Skip to main content

Reading Neverwhere Out of Time

I'm wrapping up a listen to Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere," and it's reminding me of a particular type of sorrow I have, from time to time, experienced. The Russians call the sadness of longing with nothing to long for toska, which can mean ennui, deep regret, and also nostalgia. Nostalgia fits as well as anything in describing Neverwhere, as its intricate web of imagined undergrounds and subtle horrors reference a version of London now gone except for a few hidden patches. It also sums up my feeling of nostalgia for an idealized experience which I never experienced.



I should have read this book when it was released, in 1996. I think it could have easily become the source of significant obsession on my part if I had been so lucky to have encountered it then.

Maybe I'm older now and in less need (I suppose) for an alternate world of angels, droll cut-throats, and forgotten subway stations. It's also true that this is a work with a huge impact on the fantasy literature that followed it. Although I can't find any reference to J.K. Rowling's affection for the tv series or book, her world of hidden wizards and witches (and reliance on adverbs) bears obvious echoes to this earlier work. So reading Neverwhere now is a little like going backwards in a video game series; it's hard to see what makes something great if it's obscured by all that followed it.

But then, a little voice pipes up, who are you to say this isn't the best time to read this book? Although the spell doesn't quite captivate as fully, the incantations still holds power. In particular, Neverwhere gives writers all sorts of handy tools in pulling an alternate world into view: the matter-of-fact presentation, the precise descriptions, and the weary irony.

The work still holds up, with its moments of levity always carrying a sinister edge and its depravity delivered with a gentlemanly lilt. It helps that I'm listening to book on CD, narrated by Neil himself. The guy's voice is like a goddamn Stradivarius.

***

Chapter XIII of my espionage web fiction, "Agent Shield and Spaceman" is now available. Imagine James Bond in Bat Country, you'll have the basic idea of this serialized novel.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted.  O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...
1 comment
Read more

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation.  Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...
Post a Comment
Read more

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl...
Post a Comment
Read more