantasy narratives, as she notes, aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. There is an intrusion element to Neverwhere inasmuch as Door enters London Above at the start of the novel; since she is the portal for Richard, he has to encounter her to begin his journey. Similarly, Door’s mission to discover who murdered her parents is a kind of quest narrative; were the story told from her perspective, it would then be a quest narrative within an immersive fantasy—as is the case in Lord of the Rings novels in which Frodo’s goal is to cast the One Ring into the fires of Mt. Doom in Mordor. However, Mendlesohn’s categorizations of fantasy narratives are based on where we, as readers, stand in relation to the fantastic. In Neverwhere, our perspective is wed to that of Richard and we meet the fantastic once his encounter with Door transitions him into London Below. Turning to Attebery’s characteristics of fantasy narratives, it is clear almost immediately how Neverwhere fulfills the first requirement of the

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impossible as the story is full of magic and imaginary creatures ranging from a fallen angel to supernatural assassins to Door’s supernatural abilities to open anything. The world of London Below is a place in which one’s life energy can be stored and kept safe, a magical spell can charm the coins out of people’s pockets, vending machines respect authority, rats and pigeons can hold conversations, and elements of the past literally coexist with the present—put simply, London Below operates according to principles other than those that govern our familiar reality, and things we would consider impossible are commonplace there. Ironically, as will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter, a lot of what is impossible in Neverwhere is associated with taking things literally, such as a bridge of seemingly sentient darkness at the Knightsbridge Underground stop or the angel at the Angel station. The surprise of such literalization creates a humorous effect associated with their playful impossibility that evokes associations with childhood—recollections of a time before the distinction between literal and figurative language became clear. The plot structure of Neverwhere is certainly comic in the sense of introducing a problem and proceeding toward a satisfactory resolution of it. As discussed above, Richard’s life is thrown into turmoil after assisting Door, which estranges him from his prior existence and propels him into the universe of London Below. His initial desire is just to “wake up,” so to speak, and get back to the life he knows. However, his pursuit of this objective then becomes conjoined with Door’s quest to discover who murdered her family and, as he ventures with her and her companions, his own destiny is realized. He withstands The Ordeal, survives the battle with the Beast of London, and achieves what he thought was his goal—returning to his life in London Above. Changed by his experiences however, he ultimately rejects that mundane existence for the magical adventures of London Below: Richard has found a home. His true quest is completed once he realizes that he belongs in London Below. The combination of content and structure—the impossible magical aspects of London Below and Richard’s successful negotiation of them toward a satisfying conclusion in which he realizes that his true ambition is to remain part of the fantasy otherworld—is then arguably evocative of wonder. One needs to walk carefully here: No two readers are the same and literary works will therefore be received differently based on individual tastes and differing contexts; however, that Neverwhere has been as successful as it has been—having sold many thousands of copies, been translated into multiple languages, been adapted for graphic novel and

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radio play, and so on—testifies to the enjoyment readers have derived from it. This, too, is a tricky thing, as individuals can enjoy literary works (or not!) for many different reasons ranging from wordplay to nostalgia. It seems reasonable though to propose that part of the appeal of fantasy is linked to the aspects of fantasy Attebery proposes as central to the genre: impossible things and a plot that resolves the question structuring the narrative. When developed successfully, these aspects delight us. Where the impossible is concerned, scholar Victoria Nelson has, in fact, argued that fantasy narratives respond to a deep-seated human craving for belief in what she calls “the transcendental”—a realm of spirit beyond that of the senses and the material world. According to Nelson, religion used to satisfy this desire; however, in our post-Enlightenment, increasingly secular modern world, fantasy works have filled the place religion used to hold. “Art forms of the fantastic,” explains Nelson, are a means through which “we as nonbelievers allow ourselves, unconsciously, to believe” (vii). Nelson’s premise is that human beings in general have “religious impulses”—an innate desire to believe that the universe exceeds what we can see, feel, and touch—and that, when those desires are “repressed” (viii) and can’t find expression directly through religious observance, they nevertheless assert themselves in displaced ways: notably, through the consumption and enjoyment of fantasy narratives. One need not, however, buy into this notion of a kind of universal religious unconscious to accept the idea that human beings in general find the prospect of fantasy other worlds fascinating. Historian Michael Saler’s word for it is “enchantment.” In his As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary History of Virtual Reality (2012), Saler takes as his beginning point the same premise that Nelson uses: the Enlightenment, with its rejection of superstition and religious dogma, drained some of the wonder out of the world. Fantasy works help restore a sense of wonder; however, Saler’s take is that our engagement with works such as Neverwhere is a playful one in which we go along for the ride for the fun of it. We “embrace illusions while acknowledging their artificial status,” he writes (13). It is fun to contemplate other worlds even if we don’t actually believe in them. The question of whether there are universal psychic structures that unconsciously direct human development and behavior is at the heart of the last fantasy framework to be considered here: the Hero’s Journey. As popularized by literature professor and comparative mythologist

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Joseph Campbell, notably in his book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), the Hero’s Journey, sometimes referred to as the “Monomyth,” is a recurring pattern in world myth and literature that reflects supposedly innate and universal human ideas and elements of thought. Rendered concisely, the journey, which is by definition a kind of portal-quest, is as follows: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder … fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won … the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (Campbell 23). In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell then breaks down this journey into seventeen stages organized into three parts or “rites of passage”: “departure,” “initiation,” and “return” (23). These stages are briefly summarized below. Campbell notes that stories sometimes omit certain stages, present them in different orders, or emphasize some at the expense of others.

Departure 1. The Call to Adventure. The hero in some way is summoned or drawn to venture forth into the unknown. 2. Refusal of the Call. The hero at first resists the summons. 3. Supernatural Aid. The hero is assisted by a magical helper, who may provide information and artifacts that become important later. 4. The Crossing of the First Threshold. The hero sets forth and leaves behind the familiar world passing into unknown, often figured as a kind of underworld. 5. Belly of the Whale. The hero moves deeper into the unknown, which sets the stage for transformation.

Initiation 6. The Road of Trials. The hero faces a series of tests in the underworld. 7. The Meeting with the Goddess. The hero experiences a transcendent and transformative love. 8. Woman as Temptress. The hero is tempted to stray or abandon the quest (the temptation may be a woman, but doesn’t have to be).

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9. Atonement with the Father. The hero confronts that which holds the ultimate power in their life—often a fearsome father/god— whom they must either overcome or reconcile with. 10. Apotheosis. Having confronted and overcome the obstacle presented by the father, the hero achieves insight and is strengthened in his resolve. 11. The Ultimate Boon. The hero’s ultimate objective is achieved.

Return 12. Refusal of the Return. Completion of the Hero’s Journey requires they return to their starting point, but they may resist this. 13. The Magic Flight. In some cases, if the hero’s quest was for a coveted object, they may be pursued. 14. Rescue from Without. In the same way the hero receives assistance at the start of the journey, assistance again is provided in returning. 15. The Crossing of the Return Threshold. The hero returns transformed to the place of their origin. 16. Master of the Two Worlds. The matured hero now assimilates their new insights with old understandings to achieve a sense of balance. 17. Freedom to Live. The hero, liberated from the fears that initially plagued them, including literal and figurative death, can now experience life fully. There are good reasons to be skeptical of Campbell’s claims concerning the universality of this narrative framework. Among the criticisms raised are that Campbell cherry-picks his sources, excluding anything from consideration that doesn’t follow the template, and that what Campbell proposes as universal really is a very Western and masculine template that leaves little room for cultural and sexual difference—indeed, there have been several attempts to revise Campbell’s framework to better suit female protagonists (see, for example, Murdock and Frankel). Campbell has also been criticized for making sweeping generalizations that take elements of individual narratives out of context and for his reliance on Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, with its questionable premises of archetypes and the collective unconscious (on this, see Toelken; Dundes; and Ellwood, among others).

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Such criticisms undeniably have merit. The familiarity of the Hero’s Journey as outlined by Campbell may well be the product of repetition over time rather than anything intrinsic to human psychology and it is certainly the case that it brushes aside anything that doesn’t fit the model, universalizing the trajectories of its generally white, male, Western protagonists. Nevertheless, the pattern Campbell outlines remains ubiquitous within contemporary Western fantasy, suggesting that it affords certain satisfactions to readers and viewers. Beyond the comfort of the familiar, it may be that the template persists because it allows for engaging narratives evocative of the wonder associated with fantasy and providing for satisfying closure at the end. Richard Mayhew’s journey in Neverwhere is a case in point, as it maps closely onto Campbell’s stages (although omitting a few). The Call to Adventure

Refusal of the Call

Supernatural Aid

The Crossing of the First Threshold Belly of the Whale

The Road of Trials

The Meeting with the Goddess Woman as Temptress Atonement with the Father

Apotheosis

Richard, over Jessica’s objections, comes to Door’s aid, noticing her where others do not Richard tries to resume his life, but cannot, having been rendered invisible in London Above The rat speakers and Anaesthesia in particular help Richard along his way after some initial objections Richard moves into London Below Arguably, the crossing of the Night’s Bridge and the experience of the floating market The various challenges Richard confronts with Door, the Marquis, and Hunter as they negotiate the various factions of London Below NA Lamia seeks to entice Richard into surrendering his life force Arguably, when Richard overcomes his greatest fears and survives The Ordeal. His co-worker Gary here is the avatar of all the forces of London Above that seek to discipline individuals into conforming to conventional social expectations Having survived The Ordeal, Richard now assumes his position as hero by slaying the Beast of London (continued)

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(continued) The Ultimate Boon

Refusal of the Return The Magic Flight Rescue from Without The Crossing of the Return Threshold Master of the Two Worlds

Freedom to Live

The Angel Islington is defeated and Richard is awarded the “key” to returning to his previous life NA NA Door facilitates Richard’s return to London Above Richard returns to London Above to find his position improved Richard compares London Above to London Below, discovers that he has grown, and no longer desires what he once did The matured Richard lets go off his previous desires and chooses to return to London Below

Richard’s journey, as this consideration suggests, corresponds closely to the general template for the Hero’s Journey provided by Campbell. The “meeting with the goddess” stage is omitted, which allows a sort of ambiguous romance with Door to be sustained but, due to her apparent age (we don’t know her actual age, but she is described as appearing young), never developed—although it might be at a later point. The “Refusal of the Return” and “The Magic Flight” are also omitted, as Richard believes himself eager to return to his former life and the supernatural antagonists, Islington, Croup, and Vandemar, who might give pursuit have been sucked across the universe through Door’s portal. In other respects though, Neverwhere offers a faithful illustration of Campbell’s template, suggesting that the Monomyth continues to find purchase in contemporary fantasy narrative. This chapter has used the frameworks provided by Attebery, Mendlesohn, and Campbell as lenses through which to consider Neverwhere’s relationship to the fantasy genre in general and the familiar paradigm of the Hero’s Journey in particular. The next chapter will offer a more focused consideration of the ways Neverwhere participates in specific fantasy traditions with a focus on wordplay and then on the conceits of the “urban fantastic” and the rogue angel. Neverwhere in this way will be shown to employ a general linguistic strategy often used by fantasy to evoke delight and specific plot devices shaped by contemporary anxieties and desires common to modern fantasy.

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References Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy, Indiana University Press, 1992. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces [1949], New World Library, 2008. Dundes, Alan. “Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century” in Grand Theory in Folkloristics, edited by Lee Haring, Indiana University Press, 2016, pp. 3–37. Ellwood, Robert. The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell, SUNY Press, 1999. Frankel, Valerie Estelle. From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey Through Myth and Legend, McFarland & Company, 2010. Gaiman, Neil. Coraline. HarperCollins, 2002. ———. Neverwhere. Author’s Preferred Text Edition [2006], Headline Publishing Group, 2013. ———. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, William Morrow, 2013. ———. Stardust. William Morrow, 1999. Hume, Karen. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature, Methuen, 1984. Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy, Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Murdock, Maureen. “The Heroine’s Journey” in Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion edited by David A. Leeming, 3rd edition, Springer, 2016. Nelson, Victoria. The Secret Life of Puppets, Harvard University Press, 2001. Saler, Michael. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, Oxford University Press, 2012. Toelken, Barre. The Dynamics of Folklore, Utah State University Press, 1996.

CHAPTER 3

“Mind the Gap”: Neverwhere, Language, and Intertextuality

Abstract This chapter extends on chapter two’s discussion by exploring other ways that Neverwhere participates in fantasy narrative traditions and trends. It begins by examining Neil Gaiman’s playful use of language in the novel, with a focus on his attribution of actual referents corresponding to the names of London Underground stops, but also extending as well to his use of symbolism, allusion, and other extensions or manipulations of meaning. From there, the chapter considers Neverwhere in relation to two notable trends in contemporary fantasy: the urban fantastic and the “rogue” angel. Looking at Neverwhere in relation to these trends helps us see how fantasy works in general and Neverwhere in particular are inevitably involved in larger dialogues with related works and are both responsive to and influential on broader cultural trends. Keywords Allusion · Angel · Fantasy · Hypostasis · Intertextuality · Myth · Neil Gaiman · Neverwhere · Norton Juster · Personification · Symbolism · Urban Fantasy · Wordplay

In Chapter two, I considered Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere in relation to the fantasy genre as a whole. Using Brian Attebery’s fundamental characteristics of fantasy and Farah Mendlesohn’s categories of fantasy, Neverwhere © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. A. Weinstock, A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96458-0_3

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was explored as a portal-quest fantasy that introduces a secondary fantasy world—London Below—in which the impossible is commonplace; the comic plot structure of the novel was observed in which Richard Mayhew arrives at a satisfactory answer to the question of who he is and where he belongs; and the proposition was entertained that the impossible aspects of the secondary fantasy world, combined with Richard’s successful negotiation of the challenges presented by them, tended to evoke wonder from readers (at least from those who have enjoyed the novel and its adaptations). Neverwhere was then considered more closely as a portalquest narrative conforming in significant ways to the stages of the Hero’s Journey as popularized by Joseph Campbell, suggesting, if not the template’s universality, at least the continuing fascination it exerts. This chapter will extend the previous chapter’s conversation by exploring other ways that Neverwhere participates in fantasy narrative traditions and trends. It will begin by examining Gaiman’s playful use of language in the novel with a focus on his attribution of actual referents corresponding to the names of London Underground stops, but also extending as well to his use of symbolism, allusion, and other extensions or manipulations of meaning. From there, this chapter will then consider Neverwhere in relation to two notable trends in contemporary fantasy: the urban fantastic and what we might refer to as “rogue” angels. Looking at Neverwhere in relation to these trends can help us see how fantasy works in general and Neverwhere in particular are inevitably involved in larger dialogues with related works and are both responsive to and influential on broader cultural trends. Among the aspects of Neverwhere that stands out most immediately is, of course, Gaiman’s wordplay. First and foremost within the novel, this is associated with attributing actual personages and entities to London Underground stops—having an angel at the Angel station, a smith with a hammer at Hammersmith, an Earl holding Court at Earl’s Court, black friars at Blackfriar, a bridge of night at Knightsbridge, a street that goes down at the (disused) Down Street station, and so on. Gaiman’s wordplay in the novel, however, extends beyond this to symbolic names such as Door and Lord Portico, and to his playful attribution of different origins to familiar phrases such as the “mind the gap” announcement cautioning London commuters to take care as they board subway trains. Where Underground stops are concerned, Gaiman’s attribution of real-world corollaries for place names involves creating what we might consider a form of “folk etymologies.” A folk etymology is a kind of

