 is terrible. He wrote Oz for us. He wrote Wonderland for adults. He wrote Neverland for grown-ups, and why I don't think it's that good. Neverwhere is less than most of its parts. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman is a very, very popular book. It's one of his best known, one of his most beloved books, and I like it. I've read it three, I've read it as many times as I have copies, which is not on purpose. But yeah, Neverwhere. It's um, I've read it several times, and it is so light. And I found myself, you're wondering why it doesn't really work for me that well, and because I've read it now so many times, I think with each time that I've read it, I've narrowed it down more, why it is that this book is so popular, but why it doesn't really work for me, and why I don't think it's that good. I'm going to make an argument for it being objectively less good than some of his other books, but of course, reading is subjective, art is subjective, so if it's your favorite book, nothing I say can really invalidate that. So basically, I've come to the conclusion that Neverwhere is less than the sum of its parts, because there's a lot of individual things about Neverwhere that are really, really great and are the very things that I love Neil Gaiman for, but the way that it all comes together or doesn't is what keeps it from being a favorite of mine and what keeps it from being what in my opinion would be more objectively one of his better works. So Neil Gaiman's prose is one of the things that I love him best for, that's why he's my favorite writer. It's not necessarily that the stories he tells are always my favorite stories, they very often are not, but I am always impressed with his writing. I don't think I've ever read a game in a book where I wasn't impressed with the writing, with the prose itself, and that remains true in Neverwhere. Neverwhere, there's some really excellent bits of writing. I often praised him for the way that he zeroes in on very specific things about characters, situations, people, like people at large, what it is to be adult, what it is to be a child, all these kinds of things. He really, he pinpoints very specific things about them to where he does not have to tell you paragraphs and paragraphs, pages and pages about displays or this character or this situation. He can get away with being very brief, very concise, and just telling you this like one thing about this character and you now have an image in your mind. You know who they are, you know what they are, you know how they look, you've, he just nails it. So I do have some examples, like the way that he describes Mr. Vandimar and Mr. Krupp. There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Krupp and Mr. Vandimar apart. First, Mr. Vandimar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Krupp. Second, Mr. Krupp has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandimar's eyes are brown. Third, while Mr. Vandimar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Krupp has no obvious jewelry. Fourth, Mr. Krupp likes words while Mr. Vandimar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike. And then further still about Mr. Vandimar and Mr. Krupp. They were the kind of suits that might have been made by a tailor 200 years ago who had had a modern suit described to him but had never actually seen one. The lines were wrong and so were the grace notes. Now Mr. Vandimar and Mr. Krupp are these sort of like sinister antagonist henchmen type figures that appear throughout and everywhere. Those are just two examples of how they are described. They are described that way in that style throughout the entire book. So you don't need a ton of elaborate specificity. It's in the absurdity of the descriptions and in the inherent sort of irrationality to how they look and also how the narrator is describing them that gives you a sense of their vibe beyond just their clothes. I mean in essence those were just descriptions of their physical appearances and yet I bet you have a sense of their vibe and the the tone and the the impression you should have of them as characters not just of what they're wearing. The next example isn't as good. It's about the lady door. She looked Richard thought as if she'd done a midnight raid on the history of fashion section of the Victoria and Albert Museum and was still wearing everything she'd taken. So I mean here again like the the brevity is insane. Like he a different author would have said oh she was wearing this which was from this era and this which was from this era and this which looked like it was from this era and this was shabby so it looked like it was genuinely actually old and and this here looked like it was a little bit newer but also like it probably had been worn and none of it matched and you could just go on and on and on and on or you could be Neil Gaiman say it looks like she raided the history of fashion section of the museum and is still wearing everything and bam you have an image in your mind of what that is and also the type of person that would look like that. Then my example of his description of Jessica is actually a description of Richard I guess who's our main character but in this way he is describing to you who Jessica is as a person and Jessica saw in Richard an enormous amount of potential which properly harnessed by the right woman would have made him the perfect matrimonial accessory which I just feel tells you so much about Jessica as a person like I personally have an image in my mind immediately of the type of person that Jessica is even though ostensibly that's a description of Richard here's another example where like we are sort of describing Jessica incidentally so this example is from Richard meeting Jessica for the first time and he's in a museum in France he'd tried to apologize to her in French which he did not speak gave up and began to apologize in English then tried to apologize in French for having to apologize in English until he noticed that Jessica was about as English as it was possible for any one person to be like just