Imagine there's another London beneath the metropolis we all know, love and despise.
A London Below.
Where everything commonly known in city life takes on a new meaning.
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.(www.goodreads.com)
I loved this story of Gaiman, which has everything an old school adventure novel needs.
A great hero who begins as a stumbling lad. A girl. A quest. Villains.
And then the artful way of letting London Below leech onto the city we know.
Where tube map locations become literal in meaning (a real earl's court at Earl's Court, a giant called Hammersmith, a monastery at Black Friars)
Even a house that is a street.
It's all so fantastic that it becomes enchanting.
I've read other novels of Neil Gaiman before, of which The Graveyard Shift, American Gods and The Ocean at the End of the Lane are the more commonly known.
Neverwhere was the best I've read of him so far. It has the adventure of American Gods (which I found a little tedious) and The Ocean which left me with the impression I had from this one. It seems that every time I try a new Gaiman novel I'm upping the stakes.
Snippet from my review of The Ocean at the End of the Lane:
You get to marvel in the innocence and grandeur of the world when you were in elementary school and experience this through the eyes of a 7y old. I've read Gaiman before, but this is his best novel I've read so far. It's truly mesmerizing. (http://touchofnovel.blogspot.be/2014/02/review-of-ocean-at-end-of-lane.html)Gaiman is the perfect solution for that little bit of innocent magic we all need in our lives from time to time. No glamour, no romance, no hidden agenda's, but an oldfashioned adventure. He makes me want to pick up my old favourites from when I 10 and newly experience them. Like I said before, he's the master of writing children's stories for grown-ups.