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retroactive attempt to explain the origin of a word or phrase. Technically, a folk etymology is “the transformation of words so as to give them an apparent relationship to better-known or better-understood words” (“Muskrat”). This sometimes happens when native speakers of one language adapt a word from another—a case in point is the English word “muskrat.” While it might seem plausible to suppose that the creature got its name because of a rat-like appearance and musky smell, the word actually is an adaptation from the Algonquian language word musquash (“Muskrat”). The word was “adjusted” by English speakers, who then later assumed (incorrectly) that the name was coined by English language speakers to designate a musky rat-like creature. Gaiman’s approach to place names in Neverwhere for the most part doesn’t suggest the misperception and appropriation of foreign words, but does playfully propose retroactive explanations for names of places, which have then been subject to a kind of “semantic bleaching” in which that specific association has faded over time. Gaiman then reverses this bleaching process through a form of linguistic “hypostatization” that personifies the name, reconnecting the word to its occulted origin (on hypostatization as the reverse of concept-formation, see Lipka, 16). There is a bit of variation in this process—for example, the Blackfriars area of London hosting the Blackfriars station was in fact the location of a medieval Dominican priory, so the connection is historical rather than invented, while recasting Knightsbridge (the London Underground stop) as “Night’s Bridge” adds a pun, playing on the homonyms “knight” and “night”; nevertheless, the principle remains the same: Gaiman invents a spurious—but seemingly logical—origin for the name of the Underground stop, proposes that this origin has been forgotten over time, and then reestablishes the connection for the reader by way of Richard, who is repeatedly surprised to discover a literal referent for station names. Gaiman does something similar with Door’s name, Lady Door Portico (as well as with those of her family, who all share the portal theme: her father, Lord Portico; her mother, Portia; her sister, Ingress; her brother, Arch). Similar to the Earl at Earl’s Court, the Angel Islington at Angel, the black friars at Blackfriars, and so on, Door is a kind of personification, although in this case of both a function and a thing. Not only does her name reflect her ability to open things—her name indexes what she does—but it also reflects her function within the narrative—what she is. In her first encounter with Richard, she acts as the portal effecting Richard’s transition from the universe of London Above to the universe

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of London Below. She both opens or creates doors and serves as one herself. Like Door, Hunter’s name, too, signifies her nature—it is what she is and what she does. Personifying forces of the universe and aspects of human existence is a notable feature of Gaiman’s writing in general. Preceding Neverwhere, Gaiman’s Sandman comics were wholly based on this concept—at their center are “The Endless,” incarnations of Dream, Death, Destiny, Desire, Destruction, Delirium, and Despair. American Gods pits old gods—gods from established belief systems including Odin and Loki from Norse myth; Anansi from African folklore (as per the title, also important in Gaiman’s Anansi Boys ); Thoth, Anubis, and Bast from Egyptian mythology; Czernobog from Slavic myth, and so on—against new gods, which are personifications of modern forces, such as Media, Technical Boy, and Mr. World (the God of globalization). Door, the character in Neverwhere, finds her parallel in Gaiman’s Stardust in Wall, the name of the town in which the protagonist, Tristran, grows up—the town takes its name, not surprisingly, from the wall that separates the human world from that of Faerie. Central to Stardust is also the personification of the fallen star, whose name in human form is Yvaine. As in the Sandman comics, Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book features the personification of death in the form of The Lady on the Grey, while The Ocean at the End of the Lane involves the Hempstocks, three magical women who are arguably aspects of the Triple Goddess: maiden/mother/crone (see Monique). An interest in myth—how myths are created and the functions they perform—is thus a bridge spanning Gaiman’s career. Indeed, he has spoken explicitly at various points about his relationship to and understanding of myth. In a 1999 article setting the stage for American Gods, Gaiman noted, “My interests have taken me, whether I wanted them to or not, into the realm of myth, which is not entirely the same as the realm of imagination, although they share a common border” (“Some Reflections,” 54). He then outlined a theory of myth, comparing it, interestingly, to compost: Myths are compost. They begin as religions, the most deeply held of beliefs, or as the stories that accrete to religions as they grow. And then, as the religions fall into disuse, or the stories cease to be seen as the literal truth, they become myths. And the myths compost down to dirt, and become fertile ground for other stories and tales which blossom like wildflowers. Cupid and psyche is retold and half-forgotten and remembered

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again and becomes Beauty and the Beast. Anansi the African Spider God becomes bre’r Rabbit, whaling away at the tar baby. New flowers grow from the compost: bright blossoms, and alive. (55)

Reflecting on the Sandman comics, Gaiman then added that they were “an attempt to create a new mythology—or rather, to find what it was that I responded to in ancient pantheons and then to try and create a fictive structure in which I could believe as I wrote it. Something that felt right, in the way that myths feel right” (56). Fourteen years later, Gaiman reprised this sentiment as ventriloquized through the narrator of The Ocean at the End of the Lane who comments that “I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were” (53). In 2017, this interest in myth found expression through Gaiman’s book Norse Mythology, which is a retelling of stories from Norse myth. Neverwhere is less directly invested in world myth than some of Gaiman’s later novels, but it shares the structure of myth as outlined in the Hero’s Journey and the process of hypostatization—the tracing back of a place name or general concept to a specific entity or event. As in the Sandman comics, Neverwhere is arguably engaged in the process of myth creation, inventing stories to explain how London Underground stops got their names (making use, one might add, of the literal compost of the London sewers!). The mythic structure of Neverwhere is part of the novel’s richness— the way it exceeds the confines of a singular story by using an established narrative framework to tell a familiar tale in a new and entertaining way. Another, more deliberative method through which Neverwhere connects itself to the deep history of storytelling is via the process of literary allusion—references both explicit and subtle to literature, fairytale, and popular culture. Here again, Gaiman’s playful use of names is central. The character Lear who busks in the Underground takes his name from Shakespeare’s King Lear. The name is in one sense ironic, since to find a King as a street performer would be surprising; in another sense, however, it reflects King Lear’s distressed state for much of Shakespeare’s play as he contends with madness and the perfidy of supposedly loyal family and supporters. When Lear is then given a tune that charms passersby by the Marquis de Carabas (a reel the Marquis attributes to “Merlin’s master Blaise” [139]), the referent point is the tale of the Pied Piper. For his part, the Marquis takes his name from the fairy tale Puss in Boots in which the Marquis de Carabas is the beneficiary of the eponymous cat’s

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ingenuity. Lamia, the vampiric Velvet who guides and then seeks to dine on Richard’s energy is an allusion to the vampiric creature dating back to Greek mythology and immortalized in Keats’s poem, Lamia (1820)— Gaiman will reuse her name for the villainous witch in Stardust. While her roots are ancient, that she uses a “mock Bela Lugosi” accent to reference Tod Browning’s 1931 version of Dracula (279) and that she later alludes to The Wizard of Oz when she sarcastically quips that the Angel Islington can give Hunter brains and her a heart (287) suggests she is conversant with pop culture references. On a comic note, the name of Dunniken, the ostensible leader of the Sewer Folk is an obscure word for outhouse (reflecting, of course, how he smells), while the names of the Black Friars, including Brothers Sable and Fuliginous, are all adjectives for black, dark, or dusky. The use of allusion, like hypostasis, is an important component of Gaiman’s storytelling, and is present to varying degrees in many of his works. As suggested by Neverwhere, these intertextual references range from mythology and folklore to fairy tales, literature, and popular culture. In some cases, as in his short stories “Snow, Glass, Apples” and “A Study in Emerald,” intertextuality is entirely the point. “Snow, Glass, Apples” (1994) is a creative retelling of Snow White from the perspective of the Evil Queen, while “A Study in Emerald” (2003) is a mash-up of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective Sherlock Holmes with the fiction of twentieth-century American horror writer, H. P. Lovecraft (Lovecraft’s work is also alluded to in a number of other Gaiman short stories, including “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar”). The title, “A Study in Emerald,” is itself an allusion to Doyle’s 1887 Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet. While these stories can be enjoyed on their own, the intended effect requires one to comprehend how Gaiman has manipulated his source material. Intertextuality—the way the meaning of one text is shaped its interconnections with others—is similarly central to Gaiman’s 2013 The Sleeper and the Spindle, in which he intertwines Snow White with Sleeping Beauty adding a contemporary feminist twist. Returning to Neverwhere and its playfulness with language as regards place names in particular, a very specific form of literary indebtedness present in the work is Gaiman’s participation in an established tradition of wordplay associated with fantasy humorists such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Norton Juster, Roald Dahl, Douglas Adams, and Terry Pratchett among others—especially in their writings for children. In the interview with Gaiman appended to this study, he notes that the idea of there being

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literal referents corresponding to Underground names was provoked by a game he played as a child. “I would look at all of these names,” he explains in relation to the game, which took as its focus the London Underground. “Oxford Circus, Earl’s Court… And I’d wonder. If there was a circus at Oxford Circus? Who the Earl was, and what his court was like?” He relates the origin of Neverwhere’s conceit as well to a novel by British author G. K. Chesterton called The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)—itself a kind of fantasy work set in alternate future London that, like Neverwhere, includes literal referents corresponding to the names of some parts of London. There are, for example, shepherds at Shepherd’s Bush—Gaiman acknowledges this debt to Chesterton in the first of two epigraphs to Neverwhere. Beyond inspiration from Chesterton, however, Gaiman’s playful approach to names in Neverwhere connects him with a rich tradition of primarily British fantasy writing, generally for children, that similarly foregrounds language, often in humorous ways. Among the points of reference for Neverwhere are the works of Lewis Carroll—notably Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Roald Dahl’s writings for children such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth (1961), and Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books. All of these works are portal-quest fantasies in which a character starts off in a world resembling our own before shifting into a bewildering and wondrous secondary fantasy world and, in each, language and its use are foregrounded in various ways. Carroll, of course, is famous for nonsense writing, such as his “Jabberwocky” poem included in Through the Looking Glass; however, his work is also filled with personifications and puns, such as presenting the Queen of Hearts as an anthropomorphized playing card and having the Mock Turtle explain that his time spent on his studies diminished each day because they are called “lessens” (so he invested less and less time). Like Carroll, both Dahl and Adams were fond of inventing silly sounding words such as “fluckgungled” (to be in a hopeless situation) from Dahl’s BFG (1982) or “pan-galactic gargleblaster” (a cocktail that packs a punch) in Adams’s Hitchhiker series. As noted in chapter one of this book, among Gaiman’s earliest works was a guide to Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide and Adams’s influence is apparent in the occasional absurd description or off-hand dry remark. In some respects, however, the closest analogue to Neverwhere is Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, in which, as in Neverwhere, the

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protagonist enters a fantasy world of hypostases and personifications. Milo in Juster’s novel, starts off in a world that mimics our own; however, when a map of “The Lands Beyond” and a small tollbooth mysteriously arrive, he sets off in his toy car on a journey into a secondary fantasy world that takes him through the Doldrums to such places as Dictionopolis, Digitopolis, and the Mountains of Ignorance and ultimately to rescuing the princesses Rhyme and Reason with the assistance of the “watchdog” Tock, whose body includes an alarm clock. Along the way, he literally eats his words and encounters various other personified concepts, such as the Humbug, the Dodecahedron, and a castle in the air. The Phantom Tollbooth is a children’s book that quite obviously takes language as its central focus—among its lessons are that learning can be fun and that rules must be sensible (see Brown). Its strategy for conveying these themes, however, is akin to Gaiman’s in Neverwhere—surprise and humor evoked through the literalization of figures of speech and personification of concepts in a fantasy world that operates according to logic different from that which governs the world we know. Richard and Door find their parallels in Milo and Tock, and London Below resonates with The Lands Beyond, as sets of characters in both novels move from place to place on the way to their goal, introducing the reader to a fantasy land in the process. Gaiman’s Neverwhere thus is part of a particular fantasy tradition in which absurdity, nonsense, and wordplay are used to surprise and amuse as they highlight the differences of the secondary fantasy world from the primary world of the narrative. As noted above, hypostatization is a characteristic of myth and folklore in general in stories that seek to explain how something achieved the name it has by tracing the name back to some legendary figure or event. Similarly, personification and the literalization of figurative concepts are frequently elements of myth, folktales, and fairytales that tend toward allegory, using symbolic elements to convey a larger meaning, moral, or message. Playfulness with language can thus function as a form of estrangement for both protagonists and readers as new or unexpected meanings focus attention on conventional understandings. Such works end up, at least to a certain extent, taking language itself as a focus, exploring where meaning comes from and how it is shaped. Beyond a focus on names and language use, Neverwhere can also be considered in light of two other increasingly prominent fantasy trends: the urban fantastic and the “rogue angel.” As Paul March-Russell explains,

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familiar fantasy franchises such as the Lord of the Ring s and Game of Thrones tend to condition us to think of the fantasy genre as a “pastoral” one featuring “a medieval landscape filled with knights riding out on quests, enchanted woodlands and isolated castles” (March-Russell)— aspects of what Brian Attebery characterizes in Strategies of Fantasy as formula fantasy (see Chapter two). The fantasy subgenre called urban fantasy, however, departs from this model by importing elements of pastoral or epic fantasy into an urban setting. Originating in the nineteenth century, such works responded to the development and conditions of large urban centers and often shaded toward Gothic horror, representing the city as a kind of labyrinth with a monster (or several) at its center. As its name suggests, urban fantasy is a category of fantasy that involves an urban setting. In his contribution to Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James’s The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (2012), Alexander C. Irvine argues that urban fantasy narratives come in two forms: narratives in which a “more or less recognizable city … is revealed to be in touch with the realm of Faerie, or some magical realm” (201) and stories in which the city itself is a creation of fantasy. Together with works such as Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates (1983), Megan Lindholm’s Wizard of the Pigeons (1986), Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks (1987), and China Miéville’s King Rat (1998) and Kraken (2010), Neverwhere, Irvine notes, is an example of the former category and features several of urban fantasy’s characteristic features: “the fantastic pocket universe [a universe within another], the sense of alienation from city life that creates a desire that … only the encounter with the uncanny can satisfy; and the flight from the city in the end” (205). Urban fantasy works that create fantasy cities rather than imbuing an existing city with the supernatural or otherworldly include M. John Harrison’s Viriconium novels (1971– 1984), China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen (2001), and K. J. Bishop’s The Etched City (2003). Stefan Ekman extends the conversation about urban fantasy by highlighting the role of the “unseen” in urban fantasy works, which plays out in three different ways. First, the setting is labyrinthine or subterranean, obscuring one’s view. This can involve bewildering twists and turns as a character attempts to negotiate maze-like streets ending up lost in mysterious parts of the city or underground tunnels. Second, urban fantasies call attention to “social outcasts we consciously look away from” (“Urban Fantasy,” 463). “These stories,” writes Ekman, “focus on the

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outcast and marginalized, showing us what we do not want to see. The cast, often including the protagonists, of urban fantasy can be drawn from people beyond or on the margins of society” (“Urban Fantasy,” 465). And, third, such works bring to light fantastic beings and forces that typically escape notice. “By introducing the supernatural into accounts of modern settings,” explains Ekman, “the text become suffused with ideas of keeping something hidden, out of sight, Unseen” (“Urban Fantasy,” 463). Arno Meteling proposes that, “above all it is the notion of spatiality that characterizes urban fantasy” (68); such narratives, he proposes, are focused on movement and transitions from one place to another. However, the juxtaposition of the magical with the mundane also interestingly is very much about time as “past and present meet … often in conflict” (Ekman, “London Urban Fantasy,” 380). In his analysis of urban fantasies set in London, Ekman proposes that “The history of London becomes intertwined with, and a source of, the fantastical events of the stories, and the fantastic becomes an aspect of the temporal” (“London Urban,” 384). Time in such works is often plotted on a vertical axis: to go down is to go back in time. Hadas Elber-Aviram relates this to archeology: “whether set in a real city made fantastic, or in a fantastic city that alludes to a real one, urban fantasy almost invariably follows an archaeological pattern of revelation whereby suppressed material evidence from the past opens up a portal into the secret history of the metropolis” (2). Urban fantasy works in this way often suggest the persistence of a past that continues to impinge upon the present in unseen but powerful ways. The discontinuities of space and time introduced within urban fantasy narratives then result in the creation of what scholars, after philosopher Michel Foucault, have referred to as “heterotopias.” As elaborated by Foucault, a heterotopia is a kind of liminal space or world within a world that mirrors the outside world while also disturbing it. Examples of heterotopias include cemeteries, brothels, prisons, and carnivals— places where behavior that is outside the norm and/or something that might disturb us is kept out of sight. Places that bring together objects or elements of differing times and/or spaces can also be considered heterotopias (see Foucault). In the same way that Neverwhere “reproduces the basic structural elements of portal-quests almost like a checklist” (Baker 474) and similarly hews closely to the general structure of the Cambellian Monomyth,

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it is also exemplary of urban fantasy. In keeping with Ekman’s discussion of the “unseen,” Neverwhere transports its protagonist down into “the sewers and the magic and the dark” (126). London Below is presented as a kind of maze—and literally has a labyrinth at its heart; those who exist in London Below (even when above ground) are the people “who fell through the cracks in the world” (126)—those in the real world we prefer not to see and from whom we turn away; and, of course, Richard’s foray into London Below reveals that supernatural creatures exist and that magic is real. The movement in Neverwhere, as Meteling addresses, is certainly from place to place; at the same time though, Richard’s movement down into the sewers is also back in time—or, more accurately—as signaled by the novel’s title, into a kind of temporal heterotopia where Roman legionnaires and nineteenth-century “pea-souper” fogs (229) and angels as old as creation coexist. Indeed, the deeper Richard goes into London Below, the more unsettled linear time becomes. His journey takes him to the labyrinth, “a place of pure madness … built of lost fragments of London Above: alleys and roads and corridors and sewers that had fallen through the cracks over the millennia, and entered the world of the lost and the forgotten” (308). And when he emerges on the other side, after Islington and Croup and Vandemar are defeated, his path home takes him to “London as it had been perhaps three thousand years ago, or more, before ever the first stone of the first human habitation was laid upon a stone” (350). London Below is essentially the Freudian unconscious of London Above, the repository for forgotten histories and repressed beliefs. In some respects, Neverwhere the novel is like London Below: a heterotopia where different fantasy threads and traditions converge. That Gaiman makes it work, combining the exotic with the comfort of the familiar, is a testament to his artistry. While there are certainly other threads one could tug at here to demonstrate the novel’s and Gaiman’s investment in the histories of fantasy and myth, space only permits one other example: what we may refer to as the “rogue angel” plot. This storyline certainly isn’t new—examples include the Christian Bible and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667); however, as Brian Attebery outlines in his Stories About Stories: Fantasy & the Remaking of Myth, angels in the twenty-first century “are everywhere: in TV series, movies, popular songs, church windows, and comic books; on greeting cards, T-shirts, motorcycles, and knickknack shelves” (141)—and, of course, in popular fiction.