this short sentence I feel like if you've never read Neverwhere you still have a pretty good image in your mind right now of what Richard is like and what Jessica are like and you've just had like a few sentences so like I said I'm ceaselessly amazed by Neil Gaiman's ability to just very concisely convey so much to you beyond what he is on the face of it actually telling you and that is true in Neverwhere uh next his approach to magic and the inexplicable is again I very much like his approach to that in general and I like his approach to it in Neverwhere magic is inherently illogical and I like that Neil Gaiman unlike many other writers of speculative fiction he leans into that he fully embraces the fact that magic by its very nature cannot and should not be made sense though so he leans into making it make even less sense so rather than coming up with like wordy explanations for how this thing that is to be magical it has to be impossible uh at least as far as our natural own real world is concerned so instead of going jumping through trying to explain this impossible thing and how the rules of this universe make it possible he instead draws attention to the inherent impossibility of it and is like yeah and it's and you know what it's happening this thing is completely impossible let me remind you how ridiculously impossible this is and you know what else this thing is currently happening so for example when it comes to angels Richard did not believe in angels he never had he was damned if he was going to start now still it was much easier not to believe in something when it was not actually looking directly at you and saying your name likewise when we're talking about a library that is to be found in London below another character is saying he's meeting us in the library Richard was almost proud of the way he didn't say what library or point out that you couldn't put a library on a train instead he followed door towards the Earl's empty throne round the back of it and through the connecting door behind it and into the library here again like another author might have gone on and on about how this tiny tiny train impossibly it's bigger on the inside fits an entire library in it and when you went through this tiny door then you opened into this expanse that is way bigger than it should be because this fits an entire library into it but the train on the outside looks like a normal so you could go on and on and on and on about that and you and it would be you know possibly immersive and imaginative but Neil Gaiman simply has his main character say you know what I'm not going to say that that's impossible you know what I'm just gonna accept that this impossible thing is about to happen to me and then all of us in the audience can also imagine the utter impossibility of a library fitting in a train no perhaps I should have started with this in case you've never read Neverwhere um but the concept of Neverwhere I also think is very very cool so the concept of Neverwhere if you've never heard of it never seen it I say seen it it was originally television show and we'll get to that as well Neverwhere even though it's called Neverwhere the actual place in his portal fantasy is not called Neverwhere it's called London Below and in essence Neil Gaiman was like so there's all these great portal fantasies right for kids there's Oz there's Wonderland there's Neverland and so he wrote Oz for us he wrote Wonderland for adults he wrote Neverland for grown-ups that's what London Below is supposed to do and be and as a concept you know that's I love it because I love those kinds of stories and there is he's right something inherently magical about that kind of a story that's why we have so many but London Below is terrible the fun of those other portal fantasies is that however dangerous and sinister and macabre some aspects of them are and they put you know their protagonists into some alarming situations that realistically you probably wouldn't want to experience nevertheless they are wondrous places that like a theme park would happily recreate for you and that you would kind of like to imagine going there like flying to Neverland I certainly dreamed about that when I was a kid I was less of a fan of Wonderland but again Wonderland is like pretty kooky and crazy and cool and bizarre and like you'd want to see all these crazy wonderful things that Lewis Carroll describes and going to Disneyland in a place that makes you feel like you're in Wonderland is something you would desire to do similarly the Wizard of Oz like the Emerald City and Munchkin Land like these are places that like the Wicked Witch is pretty scary and realistically you would not want to be confronted with the Wicked Witch but going to Oz sounds fantastical and fun and imagining that you could do that is something that you'd like to imagine the world of London below in Neverwhere is it's horrifying it is a place of nightmares it's not like kind of terrifying but mostly wondrous it's mostly terrifying and not not really wondrous it's just like absurdly terrifying and I don't I mean reading Neverwares it's not that scary a book I wouldn't say but it's just it's really deeply unpleasant the idea of being in London below if you visited the London Underground or really any subway station it's it's like what if that was magical but was still grimy and dirty and and filled with rats and filled with like smelly people and close confines and strangeness and rudeness and death and danger and no one is very nice and everything is awful and dingy and dirty and awful and scary and nightmarish and the rats are in charge you have to not only encounter rats but you have to like obey the rats which again I mean if he's going for topsy-turvy sure obeying the rats is pretty topsy-turvy but I don't think that's fun to imagine that like the initial impression of like oh how funny the rats are actually in charge down below like I get it but also like get me out of here so in these other portal fantasies like Alice in Wonderland like Wizard of Oz like like Neverland or Peter