Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

NEVERWHERE

ISBN - 9780060557812
FIRST PUBLISHED - 1996
PAGES - 370 (Paperback)
GENRE - Fantasy
PUBLISHER - William Morrow

AUTHOR - Neil Gaiman

SYNOPSIS - Under the streets of London there's a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.

Richard Mayhew, a young businessman, is going to find out more than enough about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his workday existence and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and utterly bizarre. And a strange destiny awaits him down here, beneath his native city: Neverwhere.

QUOTES - 

• You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not.

• I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.

• So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding. 

• So many things to see, people to do.

• Can't make an omelette without killing a few people.

FL Speak - 

This was my first Gaiman book and truth to be told, I'd need to read a few more of his before I join his exclusive cult.

Neverwhere is a pretty straightforward story. Anyone who says otherwise needs to read more books. God gave Gaiman an idea and he turned it into Alice in Wonderland. Although, I'd say I liked Alice more. Richard, our protagonist and odd hero, really got on my nerves. I got dead tired of his whining and wondered if I should simply skim his parts. Well, as it turned out, he's almost in ALL the pages. That pansy, crybaby!

Enough of that. Neverwhere introduces you to London Below. A shady place beneath the roads of London where time works differently. London Below is not a place of evil, however you'd find all sorts of people and things (yes, I said things) living in the dark. It also has some fantastic places, like a Floating Market which never opens at the same place again. And then, there are metro stations that actually live up to their name. Earl's court is actually a court and Angel station is (no points for guessing it)

By far, the strength of this book lies not in the plot (which was completely obvious), neither in the god awful humour. It lies solely on the characters. Gaiman has done some wonderful magic on the characters and they shine throughout the book. Except for Richard, of course. Door is good, the twins who look nothing at all like are better but Hunter and de Carabas are the real ones you should read about. They steaaaal the show. I really wanted/wished for one of them to kill Richard and proceed on with the story. That would've been so much better.

So we have a Gaiman book, world building which is fantastic, a plot which is extremely predictable and characters you'd hate to love and vice versa. So what's missing? I'll tell you what's missing. The finale is missing. The answers are missing. The whys and hows are missing. The ending was a gigantic piece of shit. It's like Gaiman got tired of writing the book and suddenly had to be somewhere else. So all we got is a haphazard finale without tying it off. You ask me, what's not tied off? Read the book sweetheart. If you finish it, we can go through Q&A later.

I'd really want to read another book with Hunter or De Carabas in it. Or even Door. Just to placate my curious mind about the shitstorm this ending left behind.

RATING - 3/5