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Attebery’s perspective on the function of angels in popular culture generally accords with Victoria Nelson’s position on the cultural prominence of fantasy in general: It allows for a kind of “low level” conversation about religion. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Nelson proposes in The Secret Life of Puppets that human beings have a kind of innate desire to believe in the “transcendent”—a realm of invisible spiritual forces that exists beyond the material plane. However—despite the fact that many people really do still believe in this—Nelson proposes that in our current skeptical age, the “transcendental has been forced underground” (viii) and we “now turn to works of the imagination to learn how our living desire to believe in a transcendent reality has survived outside our conscious awareness” (viii). Put succinctly, Nelson argues that fantasy is an important means through which “we as nonbelievers allow ourselves, unconsciously, to believe” (vii). The religious impulse that used to be satisfied directly through participation in organized religion now finds expression through fantasy representations of other worlds and supernatural entities. Unlike Nelson, Attebery acknowledges that many people, even in the twenty-first century, do believe in things like angels and demons, and his take on the popularity of angels doesn’t presume some unfulfilled unconscious desire for religiosity—in part because that religious inclination seems to be very much conscious and on the surface. Attebery’s position is instead that “fantastic literature”—and, by extension, film and other forms of angelic representation—“functions as an arena within which diverging formulations of angels—and the worldviews they imply— are negotiated” (Stories 141). Indeed, fantasy narratives involving angels are less “low level” than low stakes since fantasy, by not making any truth claims, can “take on powerful themes without incurring sanction” (Stories 141–142). “In the guise of escapist entertainment,” Attebery continues, “contemporary fantasy offers multiple formulations of the divine, the supernatural, prophecy, and the origins and ends of the world—all elements of traditional myth” (Stories 142). Attebery’s discussion then goes on to consider different categories or “strands” of “angel belief” as expressed in twenty-first century American popular culture. Gaiman’s Neverwhere, with its antagonist the Angel Islington, participates in this contemporary fantasy trend. Islington within Gaiman’s novel is revealed at the end to have been the mastermind behind the death of Door’s family and is attempting to use Door’s special abilities to help it

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reenter Heaven, from which it has been exiled after having been responsible for the sinking of Atlantis some 40,000 years ago—an act for which it feels no contrition. Islington’s villainous nature is on full display when, its motivations for this act of “justice” mocked by the Marquis, it “cracks”: “It was as if the lid had been pulled off something dark and writhing: a place of derangement and fury and utter viciousness; and, in a time of scary things, it was the most frightening thing Richard had seen. The angel’s serene beauty cracked; its eyes flashed; and it screamed at them, crazy-scary and uncontrolled, utterly certain in its righteousness, ‘They deserved it ’” (325). Far from being angelic in the sense of exceptionally virtuous and kind, Islington is represented as demonic and insane. In this, Gaiman’s angel joins a “host” of other “rogue” angels either with actively malicious campaigns or who just refuse to play by Heaven’s rules, including Christopher Walken’s angel Gabriel in Gregory Widen’s The Prophecy (1995), the insubordinate angels in Kevin Smith’s Dogma (1999), Tilda Swinton’s Gabriel in Francis Lawrence’s 2005 adaptation of the graphic novel Constantine, some of the angels in the long-running television series Supernatural, the violent angels in Susan Ee’s Penryn & the End of Days series—and, of course, the angel Aziraphale in Gaiman’s collaboration with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens (1990). For his part, Gaiman, in the interview included in this volume, has addressed this trend as part of making things interesting: “if you are going to create an angel, then they’re going to be morally compromised because, otherwise, they’re going to be a bit dull.” This is no doubt true, but the forms that the moral flaws take are quite telling about contemporary anxieties and desires. Two in particular stand out: self-righteousness and anti-authoritarianism. Self-righteous angels are invariably antagonists in contemporary works and reflect a deep-seated suspicion of religious zealotism and a distaste for the arrogant assertion of social privilege, the suppression of individuality, and the assumption of deference on the part of presumed social inferiors. Islington falls into the self-righteous category, as does Tilda Swinton’s Gabriel in Constantine. In Neverwhere, we learn that Islington took it upon itself to “punish” Atlantis for unspecified transgressions—and was, in turn, punished itself for its hubris. Gabriel in Constantine seeks to unleash the Antichrist, ushering in the end times, to chasten humanity and remind us of our privilege in being the children of God. In each case, the angel, perfectly convinced in the righteousness of its actions,

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acts in an unsanctioned way that is perceived from the human perspective as destructive and insane. Anti-authoritarian angels, in contrast, are often represented favorably in modern fantasy, and for similar reasons: They reflect a contemporary distaste for unthinking obeisance to authority, the suppression of individuality, corporate hierarchy, and byzantine bureaucracy. Gaiman and Pratchett’s Aziraphale falls into this category, as do the human-allied angels in Supernatural —notably Castiel (played by Misha Collins). Good Omens and Supernatural are indeed connected in having “rogue” angels “disobey orders” as they seek to head off the apocalypse. Regina Hansen’s analysis of Supernatural thus seems to apply equally to Good Omens as each seeks “to undermine hierarchy and privilege free will over obedience and subordination to narrative determinism” (21). Beyond perhaps responding to a deep-seated desire to believe in a transcendent reality over and above the material world, angels in literature, film, and popular culture—because they are associated in the popular imagination with obedience and hierarchy—turn out to be perfect vehicles to express a contemporary system of values that privileges individuality and empathy and disdains haughtiness, hierarchy, and selfishness. As Gaiman suggests, angels of untinctured virtue are boring. “Good” angels are those who do not simply follow orders when they seem hurtful or illogical; “bad” angels either mindlessly follow orders, regardless of who gets hurt, or, consumed by unbridled arrogance, seek to execute on their own some kind of scheme to purify or punish humanity. Angels, such as Islington in Neverwhere, in this way reflect very human—and contemporary—values and concerns. Gaiman’s incorporation of the rogue Angel Islington is thus a way in which his work participates in the zeitgeist —the spirit of the times. His composition of an urban fantasy narrative is a modern contribution to a more developed subgenre of fantasy with roots stretching back to the nineteenth century, while his use of wordplay and personification connect him to an established tradition of fantasy humor. More broadly, the portal-quest structure and parallels with the Cambellian Hero’s Journey template entrench Neverwhere even more fully in the history of the fantasy genre. In these ways, the work is both responsive to its moment and participates in well-established traditions of fantasy writing.

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Works Cited Attebery, Brian. Stories About Stories: Fantasy & the Remaking of Myth, Oxford University Press, 2014. ———. Strategies of Fantasy, Indiana University Press, 1992. Baker, Daniel. “Within the Door: Portal-Quest Fantasy in Gaiman and Miéville,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 27, no. 3, 2016, pp. 470–493. Brown, Maryn. “Making Sense of Nonsense: An Examination of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth as Allegories of Children’s Learning,” The Looking Glass, vol. 9, no. 1, 2005. Ekman, Stefan. “London Urban Fantasy: Places with History,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 29, no. 3, 2018, pp. 380–401. ———. “Urban Fantasy: A Literature of the Unseen,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 27, no. 3, 2016, pp. 452–469. Elber-Aviram, Hadas. “‘The Past Is Below Us’: Urban Fantasy, Urban Archaeology, and the Recovery of Suppressed History,” Papers from the Institute of Archaeology, vol. 23, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–10. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–27. Gaiman, Neil. American Gods, William Morrow, 2001. ———. Anansi Boys, HarperCollins, 2005. ———. Coraline, HarperCollins, 2002. ———. The Graveyard Book, HarperCollins, 2008. ———. Neverwhere. Author’s Preferred Text Edition, [2006], Headline Publishing Group, 2013. ———. Norse Mythology, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. ———. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, William Morrow, 2013. * A Note on The Sandman comics: The original run consisted of 75 issues published from January 1989 until March of 1996. They were published by DC comics; starting with issue 47, they were published under DC Comics’s Vertigo imprint. The 75 issues were subsequently collected together and published in twelve volumes. ———. “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar” in Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman, William Morrow, 1998, pp. 145–156. ———. The Sleeper and the Spindle, HarperCollins, 2015. ———. “Snow, Glass, Apples” in Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman, William Morrow, 1998, pp. 325–339. ———. “Some Reflections on Myth (with Several Digressions onto Gardening, Comics, and Fairy Tales),” in The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction by Neil Gaiman, William Morrow, 2016, pp. 54–63. ———. Stardust. William Morrow, 1999.

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Hansen, Regina. “Deconstructing the Apocalypse? Supernatural ’s Postmodern Appropriation of Angelic Hierarchies,” in Supernatural, Humanity, and the Soul: On the Highway to Hell and Back edited by Susan A. George and Regina M. Hansen, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 16–26. Irvine, Alexander C. “Urban Fantasy” in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 200–213. Juster, Norton. The Phantom Tollbooth [1961], Bullseye Books, 1988. Lipka, Leonhard. An Outline of English Lexicology: Lexical Structure, Word Semantics, and Word-Formation, 2nd edition, Max Niemeyer, 1992. March-Russell, Paul. “Urban Fantasy Novels: Why They Matter and Which Ones to Read First,” Sci Fi Generation, 23 May, 2020, https://scifigeneration. com/science/urban-fantasy-novels-why-they-matter-and-which. Meteling, Arno. “Gothic London: On the Capital of Urban Fantasy in Neil Gaiman, China Miéville and Peter Ackroyd,” Brumal: Revista de Investigacion sobre lo Fantastico, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, pp. 65–84. Monique. “Neil Gaiman’s Three Ladies: Two Titles that Reconfigure the Triple Goddess Archetype,” The Artifice, 25 July 2014, https://the-artifice.com/ neil-gaiman-triple-goddess-archetype/. “‘Muskrat,’ ‘Helpmate,’ and 6 More Folk Etymologies,” Merriam-Webster, n.d., https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/folk-etymology/lut estring. Nelson, Victoria. The Secret Life of Puppets, Harvard University Press, 2001.

CHAPTER 4

“Falling Through the Cracks”: Neverwhere as Social Commentary

Abstract This chapter considers the ways in which works of fantasy in general and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere in particular are never simply flights of fantasy divorced from the “real world,” but instead are inevitably shaped by and responsive to the circumstances of their production. They show us that the world as it is is not necessarily the way it must be. Neverwhere does this through its interconnected critiques of neoliberal capitalism and Western culture’s failure to care for those most at risk. This chapter accordingly focuses on the competing systems of value associated with London Above and London Below and the novel’s rejection of the logic that equates value with a corporate title and generous bank account balance. Keywords Capitalism · Economics · Fantasy · Ideology · Magical Markets · Neil Gaiman · Neoliberalism · Neverwhere · Social Critique · Values

Up to this point, this study has focused on contextualizing Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere in light of the fantasy tradition in literature in general, as well as several subdivisions of the genre. Chapter two considered how the novel meets Brian Attebery’s fundamental characteristics of fantasy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. A. Weinstock, A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96458-0_4

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(impossible content, comic structure, evocative of wonder), its portalquest structure, and how it closely maps onto the stages of the Monomyth as outlined by Joseph Campbell. Chapter three, in turn, considered the novel’s wordplay in relation to the tradition of fantasy humorists such as Lewis Carroll, Norton Juster, and Douglas Adams; addressed the novel as a contribution to the subgenre know as urban fantasy; and then noted how it participates in the fantasy trend of “rogue” angels. This chapter picks up where Chapter three left: with the ways in which works of fantasy in general and Neverwhere in particular, despite appearances to the contrary, are never simply flights of fantasy divorced from the “real world,” but instead are inevitably shaped by and responsive to the circumstances of their production. This is because, whether set in London Below, Narnia, Middle-earth, or a long time ago (but also somehow also in future) in a galaxy far, far away, fantasy works are nevertheless the product of particular authors in specific times and places and will therefore reflect their authors’s opinions, beliefs, experiences, and understandings of the world. In some cases, fantasy authors will intentionally use their works to comment or take a stance on particular issues; in other cases, fantasy works will unintentionally convey certain opinions or beliefs. Messages in fantasy works about real-world issues such as race or gender or class may be explicit or left open to interpretation. But there is no such thing as an apolitical fantasy story (or story in any other genre for that matter) because authors and readers neither write nor read in vacuum. We are inevitably situated readers, relating the messages we perceive in the narratives we consume—themselves produced by situated authors—to our understandings of the world. In a word, what we are talking about is ideology. Ideology refers to the set of beliefs to which an individual or a group subscribes. In some cases, these beliefs are conscious and clearly articulated—one can be a feminist, for example, who proudly proclaims that women and men should have the same access to education and opportunity; one can be a free-market advocate who strongly maintains that unrestricted competition among privately owned businesses is the best path to innovation and economic prosperity; and one can be a vegetarian who believes that animals shouldn’t be raised to be consumed. These are all more or less consciously held ideological positions. In other instances, ideological beliefs may be unconscious—ideas someone or a group just assumes to be obvious and true, such as that democracy is the best possible political system or that a family consists a husband, a wife, and their

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children. For many people, a tendency exists to distinguish “ideology” from “truth” and to assume that ideology is what other people, those who are brainwashed or deluded, have. We all, however, subscribe to particular ideological beliefs, some conscious and others unconscious— and ideology, in fact, is most powerful when it reflects what we simply assume to be true about the world without giving it much thought, because it seems to us natural or obvious. This is where fantasy comes in, because fantasy, and speculative fiction in general, including science fiction and horror, possess the potential to let us see aspects of our own world in a new light by showing us other worlds—and to show us that the world we know is always only one possibility among many. The world as it is is not necessarily the world as it has to be. At the same time, however, such works will inevitably also reinforce some existing ideological beliefs. This is what scholar Sherryl Vint refers to in relation to science fiction as “cultural work”—that is, the ways that works of literature either call into question or reinforce existing ideologies. In her very useful introduction to science fiction, Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed (2014), Vint proposes that what science fiction has the capacity to do is to allow us to “reflect critically upon our social world” (48) and to recognize aspects often presumed to be natural and fixed as in fact historical and mutable (49). It does this through a process of “estrangement”—that is, a kind of distancing of the reader from the represented world. “Sf,” writes Vint, “forces us to confront ideas and conventions that have been made to appear natural and inevitable, by giving us a world founded on other premises” (39). Of course, one hastens to add, it doesn’t have to do this, and works that call into question certain ideological aspects of our experience will almost inevitably reinforce others. Literary narratives that, for example, critique sexist thinking that relegates female characters to the roles of damsels in distress may at the same time reinforce the idea that heterosexuality is the only option by failing to represent any other forms of erotic desire—and what isn’t included in a text can be just as powerful as what is. Fantasy narratives arguably work in a way comparable to Vint’s discussion of science fiction. By estranging us from the world we know through the presentation of worlds that function according to different principles, fantasy works possess the capacity to provoke critical reflection on our familiar world—to let us reconceive nature as history and recognize that the way things are is not necessarily how they have to be. At the same time, as with all literary works, fantasy narratives can function as