Pan with Neverland in it there is this kind of sense of like we're gonna have to go home at the end but like oh what a shame that we have to go home what a shame that we can't live forever in Wonderland in Oz in Neverland like that you'd want to be there that you'd want to go back that you're sad to leave it and leaving London below is like the sooner the better so um my own spoilers but like when we're reaching towards when we're getting near the end of Neverwhere and we are presented with the possibility of leaving London below forever like I don't I feel like the book wants you to have this feeling of like oh what a shame that is and wouldn't it be nice to stay in London below but like no it would not be nice to stay in London below I would never ever want to be in London below again like whose dream is this if Universal Studios or or Disneyland was gonna recreate the London below experience as a an area of the park or as a theme park attraction I'd be like no no one wants this next Richard the main character the problem with Richard is that he's not much of a character in a lot of these portal fantasies you know Dorothy or Alice or or even Harry Potter and the the portal fantasy that is the wizarding world they are often audience surrogates to take you on this adventure to be your way to get into this wondrous world this portal fantasy but they still usually have a want they still usually have something that they're trying to do or that they're specifically trying to run away from or whatever it is I mean like Dorothy in the wizard of us she is trying to find the wizard so that he could send her home like she has a stated goal and desire and now she's going on this adventure and it takes her off course but like she's trying to get to the wizard so he can send her home like she has a goal and so that like gives drive and purpose to the story Richard things happen to Richard things happen around Richard Richard reacts to stuff that's happening near and around him and the lady door who he is with she does have a stated goal and a want but it gets not one that Richard fully understands or would have any real reason to be invested in seeing done because she's kind of nobody to him so it's almost like um if instead of following Dorothy you're following like the scarecrow who's like decided to help Dorothy but like it's Dorothy's quest so like Richard is like along for like doors quest but so then door should be the protagonist but door is already part of London below so like she can't be our intro to this like portal into this other world that's Richard the normal guy you get swept into this other world but he doesn't have a stated goal a stated purpose I mean I guess he vaguely is like I would like to go home kind of like Dorothy but like no one is really giving him an ability like a a way to do that and so he's not like trying to like go see the wizard so he can go home or something he's just he's just kind of helping door because door needs help so I guess that's what we're doing cool and this works a little bit better on television where one a charismatic actor can kind of make up for that lack by just kind of like being a dynamic personality this can make for an an effective surrogate for a reader if you are you know a reader can and see themselves as this average person that gets swept away into this world but because he has no stated goal or purpose there's just like a lack of tension and stakes like there's like what are we doing like what are we trying to do what are we trying to prevent like there's nothing we are vicariously striving towards alongside Richard we're just like we become just as passive as Richard is in this story and a passive reading experience is not an engaging one which is why I think the world of London below and this story like I don't feel sucked in by it because I'm not swept away on this quest I'm not engaged in this quest I don't feel any stakes for this quest like I okay Richard is in the an awful magical subway that does sound yikes like I wish him the best I don't I don't feel any investment in that or enticement to go on or see how this unfolds so lastly Neverwhere was actually originally written for television and that I think shows and I think that is part of why it doesn't work as well because when you're writing for television certain principles about storytelling remain true no matter what the medium is but there are certain things about storytelling that your your priorities will shift depending on the media and in visual mediums like film television or stage basically almost any medium but books some part of your priority is having something be visually appealing or visually enticing or visually exciting and in a book unless it's a comic book it's harder to do things that are just purely visually appealing certainly there are writers that are famous for their sort of lyrical beautiful prose in lush worlds they describe Leni Taylor which I personally love I don't like Aaron Morgenstern but I know that's what people get out of Aragon and Morgenstern's books action scenes are this way I often don't like action scenes in books because like it's again like okay it's fun to watch an action scene in a movie because you're actually watching two people do something that's really impressive to look at you know it's it's like watching gymnastics in the Olympics it's seeing them actually perform this feat that's impressive if I read a book where it says like they're able to do a handstand I'm like cool they're able to do a handstand great but like it's I'm not seeing it so like it's not that engaging whereas in a film it would be so there's a lot of stuff in Neverwhere that feels like it was written for the screen in that way that like this was this scene was written the way that it is because this would make for an interesting visual a cool action sequence a cool moment on screen and that certainly should be your priority if you're writing a story for television but when Neverwhere became a book that's less effective likewise the story feels very episodic and it was written