neil gaiman's neverwhere

i'm glad to see people have been keeping up with their book bid-nez better than i have been keeping up with my book bid-nez.

if you love me and pay me due attention, you might recall a few entries ago when i was worried i'd pinched neil gaiman's neverwhere from mark hopkins's apartment. mark reassures me i was invited (aka: he somewhat fuzzily remembers telling someone, "no! taaaaake it! take it! do it!" and waving his delicate hands about drunkenly–we all assume this was directed to me and the novel).

along with polishing off some real nuthin' reading, i do have neverwhere completely read, digested, and prepped for the chopping block. why? well, sirs and ladies: when you write a novel based on a television series, you are just asking for it. i guess we all need paychecks, but really...

a premise for a show doesn't get much gayer than this. if you don't know, i'm tossing in wiki's little quip.

"The idea for the story came from a conversation between Gaiman and Henry about possible stories for inclusion in Comic Relief - Henry commenting that the public are so used to homeless people sleeping rough in London streets that they no longer "see" them.^[1] This became in integral part of the Neverwhere plot. "

oh wow, you mean pedestrians don't stop and pay homeless people a lot of attention? whew! i had no idea we'd let ourselves slip like that. oh my dear, sweet blood-of-the-lamb, how could we be so blind to–yeah. i think we all had that epiphany when we were ten. some of us, late bloomers, wrote huge urban-issues essays in jr.high on saving owls and whales and homeless people. we care, then we either a) move on b) become green peace volunteers with clipboards, braids, and adult acne. what a completely homosexual bleeding-heart unoriginal premise. for a show. which was turned into a book.

so there it is. mayhew, a bumbling, flustered spine-less geezer stumbles (literally) over someone who appears to be a bleeding homeless girl–is really a "lady door" from london below (it is london, and it is below...). in helping her, he falls through the cracks. in caring about her his world vanquishes him, he is literally invisible, his apartment is rented out, and everyone he ever knew disappears. he treks through the london below to find door, the girl he helped, and embark on a journey both serving door and the author's need to turn mayhew into a man.

the book was mildly entertaining at best and painfully plunky at worst. plunky, obnoxious, and telling of the struggle of one man to get through writing a paint-by-number novel. he probably figures the only way we as readers will get to the end is if, and only if, he lays down little snags and teasers. "what's that?" "oh i can't tell you...NOW...." with the hope that if you keep reading, you'll learn more about this mysterious world. blatant payoffs. well, it's about as tempting as having some woman on the train take an old tuna out of her pocket and wiggle it around to coax me over on her side. 1) i don't care for old tuna, and 2) condescending. it's really condescending.

as for his own struggles, what was once an attempt to switch up adjectives for interest's sake? no longer. after the first hundred pages, neil tosses his gloves down and gives up. for example, early on he takes the miserable adjectives used to describe door's head/face ("heart-shaped", "elfin", etc) and switches them up. if it is "heart-shaped" on one page, it is surely "elfin" on the next, and "heart-shaped" two pages later. but after so long her head ceased to oscillate through description. she's got one "elfin face" all the way. why bother? why not just say "face"? we know door's head is flipping elfin by now, if we know anything. also, the instance where he refers to the velvet character's eyes as being "foxglove-coloured eyes". not once. not twice over the spread of a chapter–we're talking a good handfull of times over a two-page spread. by then he's given up and we get one adjective per noun, and that's expected to last us the course of the novel. unless he's being paid by the word and simply lacks the energy to replace adjectives...

so, there's some condescending teasers, wince-inducing adjectives that just won't let go of the nouns, and all of it: holes in an already thinly-spun plot with poorly-spun characters. i won't even drag you through them all.

the main character, richard mayhew, is barely tolerable as a person. simpering, dense, and...well, weak & dense is really as faceted as the character gets. oh right, occasionally he is horny.

door is little and plucky and tortured by memories of her lovely family being murdered. lots of "oh daddy don't die" flashblacks and nightmares.

the minor characters all have ridiculously lame back stories. i tried, so help me. let me hold your hand through a sequence here...

rat girl. dirty little thing, sent to escort mayhew to the floating market.
details of her back story followed by my internal thoughts.
. mother crazy. "eh.... okayy....."
. foster home "...seems familiar..."
. abused physically by guy foster mother lived with "oh, lordy"
. abused...other ways. "oh just get on with it..."
. she ran away "...yeah yeah yeah..."
. slipped between the cracks of humanity. (at which point i just wait for her to die. not to be a spoiler? but she does. and thank god.)

it's like she walked across three lifetime (channel for paranoid women) movies and right into gaiman's plot.

in conclusion: american gods climbs up a notch in comparison. i couldn't even finish it without cracking my new paul auster new york trilogy for relief.