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critique in certain respects while reinforcing existing ideological beliefs on the other. Put succinctly, fantasy works—as with other literary works— even when the truly seem “out of this world,” are inevitably ideological as they either reinforce or challenge established ways of thinking. Rather than being free-floating flights of fancy, fantasy works in this way always remain tethered to the real world. Turning now to Neverwhere, we can start with the obvious: Neverwhere’s interconnected critiques of neoliberal capitalism and Western culture’s failure to care for those most at risk. What the juxtaposition of London Above and London Below reveals is a system of values privileged by the novel that emphasizes personal integrity, bartering, “repurposing,” and an ethics of care over mercenary wealth accumulation. The avatar of capitalist London Above is wealthy industrialist, Arnold Stockton, “a many-chinned, self-made caricature of a man [who] owned all the Sunday papers that Rupert Murdoch had failed to buy” (58). Stockton is the crass embodiment of neoliberal capitalist values and is wholly lacking in decorum or sensibility. He wears his hair a little too long because it makes people uncomfortable and, Neverwhere’s omniscient narrator notes, “Mr. Stockton liked making people uncomfortable” (192). Presenting the refurbished angelus at the London Museum “Angels Over England” exhibition, Stockton explains to the crowd that the piece over time “Went rotten. Went bad” and that “it’s taken a shitload of money” to repair it. From the London Museum, it will then go to other venues “so it maybe can inspire some other little penniless bugger to start his own communications empire” (194). Stockton’s uncouth language and lack of manners reflect his crass, self-centered nature. Stockton’s system of values privileging mercenary accumulation of capital then has a ripple effect as those in his orbit who are impressed by or aspire to his wealth and privilege seek to ingratiate themselves to him. That’s the role primarily played by Jessica in the novel who, as Stockton’s assistant, is an exaggerated representation of his own values. She is a humorless social climber whose insecurities won’t allow her to tolerate a pet name (at least not from anyone over whom she can assert some authority) and who seeks to shape Richard to her own advantage: “Jessica saw in Richard an enormous amount of potential, which, properly harnessed by the right woman, would have made him the perfect matrimonial accessory” (12). In order to help him realize this “potential,” she picks out his clothes and buys him self-help books such as “Dress for Success and A Hundred and Twenty-Five Habits of Successful Men, and

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books on how to run a business like a military campaign” (12). And, of course, she coaches him on how to suck up to Mr. Stockton: “Now, when you’re talking to Mister Stockton, you must make sure you don’t interrupt him. Or disagree with him—he doesn’t like to be disagreed with. When he makes a joke, laugh. If you’re in any doubt about as to whether or not he’s made a joke, look at me” (24). Jessica as antithesis of the system of values underlying Neverwhere is, however, most clearly represented in the moment that she chooses being punctual for dinner with Mr. Stockton over helping a distressed person on the street. As she and Richard are hurrying to the restaurant, Jessica first chides Richard for giving a hand-out to homeless man, rushing him along. As she is coaching Richard on how to talk to Mr. Stockton, she then steps over a “crumpled form” on the sidewalk without a second thought (24). When Richard points out the bleeding Door to her, Jessica’s response is “If you pay them any attention, Richard, they’ll walk all over you. They all have homes, really” (24). The “they all have homes, really” remark is particularly telling as it goes beyond a simple lack of sympathy and reflects instead the paranoid suspicion that the poor and homeless are somehow “gaming the system” by either pretending to be in desperate straits when they are not or choosing feckless lives on the street over “honest labor.” This then functions as the justification for not helping those “penniless buggers,” as Stockton puts it, who need a hand because the poor are presumed to have the means at their disposal to solve their own problems if they simply chose to exert themselves, and handouts only reinforce their supposed bad decisions by undercutting the necessity to better themselves. However, to assume that, because an Arnold Stockton can to go from rags to riches everyone else can too not only absolves one from having to look at the poor, but conveniently disregards entrenched obstacles to social advancement such as racism and sexism, as well as mental illness and lack of education. When Richard protests Jessica’s callousness, Jessica’s response is even more telling. She thinks to herself: “Priorities: Richard had no priorities” (25). Then, as a “compromise,” she instructs Richard to call emergency services but not to give his name as he “might have to make a statement or something” (25), which would make them late. When Richard concludes despite Jessica’s protestations to assist Door, Jessica then issues her ultimatum, even as Richard walks away: “You put that young person down and come back here this minute. Or this engagement is at an end as of now” (25–26). “Priorities” is very much to the point here as the

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reader is intended to understand the irony of Jessica’s dismayed conclusion: It is not Richard’s priorities that need recalibrating, but Jessica’s. Just as Richard—having been mistaken for homeless himself in the book’s prologue—offers his umbrella to the old woman in the rain, he here again plays the Good Samaritan, stopping to assist someone in need, even at the expense of what he considers his future happiness. Richard’s “priorities” will not permit him to simply turn a blind eye to or step over someone who needs help—and these are the values that are supported by the book as a whole and are what allow him to succeed in the end. “You’ve got a good heart,” the old woman tells him in the prologue, adding that “Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go” (4). Richard’s journey in Neverwhere is one of those situations. Richard’s values, however, are shown to be out of step with those of London Above, where “turning a blind eye” to those in need is endemic—and this is what is at the heart of the novel’s critique of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism “refers to a system of economic and political thought that prioritises private ownership of infrastructure, deregulation of national economies and the extension of marketplace ideas to many domains of life, including education, healthcare and even personal relationships” (“What is neoliberalism?”). In the United Kingdom, it was associated with Margaret Thatcher, who served as Prime Minster of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990—and it provides the context for the BBC broadcast and concomitant novelization of Neverwhere in 1996. As characterized by George Monbiot, neoliberalism “sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that ‘the market’ delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning” (Monbiot). Under neoliberalism, Monbiot continues, Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. (Monbiot)

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Monbiot is clearly not a fan of neoliberalism—and neither is Neil Gaiman, at least as it is portrayed in Neverwhere. In the novel, Stockton is the winner in London Above, while all those unlucky individuals who have, as the Marquis de Carabas memorably puts, “fallen through the cracks” are the losers. “[T]here are two Londons,” de Carabas tells Richard. “There’s London Above—that’s where you lived—and then there’s London Below—the Underside—inhabited by those people who have fallen through the cracks in the world” (126). Those who have fallen through the cracks include those who have had the misfortune to become homeless and those, like the rat-speaker Anaesthesia, who have fled abusive situations. What Gaiman does in Neverwhere with London Above and London Below is to literalize the metaphor of the rich and poor inhabiting different worlds and to plot the social hierarchy of “winners and losers” on a vertical axis, with what neoliberalism construes as the winners in London Above and the losers in London Below. To be sure, in the real world the rich and poor do in fact live in different locations, frequent different destinations, and lead very separate lives; however, Gaiman exaggerates this chasm into a dimensional rift. Not just denizens of London Above, but the very world of London Above itself does not perceive the lost, the poor, and the misfits from London Below. After Richard comes to Door’s aid, not only can he not hail a cab, goes unrecognized by his coworkers, and is invisible while his apartment is shown to other potential tenants while he is in the bathtub, but his ATM card stops working. He ceases to matter not just to other people, but to the world of London Above itself. The novel then rejects this logic that equates the value of a person with their corporate title and checking account balance. This rejection is primarily embodied in the identification the reader develops with Richard and our recognition that his priorities—compassion, kindness, and loyalty—are ones worth pursuing rather than wealth, power, and status. However, the novel’s ideological values are also at times voiced by other characters. On the one hand, there is Old Bailey’s depressing assessment of the transformation of the City of London: “[N]o one lived in the City now. It was a cold and cheerless place of offices, of people who worked in the day and went home to someplace else at night. It was not a place for living anymore” (166). On the other hand, there is the security guard’s assessment of the hoity-toity crowd enjoying champagne and canapes at the opening of the “Angels Over England” exhibition at

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the British Museum: “it’s The Masque of the Red Death all over again. A decadent elite party, while civilization crumbles about their ears” (187). In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” aristocrats sequester themselves from a plague and entertain themselves in wanton fashion while a disease ravages the countryside. In London Above, the wealthy and famous gather at a museum exhibition a stone’s throw away from the desolate nighttime financial district, home only to the homeless. If Arnold Stockton is avatar of neoliberal capitalism and its mercenary values, the site of the “Angels” exhibition, the British Museum, is his rightful domain—the “repository,” notes the narration, “of so many of the worlds treasures, looted and found and rescued and donated over hundreds of years” (177). According to Elber-Aviram, the museum here is “reimagined as a citadel of upper-class pretentiousness” and exposed as “culturally hollow” (6) inasmuch as, as Julia Kula explains, “The past can be ignored in favour of what is visually beautiful; meaningful artefacts of the past testifying to the richness of tradition are replaced by meaningless objects” (55). This evaluation is certainly borne out by the description of the exhibition, attributed in the novel to a review in the London publication Time Out: The angel collection is “indiscriminate to the point of trashiness, but certainly impressive in its eclecticism” (188). It is, in short, a kind of hodge-podge of angels, decontextualized, drained of history, and combined as a sort of patchwork quilt of representations. The “looted treasures” part is important here, however, as the British Museum, with many of its artifacts taken from other countries and cultures, has increasingly been regarded in the dim light of British colonialism. While criticism of the British Museum as a “trope of empire” (Duthie 13) celebrating British imperialism and a site that acquired many of its treasures “through aggressive and opportunistic looting and plundering and by the fraudulent ‘purchasing’ of objects” (16) has become increasingly strident in the years since the publication of Neverwhere in 1996, Gaiman is nevertheless tapping into this debate by staging Stockton’s posh exhibition amid the looted, found, rescued, and donated holdings of the museum. The values of London Above are then contrasted by those of London Below, which operates according to a different economic logic based on trust and the barter system—trading in “securities” has a very different meaning in London Below, where there are no ATM cards or banks; instead of stock exchanges, there is trade in “favors.” When the injured

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Door summons the Marquis to render her aid, it is with the promise of a “really big favour” (47). The Marquis, in turn, calls in a favor from Old Bailey—one that has apparently been outstanding for twenty years (52)— when asking him to keep his life force safe, and then he finds himself in Old Bailey’s debt after being resurrected by him. When the subway busker Lear protests that the exchange of a subway train timetable for the magical reel that will charm the coins out of passersby’s pockets is unequal, the Marquis replies, “I suppose you would have to owe me, wouldn’t you?” (139)—the Marquis then accumulates another favor when he comes to Lear’s aid with the counter charm. Favors as a form of currency and exchange—especially when limited to verbal agreements between two individuals—depend on trust, and London Below is marked by a confidence in personal integrity where favors and one’s word are concerned absent from London Above’s world of lawyers, contracts, and courts to enforce them. While there are certainly dissembling villains present in London Below, such as Islington and, to a certain extent, Hunter, for favors to function as a form of currency, general confidence must exist that promises made will be kept—this suggests a kind of collective agreement with consequences for violation, perhaps similar to the kind of excommunication suggested for those who violate the truce that governs the floating market. The exchange of a favor for information or material goods is a specific form of the general economic system that governs London Below: the barter system. In contrast to the capitalist system that prevails in London Above, in which money is used as a medium of economic exchange and the intention is always to maximize profit—exchange in London Below is direct. The Marquis will solicit information from Old Bailey in exchange for clothes; Richard will later do the same at the market. “That’s how things work down here. We swap stuff,” Anaesthesia tells Richard (99), showing him her necklace. Although there is a reference to slaves being sold as a commodity at the market (111), absent from the vaguely medieval setting of Neverwhere is anything suggestive of middleclass shop, factory, or landowners who profit off the labor or rent of others. The contrast between the governing economic logics of London Above and London Below is highlighted by Gaiman’s inspired idea of hosting the floating market in Harrods, one of the largest and most famous department stores in the world. (Among the aspects of the BBC series

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Gaiman disliked was the relocation of the market to London’s decommissioned Battersea Power Station after Harrods denied the request to film in the store). As of 2010, Harrods employed some 4000 people in 330 departments and attracted over 15 million customers annually (“History of Harrods”). For the financial year 2019–2020, the Harrods group, of which the department store is a part, generated 607 million British pounds in profit (“Gross profit”). What Gaiman does in the novel is to transform this mecca of capitalism into a magical medieval marketplace in which individual venders hawk and trade their often exotic or surprising wares according to the logic of direct exchange. The magical marketplace—sometimes referred to as a “bazaar of the bizarre”—it should be noted, is itself an established trope of fantasy fiction and generally functions to establish the exotic otherness of the secondary fantasy world. Traceable back at least to Christina Rossetti’s nineteenth-century poem, Goblin Market (1862), contemporary analogues range from Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books to the market in Clive Barker’s fantasy novel Arabat (2002) and to the Troll Market in film Hellboy II: The Golden Army (dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2008). Gaiman himself will revisit this trope in Stardust. The “otherness” of the magical marketplace often involves not just imaginary creatures and exotic or magical objects but, as in Neverwhere, the revaluation of familiar objects. As Richard enters the market, the carnivalesque atmosphere contradicts what one would expect from a posh department store like Harrods: “It was pure madness … It was loud, and brash, and insane, and it was, in many ways, quite wonderful. People argued, haggled, shouted, sang. They hawked and touted their wares, and loudly declaimed the superiority of their merchandise. Music was playing—a dozen different kinds of music, being played a dozen different ways on a score of different instruments, most of them improvised, improved, improbable” (109). Amid the smells of curries and spices and grilling meats, continues the narration, “stalls had been set up all throughout the shop, next to, or even on, counters that, during the day, had sold perfume, or watches, or amber, or silk scarves” (110). In place of these familiar luxuries, however, the independent venders of the marketplace are selling items both surprising and impossible—and all extremely unlikely to be encountered in a department store. Among the surprising items are “repurposed” ones that themselves are an implicit rebuke to the “planned obsolescence” logic of capitalist London Above. One woman is selling rubbish: “Junk!” she screams.