as a television show so having Richard just be kind of this like baseline character that's just like your average dude who's in this strange situation but we're kind of like episode to episode kind of just seeing different weird parts of London below and different weird stuff is happening that like works better as a TV show where we don't have to have this like driving narrative like in a book where Richard is just kind of our eyes our reason for the audience to like be seeing this scene but we're not seeing a scene in a book we're like living this scene through Richard if Richard is not interesting then we're not gonna have an interesting time and I mean Richard is not the only one lacking in this regard I did give examples of his descriptions of characters which I do think are very effective and if it wasn't for that this truly would be a snooze fest because despite that I mean like the other characters they they're even less characters than Richard is and he's not much of one I mean like who is door she's like both an inciting incident and a plot convenience and plot device wrapped up into one person she's not a person or a character that you really like feel you know or have a reason to root for or like has layers and complexity like she comes into Richard's life is the inciting incident is the reason that he ends up in London below and then because she has magical powers then she's also the like the way that magical plot convenience has happened she's the exposition because she can go around explaining London below to Richard she's just like she like is a functional piece of the story more than a character and Richard he's an audience surrogate and the rest of the characters are even less than Richard and door they're literally just in each individual scene or in each individual episode of this television show this would be the episode in which we meet this weird quirky character this weird quirky place this weird quirky thing and that's kind of what we do in this episode then we move on to the next thing which in a show works a lot better than in a book now there are some truly poignant moments and thought provoking moments in the book which is why I still do give it four stars so a moment that comes to mind is Richard's or deal with the friars that is quite a weighty moment but the reason that it's weighty has almost nothing to do with the story the story itself has no meat to it when this story manages to when we're in this book manages to get an emotional reaction out of you it's almost 100 percent down to Neil Gaiman's ability to employ a turn of phrase that in itself is something that strikes you that resonates with you that hits you in some way it's it's the sentence itself it's not this moment in the story doing it to you the moment with the talk of the incident with the friars the ordeal that's a little bit more of the story doing it for you but even then it's more this the specific ways in which he phrases things in that scene that hit home and so that's why the book is good it's Neil Gaiman's writing but it's specifically like his prose and him being a wordsmith and him just constantly just serving truth is about life in every sentence but the story itself doesn't do anything doesn't have anything doesn't there's there's nothing to pull and hook and mesmerize and transport film and so that's why i feel that it is less than the sum of its parts you have an excellent writer who has some of the best prose around you have a really cool concept in this this portal fantasy for adults a very creative handling of how magic would work in this scenario to make it very creative and bizarre and and witty and and it just kind of feels like a collection of things rather than a story so even though i would give high marks for all of these things again i gave high marks for the descriptions of characters but the characters themselves aren't much to write home about give high marks for prose but the writing of the story isn't much to write home about i give high marks for where the world is the world building is done and described and how magic is described but it's like a horrifying place to be so like i don't want to be transported there so it's it's a very mixed experience in that sense what it does very well it does exceedingly well because it's game and doing it but it's so flawed and so held back by both the origin of how it was created and just like generally some issues with how it's structured that it will never be a favorite for me for these reasons but i get why it could be for others if you do feel transported and excited to be transported to the world of London below i do not understand you but like if that's true for you i get why you like never wear if for some reason something about Richard really resonates with you because there's not that much there but if what is there just really does work for you and you really latch on to Richard like i get why then this book might work better for you if you really resonate with Richard but yeah i don't really get why anyone would super love this book and other people do so maybe you can tell me why you're one of them so let me know in the comments down below your thoughts and feelings about never wear if you have read it if you want to read it if you've never read it if i'm convinced you never to read it i hope not because i do think it's a good book and i do think it's in it it it's quality but i just i don't think it's nearly as good as it could or should be based on the list of what's in it and frankly because the tv show is so old i find myself thinking never wear would make a really good adaptation which feels weird to say because it's a it was adapted from a tv show into a book but now that we have the technology i think we should re-adapt it into a tv show but you know better so as i say let me know in the comments down below your thoughts and feelings whatever you want me to know i post videos on saturdays at the random times as well definitely saturdays so like and subscribe join my patreon if you feel so inclined and i'll see you when i see