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“Garbage! Trash! Offal! Debris! Come and get it! Nothing whole or undamaged! Crap, tripe, and useless piles of shit. You know you want it” (110). Other stalls are selling steampunkish “jewelry made from what looked like the valves and wires of antique radios” or “old clothes patched, and mended, and made strange” (111). Later in the book, Old Bailey will bargain at the market with the Sewerfolk for the body of the Marquis. Nothing goes to waste in London Below, including that which itself is considered waste in London Above. The surprising diversity of goods and services being sold at the market is then matched by a similar diversity among the market’s population. “Richard,” the narration explains, tried to pick out distinct groups: there were the ones who looked like they had escaped from a historical reenactment society; the ones who reminded him of hippies; the albino people in grey clothes and dark glasses; the polished, dangerous ones in smart suits and black gloves; the huge, almost identical women who walked together in twos and threes, and nodded when they saw each other; the tangle-haired ones who looked like they probably lived in sewers and who smelled like hell; and a hundred other types and kinds… (111–112)

Amid the stalls selling dreams and nightmares, lost things, and magical hands of glory are dwarves, furry giants, and the vampiric Velvets, as well as those auditioning for the role of Door’s bodyguard including The Fop With No Name and Ruislip, “a huge Rastafarian who looked like nothing so much as an obese and enormous baby” (115). The heterogeneity of the market’s wares is matched by the multiculturalism of its patrons, all interacting within the constraints of the binding marketplace truce. If the essence of London Above is in some ways captured by the British Museum, then the essence of London Below is embodied by its inverse: the floating market. Like the British Museum, the market brings together a remarkable assortment of objects, but not for the purposes of aesthetic admiration or helping instill “culture” into visitors but rather for exchange, use, and enjoyment. And absent entirely at the floating market is the kind of pretentiousness—and close-mindedness—that marks the crowd present at the opening of Arnold Stockton’s “Angels” exhibition. Whereas the rich, white crowd at the British Museum sips champagne and chats as a string quartet plays—and tacitly agrees to ignore the miraculous disappearance of Door and Richard through the angelus because

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such things have no place in their experience—no such airs are put on in the floating market, which is earthy, raucous, and suffused with the marvelous. Gaiman thus “flips the script,” so to speak, in his juxtaposing of the angel exhibition and the floating market by satirizing what is typically regarded as “culture”—museums, classical music, champagne, formal wear—and the whole system of value on which the privileging of those things is based, and preferring instead a noisy, dirty, but sincere and open world of craftsmen and independent merchants and laborers. It is worth noting that the multiculturalism of the marketplace extends within the novel to all of London Below. While Gaiman’s protagonist, Richard, is a white man, two of the main characters, the Marquis and Hunter, are black, as are the Black Friars. In general, the racism of London Above does not seem replicated within London Below, which is marked by a range of somatic diversity. Similarly, the novel makes efforts to avoid reinforcing traditional gender roles by including two assertive female characters: Door and Hunter. While Richard does come to Door’s aid initially and is the one to survive The Ordeal to obtain the key, it is Door who commissions the false key and, in the end, expels Islington, Croup, and Vandemar. And while Hunter turns out to be a turncoat, it is nevertheless notable that the most famous hunter in London Below and the most formidable bodyguard is a black woman. In this, the novel playfully foregrounds its own undercutting of stereotypes by having Richard initially mistake Hunter for a prostitute. As a representative of the “real world,” Richard here reflects conventional ways of thinking about gender. That he is comically wrong is another way in which the secondary fantasy world of London Below “forces us to confront ideas and conventions that have been made to appear natural and inevitable, by giving us a world founded on other premises,” as Vint says of science fiction. To be fair, despite its magic—and magical multiculturalism—London Below is certainly no paradise. Although it is easy to forget at times, it is dark, dirty, damp, smelly, and dangerous. And, although it isn’t explored to any great extent in the novel, part of London Below’s vaguely medieval character is its division into contentious factions and fiefdoms—when Door wakes up in Richard’s apartment near the beginning of the novel, among her first questions to him concerns his allegiance: “Whose barony is this?” she asks him. “Whose fiefdom?” Indeed, an initial red herring within the text concerning the death of Door’s family is that it was a consequence of his political desire to unite London Below. When Door accesses her father’s video diary, the entry shared with the reader is one

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lamenting social stratification: “what cripples us, who inhabit the Underside,” speaks her father, “is our petty factionalism. The system of baronies and fiefdoms is both divisive and foolish” (96). Although some share his desire to unite London Below, he continues, some would prefer things to stay the same and, indeed, some would seek to sharpen antagonisms. In the same way that the Angels exhibition in the British Museum finds its London Below counterpart in the floating market, Arnold Stockton as avatar of neoliberal capitalism arguably finds his inverted reflection in the Earl as the representative of London Below’s vaguely medieval political organization and economy. Complete with his court jester, wolfhound, falconer, and aged courtiers, the elderly and somewhat senile Earl, ruler of the Underground, endlessly circles London in his private train, complete with “thronelike carved wooden seat” (150) and private library of items lost on the subway. The Earl helps Door by explaining how to reach the Angel Islington but, as embodiment of displaced system of governance, also is emblematic of the fact that “time in London Below had only a passing acquaintance with the kind of time [Richard] was used to” (108). Past and present coexist in London Below, which in some ways functions as London Above’s evolutionary unconscious—a sealed pocket of time where the past still persists. After the defeat of Islington, Croup, and Vandemar, Richard returns to his life in London Above to find his situation markedly improved over how he left it. He receives a promotion and a new office at work. With new-found confidence, he demands compensation for the fact that his former apartment was rented to another tenant and his personal belongings disposed of and ends up with a penthouse suite. Jessica wants him back and is even content to be referred to as Jess, but Richard declines. He has transformed into a winner within the economy of London Above but, in the novel’s clearest rejection of neoliberal ideology, he turns his back on this life. His rejection is framed as a desire for excitement. He can envision how his life will progress: “he would marry the girl from Computer Services, and get another promotion, and they would have two children, a boy and a girl, and they would move out to the suburbs…” (365). His co-worker Gary tries to convince him there is nothing wrong with predictability and stability. “Give me boredom,” he tells Richard. “At least I know where I’m going to eat and sleep tonight. I’ll still have a job on Monday” (368). However, having had a taste of adventure and magic in the sewers, Richard can’t shake the feeling that there is more to life. “Haven’t you ever got everything you ever wanted?” he asks a

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homeless woman, “And then realized it wasn’t what you wanted after all?” (370). And with that, he scratches the outline of a doorway onto a wall and leaves the world of London Above, presumably for good, with the Marquis. In the end, getting everything you ever wanted, the novel makes clear, isn’t good enough if that everything consists entirely of material success as a cog in the neoliberal machine of contemporary capitalism. Richard is certainly seeking something more than predictability and safety. However, in returning to London Below, he is also rejecting everything that Arnold Stockton and those cut from his cloth like Jessica represent. He is rejecting economic stratification and the idea that there will inevitably be winners and losers; he is rejecting the idea that some people simply don’t matter and should be allowed to be invisible and fall through the cracks; he is rejecting the racism and sexism and ableism and culture of conformity of London Above. The novel, of course, gives Richard the option to reject these things—which is why it is a work of fantasy. He can draw a door on the wall and walk out of the world of trickle-down economics and representative democracy in which not everyone is truly represented into a steampunkish world nostalgic for a time that actually wasn’t particularly great for average people. He can walk out of time into the neverwhere of London Below. In doing so, however, he lodges a complaint about the state of the world with the reader, who doesn’t have Richard’s luxury of leaving it all behind. The novel as a whole thus asks us—in the way that speculative works often do—to reconsider the present state of things and to contemplate other possibilities. This is how estrangement and ideology function in fantasy worlds. By showing us other worlds, we are asked to reconsider how our world is and how it might be otherwise.

Works Cited Duthie, Emily. “The British Museum: An Imperial Museum in a Post-imperial World,” Public History Review, vol. 18, 2011, pp. 12–25. Elber-Aviram, Hadas. “‘The Past Is Below Us’: Urban Fantasy, Urban Archaeology, and the Recovery of Suppressed History,” Papers from the Institute of Archaeology, vol. 23, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–10. Gaiman, Neil. Neverwhere. Author’s Preferred Text Edition [2006], Headline Publishing Group, 2013.

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“Gross Profit of Harrods Limited Worldwide from 2011/12 to 2019/20,” Statista, 11 May 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/589785/harrodslimited-gross-profit/. “History of Harrods Department Store,” BBC News, 1 May 2010, https://www. bbc.com/news/10103783. Kula, Julia. “The Image of Contemporary Society in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere,” New Horizons in English Studies, vol. 1, 2016, pp. 51–59. Monbiot, George. “Neoliberalism—The Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems,” The Guardian, 15 April 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot. Vint, Sherryl. Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed, Bloomsbury, 2014. “What Is Neoliberalism?” The Week, 11 June 2018, https://www.theweek.co. uk/94184/what-is-neoliberalism.

CHAPTER 5

Fidelity and Innovation: Adaptation, Transmediality, and the Neverwhere Megatext

Abstract Neverwhere presents a very interesting case study in transmediality since it started off as a television series; it was expanded into a novel that was then lightly adapted for American readers and then subsequently revised again by Gaiman in the “author’s preferred edition”; it has been published as a comic book series as well as issued in an illustrated edition; and it has also been adapted as a radio play. These different forms first of all let us consider the process of adaptation, both in terms of the elements of story that are transportable and the different qualities or affordances of different media; this then lets us think about how the different versions of the same story combine into something we might call the Neverwhere “megatext.” The notion of megatext, appropriated from science fiction studies, then lets us explore how all the different versions of a work participate together in creating the meaning of that work. Keywords Adaptation · Comics · Fidelity · Megatext · Neil Gaiman · Neverwhere · Transmediality

The preceding chapters of this study have focused on Neverwhere in its novel form, exploring its connection to the fantasy genre, its use of language, and its politics. This chapter, in contrast, will adopt a more © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. A. Weinstock, A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96458-0_5

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expansive approach to Neverwhere, considering it in light of adaptation and what is referred to as transmediality. Transmedial storytelling, as explained by media and popular culture guru Henry Jenkins in his 2006 study Convergence Culture, refers to a story that “unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” (97–98). Neverwhere presents a very interesting case study in transmediality since it started off as a television series; it was expanded almost immediately into a novel that was then lightly adapted for American readers and then subsequently revised again by Gaiman in the “author’s preferred edition”; it has been published as a comic book series as well as issued in an illustrated edition; and it has also adapted as a radio play. (In addition, there have also been at least three separate stage adaptations of the book.) These different forms first of all let us consider the process of adaptation, both in terms of the elements of story that are transportable and the different qualities or affordances of different media; this then lets us think about how the different versions of the same story combine into something we might call the Neverwhere “megatext.” The notion of megatext appropriated from science fiction studies, then lets us explore how all the different versions of a work participate together in creating the meaning of that work. Neverwhere is particularly interesting to consider in terms of adaptation because of the complexities of its genealogy. There is often a tendency to think about adaptation as a process that begins with a literary “source text” that is then adapted into a different medium—usually film or television. The Harry Potter films are a case in point—they each began life as a book that was then adapted individually for film. Adaptations from novels—which can often feel “thin” in comparison to their source texts because, by necessity, they typically offer a condensed version—are then frequently assessed by audiences, especially those with particular affection for the novels, using fidelity to the source text as a yardstick against which to measure the success of the adaptation: the common assumption being that an adaptation should remain as “faithful” as possible to the text being adapted. Those who study adaptation remind us, however, that adaptation is in fact a complicated process of transposition because different media have different qualities or affordances. While this may seem obvious, reading a book is not the same as watching a movie, and both experiences are different from listening to a podcast or playing a videogame. Put differently: Literature can do some things well that cinema and television do

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poorly or can’t do at all and vice versa. Literature, as Brian McFarlane explains, is a conceptual system—it gives us words that we mentally translate into images, sounds, sensations, and so on (see McFarlane, Novel to Film, esp. Chapter 1). This presents the reader with a certain amount of freedom to “fill in the gaps” and to imagine what isn’t stated directly, including aspects of how the characters and setting appear. However, the reader’s progress through a written text is rigidly linear—line by line, page by page, chapter by chapter—and the author controls our focus. Film and television, in contrast, are perceptual systems of communication that beam images and sound at us directly and package a significant amount of information concisely—what an author might spend several pages describing can be conveyed immediately in a single film or television shot. As a result, when watching film or television, we have less liberty to imagine what characters and setting look like than we do when reading, and visual mediums make use of a range of devices to evoke feeling and constrain interpretive possibilities. Soundtrack, camera angles, lighting, sets, editing, special effects, and so on all conspire to manipulate our focus, feeling, and understanding of what is happening—so, for example, when the protagonist starts down the dark stairs toward the basement of the isolated house and ominous music plays for the viewer, anxiety is evoked as we know to anticipate danger. That said, unlike literature, where the words on the page are all we get, viewers of film and television do have a certain amount of liberty to direct their focus onto whatever is in the frame. We can take in the room, if we choose, rather than focus on the character at the center of the frame. Comparing literature to film, McFarlane also notes that film has a hard time with first-person perspective and can’t do past tense at all. A truly first-person point of view in film or television wouldn’t show us the narrator, only what they see—and to know what they are thinking, we’re generally dependent on dialogue or voice-overs (15–16). Rather than first person, which is common in literature, what film and television primarily deploy is the equivalent of a third-person omniscient point of view, with the camera serving as the narrator. Rather than telling us what a character is doing, seeing, thinking, and so on, the camera as narrator shows us. Where tense is concerned, in literature, past tense is signaled by past tense verb forms as in this line from the prologue of Neverwhere: “[Richard] had begun the evening by enjoying himself: he had enjoyed reading the goodbye cards, and receiving the hugs from several not entirely unattractive young ladies of his acquaintance” (1, emphasis

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mine). Film and television, while able to signal that something is a flashback or set in the past, lack a comparable grammatical past tense—there is no way to film in past tense. Whatever is depicted becomes present tense for the viewer (see McFarlane 29). In these ways, literature differs from visual media, and these differences complicate the adaptation process. A word also needs to be said here about length. While there is no inherent restriction on the length of a film, practical considerations such as scheduling and audience attention spans tend to limit commercial releases to somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 min. Novels tend to average around 100,000 words (some websites hosted by presses or literary agents suggest a little less; few suggest more. See, e.g., Masterclass). This works out roughly to about 300 pages depending on font, font size, and spacing—Neverwhere, in the author’s preferred edition, comes in at 372 pages. Novels thus usually contain more content—scenes, events, dialogue, characters, different perspectives, and so on—than can conveniently be packaged in a two-hour film, so decisions need to be made at that start of the adaptation process about which content to include and which to exclude, and from what perspective to present events. Much to the dismay of fans of the source text being adapted, this may compel deletion of minor characters, the focusing of attention on one character in particular, omission of some scenes or events that are less important to plot development and/or would be difficult to represent visually, and so on. After these preliminary decisions have been made about what to include, the next step is determine how they will be represented, which entails decisions about casting, blocking, lighting, sets, camera angles, special effects, and all the rest—all of which must be considered in relation to budget and time constraints. The situation with adapting a literary source text to a television series rather than a single film or program is comparable when it comes to considering what content to include and how to represent it, although a series obviously will permit more content from the source text to be included. The question instead becomes how to package content into individual episodes such that each episode has its own “arc” to sustain audience engagement. All of this brings us back to the vexed issue of using fidelity to the source text as a yardstick to evaluate quality. Robert Stam puts the question succinctly: “fidelity to what?” (15). What is it, exactly, that an adaptation should be faithful to? To the plot of the source text? To the way the author describes the characters? To the setting of the book? To

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the author’s “intentions,” whatever those may be? To the “spirit” of the work, whatever that is? Without getting too deep into the weeds of adaptation studies (and it is a weedy—if interesting—subject. Those inclined should see not just McFarland and Stam, but also Hutcheon, Leitch, Beja, and Sanders, among others), and bearing in mind that different mediums have different qualities, strengths, and weaknesses, it’s fair to say that “faithful” adaptations are not always the most interesting, and more imaginative interpretations or updatings can sometimes be very successful. Returning at last to Neverwhere, we have an unusual instance in which a media property began life as a television series and then was adapted into novel form before then being adapted to comic book and radio play forms. Even more unusually, the novel form came out virtually coincident with the television series—the television series premiered on September 12, 1996, and the novel was released on September 16 of the same year. Additional complexity is added by the fact that there are then two lines of filiation—the TV series and its initial novelization served as the basis for the comic book series, published staring in June of 2005; in contrast, the BBC radio play version, first broadcast staring in March of 2013, takes the “author’s preferred text” version of the novel, published in 2006, as its basis. While all of Neverwhere’s current forms are generally congruent in terms of plots, there are some interesting differences that help illustrate the ways that medium shapes the message. As addressed in chapter one of this study, the novel version of Neverwhere was created by Gaiman to address what he perceived as some of the deficiencies of the BBC series—among them some decisions regarding character accents, that the first floating market was moved from Harrods in the original script to a decommissioned power station after permission to film at Harrods department store was refused, that the Beast of London was not particularly intimidating, and the general look of a series shot on video with the intention of post-production manipulation to make it look more like a film that never occurred (for those interested in the specifics, the series was shot with what Leader describes as a “claustrophobic 4:3 aspect ratio,” with the intention of applying a “film filter” later that never happened. See Leader). The novel generally retains the dialogue of the series and follows the plot quite closely, although it adds a few scenes, including the prologue with Richard’s last night in Scotland, the scene of Richard being attacked by a smoke-like monstrosity during the “Mind the Gap” scene on the subway platform, and Serpentine’s reclaiming of Hunter’s body; where it primarily differs is in the

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inclusion of a significant amount of narration that more fully describes London Below—suggesting that what bothered Gaiman the most about the BBC series was its inability truly to render an impressive fantasy world. Put simply, everything in the novel is darker, bigger, dirtier, and more dangerous—which foregrounds the budget and special effects limitations that constrained the BBC series rather than any inherent limitations on television or film. The Knightsbridge scene is an interesting case in point because the producers of the series were forced to confront several questions: how to represent a large interior space, how to visually represent darkness, and how then to depict the nightmares it brings. The series’s decision is not to try to represent physical passage across the bridge; instead, the series substitutes a kind of grainy, surreal montage of aspects of the Beast of London and Richard fighting with it, edited together with close-up shots of Anaesthesia screaming. The same scene in the novel version is developed to a much greater extent, emphasizing more fully the expansive interior space of London Below and the bridge and the almost tangible feel of the darkness. As the bridge comes into view, the narration describes it as “a huge stone bridge spanning out over a vast black chasm, into the night. But there was no sky above it, no water below. It rose into darkness. Richard … wondered how something like this could exist, beneath the city of London, without everyone knowing” (99). As Richard crosses, he experiences the darkness as “something solid and real, so much more so than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth” (102). Descriptions of interior states such as this one are particularly challenging to represent visually. Something similar is the case with the representation of Down Street and the labyrinth at the heart of London Below. Working with its available budget and special effects, the BBC series has the Down Street elevator open to a board across a deep, if not particularly wide, chasm; after crossing, the characters then proceed down an impressive staircase with numerous 90-degree turns. Croup and Vandemar are waiting at the bottom and take Door captive, leaving Hunter, Richard, and the Marquis to battle the not-especially imposing Beast. Following Hunter’s demise and Richard’s success in her stead, the next shot has Richard and company entering Islington’s domain. The novel version develops all of this much more fully: The elevator that lets them off is hanging in mid-air “a few thousand feet above solid ground” (291–92). After walking for hours,

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Down Street (with a nod toward H.P. Lovecraft) ends “in a vast Cyclopean gateway—built of enormous rough stone blocks. Giants built that gate, thought Richard” (306). The labyrinth is “a place of pure madness. It was built of lost fragments of London Above: alleys and roads and corridors and sewers that had fallen through the cracks over the millennia” (308). And the Beast is “the size of an ox, of a bull elephant, of a lifetime” (313). In place of the claustrophobic feel of the BBC series, Gaiman’s novelization emphasizes the vastness of the world of London Below, which just seems to keep getting bigger as the characters descend further. One other change that the novel implements illustrating the difference between literature and, in this case, a television miniseries, is the deletion of introductory segments. Most of the BBC series episodes begin either with a character stepping forward to introduce themselves or with Richard quickly recapping events for the viewer against a glowing London Underground backdrop. These opening segments violate the “fourth wall” separating the hermetically sealed storyworld from the viewer as characters seem to address the viewer directly, providing information that helps orient the viewer. As such, the opening scenes are separate from the rest of the narrative. The novel version dispenses with this device; it is unnecessary, since the whole narrative is available to the reader (rather than waiting for the next episode) and the novel’s third-person omniscient narrator can supply information as needed. The novel version released coincident with the television series was then lightly edited for American audiences. The changes mainly concern language someone, somewhere was concerned might confuse Americans—so “idiot” is substituted for “wanker,” “elevator” is substituted for “lift,” “drugstore” for “chemist,” “flashlight” for “torch,” and so on. Some spellings, such as “grey” and “realised,” are Americanized, as are some British colloquialisms: For example, rather than using the expression “have kittens” to describe someone angry to the point of apoplexy, the American version substitutes “have a fit.” The American version, interestingly, also renders the word “marquis” in the Marquis de Carabas’s name with a lowercase M. There are, however, a handful of more substantive changes. Most notably, the American version omits a second prologue introducing Croup and Vandemar four hundred years before the start of the novel proper, burning a monastery and, apparently, eating a puppy. Also inexplicably deleted is a scene present in both the BBC series and the

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first British version of the novel in which the Angel Islington, anticipating the completion of its plan, sings the Irving Berlin song, “I’m in Heaven.” The author’s preferred version, published in 2006, is, as Gaiman explains in its preface, a combination of the original UK text and the US text (n.p.) and is presented to the reader as “a new … and definitive … version of Neverwhere, along with a headache for bibliographers” (n.p.). The preferred version does not restore the second preface featuring Croup and Vandemar, but it is appended at the end, along in some editions with a brief interview with Gaiman and—validating the novel as worth one’s time—reading group discussion questions, the presence of which now mark the historical significance and/or “quality” of a literary work, as one doesn’t invest time in serious discussion of a novel that doesn’t merit it. The adaptation of Neverwhere that introduces the most noticeable changes is the comic book version. Inspired by the novelization rather than the BBC series, the comic book adaptation was written by Mike Carey, who had worked on Lucifer—a spin-off of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics that itself has since been adapted for television. Carey is also known for being the author of The Girl With All the Gifts (2014)— both the novel and the screenplay adapted from it. (The film version, directed by Colm McCarthy, was released in 2016.) The artwork for the comic books is credited to Glenn Fabry, whose other works include the barbarian fantasy comic Sláine and the science fiction comic Judge Dredd. The nine-issue series began in June of 2005 and the individual comic books were then published together in one graphic novel volume in 2007. In Carey’s preface to the graphic novel edition, he addresses the differences between the comic book and the novel directly, foregrounding for the reader the specific qualities of each medium that complicate direct translation from one form to the other. According to Carey, “[T]he logistics of comics storytelling are very different from those of sequential prose.” “[M]ost noticeably,” he continues, “comics impose limits on dialogue, which meant that in many places Neil’s wonderful conversations had to be abridged or split up, and new dialogue had to be created to bridge new scenes and transitions” (n.p.). As Carey points out, comics typically have far less text than novels, with images often serving to convey information and advance the plot instead. Carey also condensed Neverwhere by omitting some secondary characters—notably Lamia, but also Lear and Serpentine—and, in perhaps the most significant alteration to

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plot, stages the first meeting between the Angel Islington and Door and Richard in a kind of psychic space rather than on the material plane. Carey additionally highlights the comic book version’s shift of perspective from the novel’s third-person omniscient narrative voice to firstperson from Richard’s perspective. “[I]n novels,” Carey explains, “the omniscient narrative voice has a long and honorable tradition and is so universal a convention that it’s become almost invisible” (n.p.). This was the case, too, in comics, notes Carey, until the 1980s when tastes shifted and one reason to avoid third-person omniscient is therefore to avoid the comic feeling dated. However, Carey continues, there were other motivations for the change as well—notably, that, for the story to work, we need to care about Richard and he is the character “best placed to allow us to see all [the] wonders and peculiarities” (n.p.) of London Below. Carey’s commentary in the preface concerning the shift in point of view arguably overstates the effect of this change a bit as what the comic actually gives us is a more cinematic form of first person. While it is true that the story is introduced as being narrated by Richard who is reflecting on past experience, as in a film we are shown Richard as he narrates, and the tense shifts from past to present as the story progresses. The initial structure, therefore, is akin to a kind of cinematic voiceover leading to a flashback shown from the camera’s perspective rather than any true first-person point of view. Carey ends his preface by highlighting a point central to this chapter: Adapting a narrative from one medium to another inevitably involves confronting medium-specific affordances, strengths, and weaknesses, and fidelity to the source text isn’t always the best yardstick to use when evaluating the success of the adaptation. One needs to bear in mind, according to Carey, “the enormous extent … to which any adaptation splits itself off from its source and becomes its own journey: its own answer to a set of questions that only formulate themselves as you set to work” (n.p.). Referring to a number of other adaptations, including Peter Jackson’s cinematic versions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series and Ridley Scott’s film version of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, released as Bladerunner, Carey describes them as “jazz riffs on their wonderful originals rather than straight translations.” And this is because “straight translation from one medium into another is both impossible and undesirable” (Carey n.p.). While the streamlining of plot and dialogue, and shift in narrative point of view, are notable, what stands out most immediately about the

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comic book adaptation is what is missing from the novel—the visuals— and these are both the strength and weakness of the comic book version. The comic book certainly succeeds where the TV miniseries comes up short: in conveying the sense of a vast interior world with a fearsome beast at its center. London Below in the comic book version is a sprawling space of crumbling architecture. The bridge at Knightsbridge, for example, is broad with an inky black sky above, and the Black Friars inhabit a complete cathedral that itself exists at the center of a kind of Roman amphitheater. Departing from both TV series and novel, Down Street is presented as an impossibly vertical street that must be descended by rappelling and the Beast of London at the bottom—quite unlike its representation in the BBC series—is truly a thing of nightmare. Most memorable about the comic book adaptation of Neverwhere, however, are the representations of the characters themselves, which reflect some bold, if questionable, decision making. In the BBC miniseries, the character of Door is played by actress Laura Fraser, who at the time of the series’s release, was 21 years old, but whose petite stature and youthful appearance, combined with loose-fitting and layered costuming, allow her to be construed as younger. In keeping with Gaiman’s novelization, Door is pointedly not presented as an alluring siren—in the novel, Door is referred to by Richard repeatedly as a “girl” when he first stumbles across her and Hunter thinks of her as “the child Door” (214)— although it’s not entirely certain what “child” means in a world where people seemingly can live for hundreds of years. In the comic book adaptation, however, Door stands out as a comic book heroine with comic book proportions. Gaiman, commenting on the comic book adaption, calls attention to this directly, noting that he is “Still not used to Door as a busty superheroine!” (sfx) (Fig. 5.1). Also of note are the representations of the Marquis and Anaesthesia. In both the BBC series and the novelization, the Marquis de Carabas is presented as a person of color—and, indeed, one of the more utopian aspects of London Below is that his skin color, like Hunter’s, appears not to be an issue—London Below certainly has its problems, but racism appears not to number among them. In the comic book version, the Marquis is bizarrely presented as a literally black man. Framed by long, white hair, his face is so dark as to be featureless, allowing his red lips, white teeth, and eyes to seem to float in a pool of ink. Even more bizarre is the rendering of Anaesthesia as having blue skin and bright orange hair. Dressed in thigh-high leather boots, short, frilly skirt, and tight tank top

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Fig. 5.1 Laura Fraser as Door in the BBC TV miniseries and her comic book counterpart

emphasizing her figure, she is, like Door, sexualized in ways the BBC series and Gaiman’s novel take pains to avoid (Fig. 5.2). Indeed, the comic book representations of Door, the Marquis, and Anaesthesia, while certainly striking, are also rather troubling because they run contrary to the prevailing political ethos shared by the BBC series and Gaiman’s novelization. As addressed in chapter four, Neverwhere highlights certain forms of abuse and neglect that occur in the real world and it pointedly plays against stereotypes in casting women and people of color in assertive roles: The legendary Hunter is a black woman; the most dynamic character, the Marquis, is a black man; and the true savior of London Below is Door. With the exception of Lamia and the Velvets, who are predators that intentionally deploy their sexuality to seduce their prey, the women of Neverwhere are not presented as sex objects. To present Door in the comic book as a statuesque superheroine whose boobs are threatening to burst free of the constraints of her bustier would seem to run contrary to Gaiman’s intent; more concerning though is that, in the novel versions, Anaesthesia is described as a “thin, bedraggled girl in her late teens” (76) who ended up in London Below because she was abused, likely sexually, by her aunt’s boyfriend. Rendering her

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Fig. 5.2 The Marquis and Anaesthesia in the comic book version

in comic book form as a hypersexualized exotic object for the male gaze completely undercuts the pathos of her backstory and mutes the social commentary associated with it—her blue skin in particular makes her a creature of fantasy rather than someone who “slipped through the cracks” of our world. Something similar is the case with the Marquis, who rather than being an assertive and dynamic person of color, is an imaginary creature—and one that seems much closer to a minstrel show character acting out a parody of blackness than an actual person of color. Put succinctly, the comic book version’s renderings of Door, the Marquis, and Anaesthesia seem to run contrary to the BBC series and the novel’s attempts to de-objectify women and people of color. The 2013 BBC radio play version of Neverwhere avoids these complications of representation of course by virtue of being auditory; the question then becomes one of how to build a world and convey action and character through sound alone. In this sense, the radio dramatization occupies

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an interesting middle ground between the conceptual system of literature and the perceptual system of film and television—the listener builds a mental picture of London Below and the characters through voice and sound effects, as well as non-diegetic music that creates atmosphere and mood for the listener. Reflecting the extent to which Neil Gaiman’s status within popular culture had been elevated since Neverwhere debuted in both miniseries and novel forms in 1996, the 2013 adaptation features the voice acting of many well-known film and television stars, including Benedict Cumberbatch as Islington, Christopher Lee as The Earl, Natalie Dormer as Door, David Harewood as The Marquis, Jon Glover as Lord Portico, Sophie Okonedo as Hunter, and Anthony Head as Mr. Croup. Familiarity with how these actors look then to some extent constrains how the listener imagines them to appear. The adaptation itself is generally faithful to the plot of the author’s preferred version of the novel; its deviations in large measure reflect the restrictions of the audio-only format: Door, for example, wonders aloud at how Arnold Stockton got so fat and the Sewerfolk, described as silent in the novel, are given a voice as they discuss their catch and barter with Old Bailey for the Marquis’s body. Because we cannot see these things, they need to be described by a character or voiced through dialogue. In some places, the radio play adds details to assist with creating a sense of London Below: The voices of the Black Friars are given a Jamaican lilt; during Door and Richard’s first meeting with the Angel Islington, Islington stretches his wings for the incredulous Richard and the listener hears the sound of them spreading; the reel the Marquis offers Lear, in an inspired decision, is a version of the “Lyke Wake Dirge” folk song included by Gaiman as an epigraph to the novel. The radio play’s only significant omission in terms of plot is the exclusion of the character Serpentine—after Richard and Door sleep off the Angel Islington’s potent wine from Atlantis, Richard actually voices his surprise that he isn’t hung over. Dialogue in the radio play is supplemented by both diegetic and nondiegetic sound. Diegetic sound is sound that exists within the storyworld, audible to the characters as well as the listener. In addition to the “Lyke Wake Dirge,” diegetic sound includes the chittering of rats, the cooing of birds, echoing footsteps, crowd noise at the floating market, the dripping and splashing of water, roars and crashes of the Beast of London, and wind when Door opens the door for the Angel. Non-diegetic sound

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within the radio play consists of soundtrack, which accentuates mood and primarily is deployed during scenes of intense emotion including the crossing of Knightsbridge and the climax of the narrative when Door opens the door for Islington. In this latter scene in particular, dialogue, rushing wind, and a bombastic pseudo-medieval soundtrack conspire to evoke an atmosphere of intense chaos and movement. The end result is something that feels cinematic, but that we, of course, can’t see. Sound is all we have to go on to construct our mental impressions of the characters, the action, and the world of London Below. One final Neverwhere adaptation requires some brief attention, and that is the 2016 illustrated edition of the novel. This version combines the author’s preferred edition with black and white pencil line illustrations by artist Chris Riddell, who is a prizewinning artist associated most immediately with children’s books and with political cartoons in the British newspaper, The Observer. Riddell had previously illustrated several other Neil Gaiman works, including The Graveyard Book (2008) and Coraline (2013). Very much in keeping with the style of nineteenthcentury artwork by John Tenniel—notable for his illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and what Alice Found There (1871)—Riddell’s detailed illustrations seem intended to a certain extent to revise the comic book representations of the characters. While still retaining a fantastical and, in some cases, grotesque character, they substitute darker and more expressionistic images for the comic book’s colorful excesses. The Marquis, notably, is represented as “normal” person of color (Fig. 5.3) and Door is desexualized (Fig. 5.4). Where Neverwhere is concerned, there is an understandable—and, indeed, justifiable—reason for privileging the author’s preferred edition of the novel as the “authoritative” one. However, the author’s preference for a particular version of their work need not be shared by readers, reviewers, or listeners. More to the point, because of its multiple, transmedial adaptions, Neverwhere is more than just a discrete, singular work. Michael Leader put it this way in 2013, “Now, let’s get this out of the way first: there is no single, true ‘Neverwhere’. Like its signature setting, a semi-mythological, hidden version of London that exists below the streets of Britain’s capital, Neverwhere [sic] is a story that has taken many forms” (Leader). What and how the text means to different individuals will depend on which versions of the text have been consumed and in what order. Those introduced to the comic book version first may have a

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Fig. 5.3 The Marquis as rendered in the illustrated edition

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Fig. 5.4 Door as rendered in the illustrated edition

hard time not seeing the Marquis as inhumanly black; those who started with the radio play may never be able to hear Islington in a voice other than that of Benedict Cumberbatch. Those who came to the text through the illustrated edition may forever see Door as girlish and with short hair. More to the point though, all the various forms that Neverwhere has taken combine into something we may wish to call the Neverwhere

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“megatext.” In science fiction studies, the notion of megatext describes the way a genre reuses certain tropes and devices, with later iterations referring back to earlier instances (see Vint, 57). One can talk, for example, about the Frankenstein megatext, in which “any created being in sf carries a trace of Frankenstein’s Creature” (Vint 57). My use of the term here is a riff on that understanding of the term. The idea is that all the individual versions of Neverwhere combine into one “mega” version that encompasses both similarities and differences—think of it, perhaps, as the dense site where parallel universes converge. The Neverwhere megatext thus brings together Gary Bakewell’s performance of Richard from the BBC series, James McAvoy’s dramatization of Richard from the radio play, the reader’s impression of Richard developed from descriptions in the novel versions, the comic book illustrations of Richard, and Riddell’s pictures of Richard in the illustrated edition. Richard is all these things at once, which is true as well for the rest of the characters, London Below, and the world of Neverwhere writ large. Neverwhere does not exist merely within the pages of a book or in one screen adaptation. It is rather all its versions combined. And, importantly, these different versions do not exist independently, sealed off from one another, but rather are locked in complicated gravitational orbits around one another as later adaptations establish both continuities with and divergences from earlier versions. Each new contribution to the Neverwhere megatext thus in some ways changes the earlier ones; the texts remain the same, of course, but their meanings and trajectories are altered by new intertextual relationships. Like London Below, the megatext is a kind of imagined space where past and present incarnations of the same text coexist and collide in productive tension. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere is not just a novel or TV miniseries or comic book or radio play; it is all of these, combined as well with not only other adaptations but the interpretations and associations and impressions, both shared and idiosyncratic, that readers and viewers and auditors bring to the text. In the end, we, too, adapt Neverwhere to our own needs and desires. Our own imaginations is where Neverwhere finally resides.

Works Cited Beja, Morris. Film & Literature: An Introduction, Longman, 1979. Carey, Mike. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere [graphic novel version], Vertigo, 2007. Gaiman, Neil. Neverwhere. First Edition. BBC Books, 1996.

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———. Neverwhere. American Edition. Avon Books, 1997. ———. Neverwhere. Audiobook Narrated by Neil Gaiman, HarperAudio, 2007. ———. Neverwhere. Author’s Preferred Text Edition, [2006], Headline Publishing Group, 2013. ———. Neverwhere. Illustrated Edition with Drawings by Chris Riddell, William Morrow, 2016. ———. Neverwhere. Radio Play. BBC Radio 4, 2013. ———. Neverwhere. Television Miniseries. BBC Two, 1996. DVD Boxset from A&E Home Video, 2003. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation, Routledge, 2006. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press, 2006. Leader, Michael. “Looking Back at BBC Two’s Neverwhere,” Den of Geek, 19 March 2013, https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/looking-back-at-bbc-twos-nev erwhere/ Leitch, Thomas, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, Oxford University Press, 2020. Masterclass. “Word Count Guide: How Long Is a Book, Short Story, or Novella?” MasterClass.com, 3 Sept. 2021, https://www.masterclass.com/art icles/word-count-guide#3-reasons-word-count-is-important-in-writing. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation, Clarendon Press, 1996. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation, Routledge, 2015. sfx. “Neil Gaiman on Neverwhere,” GamesRadar+, 23 April 2007, https://www. gamesradar.com/neil_gaiman_on_neverwhere/. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” in Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, Blackwell, Publishing, 2005, pp. 1–52. Vint, Sherryl. Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed, Bloomsbury, 2014.

CHAPTER 6

The Key

Abstract This brief concluding chapter to A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere introduces other approaches to the novel that could be pursued including psychoanalytic, queer theory, and postcolonial. It is also suggested that the novel could be more fully contextualized in light of its late twentieth-century historical moment and addressed from a fan studies perspective. Keywords Fan studies · Neil Gaiman · Neverwhere · Postcolonial theory · Psychoanalysis · Queer theory

In Neverwhere, the key sought by Richard Mayhew turns out to be “the key to all reality” (344)—it is a tool that can take Richard wherever he wants to go. In a sense then, the key is like a book: a tool that has the power to transport readers literally anywhere, from London Below to other galaxies, and from the distant past to the far-flung future. This brief study has sought to explore some of the ways that Neverwhere is the key to opening various doors: to the fantasy genre and certain fantasy trends, to comprehending how fantasy can function as social commentary, to contemplating the different affordances of various media and the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. A. Weinstock, A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96458-0_6

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complexities of adaptation. But, far from exhausting its subject, this book has left many doors still to be opened by the curious. To begin, there is certainly more close reading of the novel to be done using various lenses that highlight particular aspects of the text. There seems to me to be a queer theory approach waiting in the wings, for example, looking at the Marquis—especially as performed by Paterson Joseph who steals every scene he is in in the BBC miniseries—as well as Hunter, the Velvets, Serpentine, and even Croup and Vandemar. Similarly, a postcolonial approach to the text could be very productive, given how the novel takes as its subject the history of London, but seems to suggest a countercurrent to British ethnocentrism and imperialism. An eco-conscious or “green” reading of the novel is another approach that could be utilized, given the emphasis on the sewers. After all, as Mr. Croup remarks, “with cities, as with people … the condition of the bowels is all-important” (262). And, of course, there is always more to be said from a psychoanalytic perspective about what motivates the characters and what their words and deeds reveal about them. Analysis then could then expand outward. The structure, themes, conceits, characters, and the like could be explored first of all in relation to other works by Gaiman—this study gestures toward that a bit in chapter three when it notes Gaiman’s tendency to personify natural forces in a number of his works, but there is much more to be done here. One could explore how Gaiman incorporates aspects of myth more fully, for example, or how he portrays children and childhood. One could consider his representations of gender, race, sexuality, and their intersections in his works, or what his works have to say about twenty-first-century existence. A fuller consideration of Gaiman’s work and the process of adaptation is certainly also possible—one could compare the BBC Neverwhere miniseries, for example, to the Starz network’s adaptation of Gaiman’s American Gods, or look at Neverwhere together with the film versions of Stardust and Coraline. And then the next step is to consider how Gaiman’s work compares to fiction by other fantasy writers, past and present. Again, chapter three does a bit of this work in thinking about the urban fantastic and rogue angels, but all kinds of possibilities exist to extend this— comparing Gaiman’s London Below to other fantasy worlds, such as those of China Miéville, for example, or his “bizarre bazaars” to those in other works. Comparative studies can in fact be quite revealing as recurring themes, approaches, structures, devices, and the like suggest what cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams refers to as a “structure of feeling”—a

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shared, often unspoken understanding of the world at a particular time and place (see Williams). Considering Gaiman’s Neverwhere and other works more fully in light of their historical moment is another path that could be pursued. Such an approach would delve more deeply into not only Gaiman’s personal history, but the socio-political milieu in which he creates his works. How do things like global warming, for example, or wars in the Middle East, viruses or political demagoguery, social media and wealth disparity, and so on not only find expression, explicitly or implicitly, in Gaiman’s work but allow for the possibility of them in the first place? To use the language of chapter four, one could consider more fully the ideological presuppositions that inform Gaiman’s work—assumptions about how things simply are and how they could be otherwise. Yet another angle to be explored is what fans do with Gaiman’s work and how Gaiman interacts with his fans. The exhilarating and terrifying thing about being an author is that, if one is lucky, people will read your work—and in Gaiman’s case, they most certainly do! But beyond simply reading it, they form attachments to it and discuss it with others who share a similar affection. Some fans will then extend or revise those works through fan fiction, or create artwork based on the texts that reflect their impressions of the characters and scenes. Some fans may cosplay the characters at conventions and engage with the works in other ways, and this participatory activity inspired by the works is arguably part of the megatext too, feeding back and shaping understandings of the works. Living authors, for their part, will engage with their fans to varying extents. Gaiman, for example, has been very active on social media, responding to fan questions and requests. In a memorable—and widely circulated— social media post, Gaiman responded affirmatively to a student request for permission to refer to him by his first name. Interactions between Gaiman and his fans, as well as news stories and social media reports of his activities, help form a picture of him as an author, which to some extent also shapes the ways readers and viewers and auditors relate to his works (Fig. 6.1). Literary works, no matter the genre, contain worlds—a fact coincidentally signaled by Neverwhere’s unusual title, a portmanteau of “never” and “nowhere.” The meaning of such works is never exhausted as there is always more to say, other doors to open, and avenues to explore. And the meaning of the work is nowhere in particular because it is everywhere: in

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Fig. 6.1 Neil Gaiman responds to a Fan on tumblr

the complexities of language as words combine into sentences into paragraphs and chapters, in the many histories that inform the work and shape it, in the many forms the work takes on the page and screen and in the mind of the reader or viewer or listener. The magic of Neverwhere is, finally, the magic of the well-crafted novel that is much, much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Works Cited Gaiman, Neil. Neverwhere. Author’s Preferred Text Edition, [2006], Headline Publishing Group, 2013. Williams, Raymond. Culture & Society: 1780–1950 [1958], Columbia University Press, 1983.

Interview with Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman kindly responded to these questions in July of 2021. My thanks to Edwin Williamson for the transcription. 1. Neverwhere was published as a novel in 1996. Looking back on it from the vista of 2021, what stands out to you now about your first solo novel? If you were writing it today, is there anything you would change or do differently? The second half of that question is kind of impossible to answer because any book that you look at from a later time you would do differently because you’re not the person who wrote it, and you’re not in the circumstances in which you wrote it. What I mostly remember was … initially not wanting to do a novelization, as it were, because I wanted the show to be the thing for the same reason that I wouldn’t do a novel of Sandman. And then, being increasingly dissatisfied with the show and feeling that all of the things that were in the script that had made it interesting for me to write were no longer there on the screen. So, I committed to writing it. And writing a novel so that I could say to people, “This is what it’s meant to be like.” And the biggest thing that I would do differently is that I would give myself more time.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. A. Weinstock, A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96458-0

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I had the first draft of the book—the English, the novel that was published in the UK—I’m trying to remember if I had six weeks to write it in. Maybe … I may have had six weeks to write it. I definitely wrote the majority of it in a mad, week-long, maybe eight or nine-day long, stint in a little hotel somewhere in California. At points I was writing about 6,000 words a day which is much more than I normally ever write in a day. And then, the second draft was sort of the American draft where my publisher got to read the finished English novel and said, “Okay, this is the information that I need. And can you lose some jokes and things?” And so, another draft was done. And I think it was about another 12,000 words, but it also lost a few thousand words of any lines that were intended to be funny went away, and that frustrated me which meant that—at some point in the early 2000s, I think 2006? Somewhere like that. The author’s preferred text version came out, which put all the jokes back but kept the sort of second draft thing. So, if I were doing it today, I wouldn’t do it like that. I would give myself more time and get it to the point where I was satisfied and not have to write it all at a sort of white-hot speed. And at least I didn’t ever have to plot it. The plot was all there, and a lot of the dialogue was there. It’s a very odd way to build a book. 2. Since Neverwhere started as a teleplay for a BBC series that was then adapted into a novel, it presents an interesting case study in adaptation. How is it different moving from teleplay to novel rather than the reverse (which is more common)? Well, really, the dialogue exists for you, I guess. And all of the plotting work has been done. In my case, I got to describe a lot of things. And I described a lot of things because I was frustrated that they hadn’t been there in the BBC series. I got to dress people like I wanted them to dress, and I got people to look the way I wanted them to look. 3. Neverwhere shares with several of your novels the conceit of overlapping or adjacent worlds. What do you find particularly appealing about this prospect? And are there other through-lines you consider important that connect Neverwhere to your subsequent projects?

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I think, for me, Neverwhere was primarily a way, and the adjacent worlds in Neverwhere, were a way of making a simile rather more concrete. Which is just talking about the people who fall through the cracks. Talking about London and the homeless in a big city as if they live in another world to the people who are there. And that came about mostly because of the stuff, the work I was doing at the time with the English charity, Comic Relief. And I’d been talking to my friend Lenny Henry, who’d suggested that I could do a TV series. His line was: “Tribes of homeless people in London.” And I thought, “Well, actually—I don’t want to do tribes of homeless people because I know that I could make it feel really cool to be homeless in London. And I don’t a girl in Liverpool who’s being abused by her uncle to head for London because she knows it’s cool to live in the tribes of homeless people there.” So, I pushed it into fantasy, which allowed me to look at some of the ideas, but to worry rather less about people running off to find it. 4. In generations past, fantasy and science fiction were often (dis)regarded as appropriate primarily for younger readers. Why do you think speculative fiction (in various media) has assumed such a prominent position in contemporary culture? I think because we are at a time of flux. And we need all of the oracles we can get in a time of flux. For thousands upon thousands upon thousands of human years, very little changed. You got to live in the world that your parents did, and you got to live in the world that your grandparents did, and if you were talking about the world, it was normally to imply that you’d fallen away from some kind of Golden Age. Little changed for thousands of years. And then things started changing and changing and changing more. And now we hang on to straws in the wind. And they inform us. You say, “In generations past fantasy and sf were often regarded as appropriate primarily for young readers.” I’m not sure I ever was particularly in that world. And I’m sixty. For me, I remember growing up with the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line where they were reprinting Victorian books, Edwardian books of science fiction aimed very much at adults. Science fiction, while it is true to say that the Golden Age of science fiction is when you’re twelve, was intended, I always felt at least, as a

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literature intended for adults. I mean—I remember as a kid getting hold of the works of people like Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, J.G. Ballard, and knowing I was reading fiction intended for adults. This wasn’t for kids. But, still finding what I could find in it. 5. As a follow-up to the preceding question, what do you make of the contemporary ubiquity of morally compromised angels in fantasy media? I don’t really. I love angels. I love writing angels. And if you’re going to write a character, they’re going to be morally compromised because that’s what makes characters interesting. If you’re writing any kind of fiction intended for adults, or even for older children, characters are interesting as they have to compromise. And as they learn and as they shape themselves to the world that they’re in. So, if you’re going to create an angel, then they’re going to be morally compromised because otherwise, they’re going to be a bit dull. 6. To what extent do you feel that fantasy fiction can comment on social and political issues? I think fantasy fiction can always comment on social and political issues, and I think sometimes it’s at its most interesting commenting on social and political issues when it does it as fantasy. So, it gets to talk about something completely different. It sneaks in its social and political issues under the guise of something else. I love the number of people who point to Terry Pratchett’s essay on the economics of rich and poor people buying boots and what kind of boots they buy, and how quickly they have to be replaced, and how much money the poor people spend on boots as opposed to how much money the rich people spend on boots. And I love that people bumped into economic theory in a Terry Pratchett book. 7. Richard Mayhew in Neverwhere is a particularly interesting character in that his journey maps quite closely onto Joseph Campbell’s famous description of the “Hero’s Journey.” What do you think is the appeal of this pattern and do you think its appeal is universal?

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I don’t know, I’ve never finished reading Hero of a Thousand Faces. I was told I should read it and I read maybe the first thirty pages? Maybe the first forty pages? Then I thought, “Y’know, this is silly. Because if it’s true, I’ll do it anyway. And if it’s not true, then there’s no reason for reading it. And either way, I’m very happy without this thing in my head.” So, I loved The Masks of God, but I don’t think Neverwhere particularly maps onto The Masks of God. 8. Part of the fun of Neverwhere is its literalization of what we generally accept to be figures of speech. Was Lewis Carroll an influence of your approach in this respect and why do you think we delight in this kind of word play? We delight in this kind of word play because we are human. Was Carroll an influence in that? No, not particularly—G.K. Chesterton was. There’s a little passage in The Napoleon of Notting Hill where he takes a bunch of London place names very literally, and a speech is made talking about the shepherds of Shepherd’s Bush. And I just remember reading that as an, what? An eleven-year-old? And loving it. And thinking that that’s magic. At around the same time, I was playing a game. A board game at school. We would play this board game about traveling around the London Underground and I would look at all of these names: Oxford Circus, Earl’s Court,… And I’d wonder. If there was a circus at Oxford Circus? Who the Earl was, and what his court was like? And that literalization—I think—is where Neverwhere began for me. 9. Another of the delightful elements of Neverwhere is the floating night market that operates according to different economic logic. What do you consider the appeal of this conceit? Well mostly, if you’re going to create a society that exists in the cracks, you’re going to have to come up with an economy. Some kind of basic economy and some kind of basic economic theory, and it’s probably not going to exist on nominal and theoretical bullion reserves and the issuing of paper that promises somebody guaranteed by that bullion reserve. You’re going to have to figure out what people are trading. What gives things value. What makes the world go round, if it’s not money? And that

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was the starting point for me with Neverwhere. Going, “Well, let’s trade things. And let’s have fun with that.” 10. Lastly, what would you like students being introduced to your novel—and, through your novel, fantasy fiction more generally—to appreciate about fantasy fiction? That’s a lovely question. Because, really what I want them to do is enjoy it. I feel like any improving lessons that they get, any understanding of the fact that a good piece of fantasy is showing you the world that you know from an angle that you haven’t seen it from before, or that’s going to make you look at it differently from then on. That you’re making people think. That you’re making people reassess and reinspect their own lives to understand where the magic is in their own worlds. To understand, in some ways that they may not even be conscious about, that metaphors can be concretized. All of that feels secondary to wanting them to respond emotionally. Wanting them to have gone on a journey, and to have returned to their lives from the journey that they were on armed with tools they might not have had when they left. Whether it’s knowledge. Whether it’s an understanding of people. Whether it’s an understanding of the world. Whether it’s just been a break from the lives that they’re in. A small holiday that they might have needed. I’m good with all of that. The ways in which the fantastic in literature can actually be one of the most potent tools in a writer’s armory and the way that fantasy—and for me, at the end of the day, all fiction is fantasy because you’re talking about people who never existed doing things that didn’t happen very often in places that aren’t—is going to, I hope, change the reader. Just as the process of writing it, I trust, always changes the writer.

Index

A “A Study in Emerald”, 36 A Study in Scarlet , 36 Absurdity, 10, 38 Adams, Douglas, 6, 9, 10, 12, 36, 37, 48 Adaptation, 12, 20, 32, 33, 43, 64, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 79, 82, 86 Aiken, Joan, 20 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 37, 76 Allegory, 12, 38 Allusion, 10, 32, 35, 36 American Gods , 7, 11, 12, 34, 82 Anansi Boys , 7, 11, 34 Anaesthesia (character), 27, 53, 55, 68, 72–74 Angel, 2, 3, 8, 9, 12, 23, 28, 32, 33, 38, 41–44, 48, 50, 53, 54, 57–59, 75, 82, 88 Angel Islington (character), 8, 9, 28, 33, 36, 42, 44, 59, 70, 71, 75

Animals, 8, 48 Anti-authoritarianism, 43 Arabat , 56 Archeology, 40 Arnold Stockton (character), 2, 50, 51, 54, 57, 59, 60, 75 Audible (streaming service), 6, 75 Audiobook, 5 Aziraphale (angel), 43, 44

B Bakewell, Gary, 4, 79 Barker, Clive, 20, 56 Barter system, 54, 55 Batman: The Killing Joke, 6 Bazaar of the bizarre, 56 BBC, 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 52, 55, 67–70, 72–74, 79, 82, 86 Beast of London, 4, 5, 8, 9, 23, 27, 67, 68, 72, 75 Berlin, Irving, 70 BFG (novel), 37

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. A. Weinstock, A Critical Companion to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96458-0

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INDEX

Bible, The, 41 Bildungsroman, 7, 22 Bishop, K.J., 39 Blackfriar (station), 2, 3, 32, 33 British Fantasy Society, 6 British Museum, 10, 54, 57, 59 Browning, Tod, 36 Bull, Emma, 39 C Campbell, Joseph, 16, 25–28, 32, 48, 88 Capitalism, 50, 54, 56, 59, 60 Carey, Mike, 5, 70, 71 Carroll, Lewis, 9, 36, 37, 48, 76, 89 Castiel (angel), 44 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 37 Chesterton, G.K., 37, 89 Children, 7, 8, 21, 35–38, 43, 49, 59, 76, 82, 88 Class (social), 10, 21, 48, 58, 66 Collins, Misha, 44 Colonialism, 54 Comic book, 5, 6, 41, 64, 67, 70–74, 76, 79 Comic relief, 4, 87 Comic structure, 18, 48 Constantine (film), 43 Convergence Culture, 64 Coraline, 7, 11, 21, 76, 82 Croup, Mr., 3, 8, 10, 28, 41, 58, 59, 68–70, 75, 82 Cultural work, 49 Cumberbatch, Benedict, 5, 75, 78 Currency, 55 D Dahl, Roald, 36, 37 Danes, Claire, 7 DC Comics, 6 Death, 6, 8, 12, 26, 34, 42, 54, 58

Departure, 2, 25 Dick, Philip K., 71 Diegetic sound, 75 Discworld (series), 6 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 71 Dogma (film), 43 Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion, 6 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 36 Door Portico (character), 3, 33 Dormer, Natalie, 5, 75 Down Street, 9, 32, 68, 69, 72 Dracula, 36 Dream (character), 6, 16, 21, 34, 57 Duran Duran (band), 6 E Earl, The (character), 59, 75, 89 Earl’s Court, 2, 3, 9, 32, 33, 37, 89 Eco-consciousness, 82 Economics, 60, 88 Ee, Susan, 43 Ekman, Stefan, 39, 40 Elber-Aviram, Hadas, 40, 54 Endless, The, 6, 12, 34 Estrangement, 18, 38, 49, 60 Ethnocentrism, 82 F Fabry, Glenn, 5, 70 Faerie, 11, 22, 34, 39 Fan studies, 81 Fantasy, 3–5, 7–13, 15–24, 27, 28, 31, 32, 36–39, 41, 42, 44, 47–50, 56, 58, 60, 63, 68, 70, 74, 81, 82, 87, 88, 90 Fantasy content, 17, 48 Fantasy formula, 16, 17 Fantasy mode, 17

INDEX

Fantasy response, 17 Fantasy structure, 17, 18 Favors, 54, 55 Fidelity, 64, 66, 71 Film, 4, 7, 10, 42, 44, 56, 64–68, 71, 75, 82 Flanagan, Mark, 4 Floating market, 5, 27, 55, 57–59, 67, 75 Folk Etymology, 32–33 “Forbidden, The” (short story), 20 Foucault, Michel, 40 Frankenstein (creature), 79 Fraser, Lauren, 72, 73 Freud, Sigmund, 41 Fuzzy Set, 17 G Gabriel (angel), 43 Gaiman, Neil, 1–13, 18, 20–22, 31–38, 41–44, 47, 53–56, 58, 64, 67–70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 79, 82–85 Gender, 48, 58, 82 Genre, 9, 12, 15–19, 24, 28, 31, 39, 44, 47, 48, 63, 79, 81, 83 Girl With All the Gifts, The, 70 Global warming, 83 Goblin Market , 56 Gods, 11, 12, 34 Good Omens , 6, 7, 43, 44 Graphic novel, 6, 13, 23, 43, 70 Graveyard Book, The, 7, 11, 12, 34, 76 H Hammersmith, 10, 32 Hansen, Regina, 44 Harewood, David, 75 Harrison, M. John, 39 Harrods, 5, 55, 56, 67

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Harry Potter (character), 8 Harry Potter (franchise), 56, 64 Head, Anthony, 75 Hellboy II: The Golden Army, 56 Hellraiser Franchise, 20 Hempstocks (characters), 12, 34 Henry, Lenny, 1, 4, 87 Hero With a Thousand Faces, The, 25 Hero’s Journey, 7, 8, 12, 16, 24–28, 32, 35, 44, 88 Heterotopia, 40, 41 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 6 Homelessness, 4, 10, 11 Horror, 6, 18, 20, 36, 39, 49 Hume, Kathryn, 18 Humor, 5, 7, 10, 38, 44 Humphreys, Dewi, 4 Hunter (character), 10, 27, 34, 36, 55, 58, 67, 68, 72, 73, 75, 82 Hypostasis, 36 I Ideology, 48, 49, 59, 60 Immersive narrative, 20, 22 Imperialism, 82 Impossible, The, 17, 18, 23, 24, 32 Initiation, 25 Intertextuality, 36 Intrusion narrative, 19, 20 Irvine, Alexander C., 39 Islington (character), 8, 9, 28, 33, 36, 41–44, 55, 58, 59, 68, 70, 71, 75, 76, 78 J Jenkins, Henry, 64 Jessica (character), 2, 10, 11, 21, 22, 27, 50–52, 59, 60 Journalism, 6 Judge Dredd (comic book series), 70 Jung, Carl, 26

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Juster, Norton, 9, 36–38, 48 K Keats, John, 36 Key (plot element), 81 Knightsbridge, 9, 23, 32, 33, 68, 72, 76 Kula, Julia, 54 L Labyrinth, 39, 41, 68, 69 Lady on the Grey, The, 12, 34 Lamia, 10, 27, 36, 70, 73 Lawrence, Francis, 43 Leader, Michael, 4, 5, 7, 67, 76 Lear (character), 35, 55, 70, 75 Lear, Edward, 36 Le Guin, Ursula, 17, 88 Lee, Christopher, 5, 43, 75 Lewis, C.S., 19 Liminal narrative, 19 Lindholm, Megan, 39 Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The, 19 Literalization, 9, 10, 23, 38, 89 Literature, 8, 16–18, 24, 25, 35, 36, 44, 47, 49, 64–66, 69, 75, 88, 90 London Above, 3, 10, 11, 20–23, 27, 28, 33, 41, 50–60, 69 London Below, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, 16, 20–23, 27, 28, 32, 34, 38, 41, 48, 50, 53–55, 57–60, 68, 69, 71–73, 75, 76, 79, 81, 82 London Underground, 2, 3, 9, 32, 33, 35, 37, 69, 89 Lord of the Rings , 17, 20, 22, 39, 71 Lord Portico (character), 32, 33, 75 Lovecraft, H.P., 36, 69 Lucifer (television series), 5, 70 “Lyke Wake Dirge”, 75

M Magic, 8, 11, 17, 19, 22, 23, 41, 58, 59, 84, 89, 90 Magical market, 56 March-Russell, Paul, 38, 39 Marquis de Carabas (character), 2, 8, 35, 53, 69, 72 “Masque of the Red Death, The”, 54 McAvoy, James, 5, 6, 79 McCarthy, Colm, 70 McFarlane, Brian, 65, 66 McKean, David, 6 Media, 5, 11, 13, 64, 66, 67, 81, 88 Megatext, 12, 63, 64, 79, 83 Mendlesohn, Farah, 8, 16, 18–20, 22, 28, 31, 39 Metamorphosis, 22 Meteling, Arno, 40, 41 Miéville, China, 39, 82 Milton, John, 41 Mind the Gap, 12, 31, 32, 67 Monbiot, George, 52, 53 Monomyth, 12, 16, 25, 28, 40, 48 Moore, Alan, 6 Morpheus (character), 6 Multiculturalism, 57, 58 Myth, 8, 25, 34, 35, 41, 82 N Napoleon of Notting Hill, The, 37, 89 Narnia, 8, 48 Nelson, Victoria, 8, 9, 24, 42 Netflix, 6 Neverwhere, 1–5, 7–12, 15, 16, 18, 20–24, 27, 28, 31–44, 47, 48, 50–56, 60, 63–67, 70, 72–76, 78, 81–90 Night’s Bridge, 27, 33 Neoliberalism, 52, 53 Non-diegetic sound, 75 Nonsense, 37, 38 Norse Mythology, 35

INDEX

Novel, 2–8, 10–13, 16–18, 22, 23, 32, 35–39, 41–43, 47, 48, 50, 53, 54, 56, 58–60, 63, 64, 66–76, 79, 82, 84–86, 90

O Ocean at the End of the Lane, The, 7, 12, 21, 34, 35 Okonedo, Sophie, 75 Old Bailey (character), 53, 55, 57, 75 Ordeal, The, 23, 27, 58 Oxford Circus, 2, 3, 37, 89

P Paradise Lost , 41 Parallel world, 20 Past, 19, 23, 40, 54, 59, 71, 79, 87 Past tense, 65, 66 Paterson, Joseph, 82 Penryn & the End of Days , 43 Personification, 12, 33, 34, 37, 38, 44 Phantom Tollbooth, The, 9, 37, 38 Picadilly Circus, 9 Poe, Edgar Allan, 54 Powers, Tim, 39 Plot, 4, 7, 16, 18, 23, 24, 28, 32, 41, 53, 66, 67, 70, 71, 75, 86 Point of View, 65, 71 Portal-quest, 8, 12, 19–22, 25, 32, 37, 40, 44 Portico, Lady Door. See Door Postcolonial theory, 82 Pratchett, Terry, 6, 7, 36, 43, 44, 88 Prologue, 1, 3, 9, 52, 65, 67, 69 Prophecy, The (film), 43 Protagonist, 7–9, 11, 12, 18, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27, 34, 38, 40, 41, 58, 65 Psychoanalysis, 82 Puss In Boots, 35

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Q Queer theory, 82 R Race, 48 Radio play, 5, 13, 24, 64, 67, 74–76, 78, 79 Rat, 3, 33 Rat Speaker, 8, 27, 53 Referent, 16, 32, 33, 35, 37 Religion, 8, 24, 34, 42 Return (Hero’s Journey Stage), 23 Richard Mayhew (character), 1, 3, 7, 10, 20, 27, 32, 81, 88 Riddell, Chris, 76, 79 Rossetti, Christina, 56 S Saler, Michael, 24 Sandman, 6, 12, 70 Science fiction, 49, 58, 64, 70, 79, 87 Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed, 49 Scott, Ridley, 71 Secondary world, 19, 32, 37, 38, 58 Secret Life of Puppets, The, 42 Self-righteousness, 43 Selick, Henry, 7 Serpentine (character), 67, 70, 75, 82 Sexuality, 73, 82 Sewer Folk, 8, 36 Shakespeare, 35 Sheen, Michael, 7 Shepherd’s Bush, 37, 89 Sherlock Holmes, 36 “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar”, 36 Sláine (comic book series), 70 Sleeper and the Spindle, The, 36 Sleeping Beauty, 36 Smith, Kevin, 43 “Snow, Glass, Apples”, 36

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INDEX

Snow White, 36 Social critique, 12 Social media, 83 Soundtrack, 65, 76 Source text, 64, 66, 71 Stam, Robert, 66, 67 Stardust , 7, 11, 12, 21, 22, 34, 36, 56, 82 Starz Network, 7, 82 Stockton, Arnold, 2, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 59, 60, 75 Structure of feeling, 82 Supernatural, 12, 17, 23, 25, 28, 39–42 Supernatural (television series), 43, 44 Swinton, Tilda, 43 Symbolism, 12, 32

T Television, 1, 3, 4, 7, 43, 64–70, 75 Tennant, David, 7 Thatcher, Margaret, 52 Through the Looking-Glass , 37, 76 Time, 8, 10, 17, 23, 27, 33, 37, 40, 41, 43, 44, 48–50, 53, 58–60, 65, 66, 70, 83, 85–87 Tolkien, J.R.R., 17, 20, 71 Totally Stonking, Surprisingly Educational and Utterly Mind-Boggling Comic Relief Comics , 4 Transmediality, 12, 63, 64 Triple Goddess, 12, 34

Trust, 54, 55, 90 Tube. See London Underground Turnham Green, 9 U Unconscious, The, 24, 42, 48, 49, 59 Unseen, 39–41 Urban fantasy, 39–41, 44, 48 V V for Vendetta, 6 Value, 2, 21, 44, 50–54, 58, 89 Vampire, 8, 10, 36, 57 Vandemar, Mr., 3, 8, 10, 28, 41, 58, 59, 68–70, 72 VanderMeer, Jeff, 39 Velvets (characters), 8, 57, 73, 82 Vint, Sherryl, 49, 58, 79 W Walken, Christopher, 43 Wall (fictional place), 11, 12, 21, 34 Watchmen, 6 Widen, Gregory, 43 Williams, Raymond, 82, 83 Wizard of Oz, The, 10, 36 Wonder, 8, 9, 11, 17, 18, 23–25, 27, 32, 37, 56, 71, 75, 89 Wordplay, 9, 10, 12, 24, 28, 32, 36, 38, 44, 48 Worlds, 11, 12, 21, 24, 42, 49, 53, 54, 60, 83, 86, 87, 90