Neverwhere

By Neil Gaiman

Richard Mayhew is a successful young man living in London. He has a fiancee, Jessica, who is ambitious and very sure of herself and not too popular with Richard's friends. Her true character is revealed one weekend night when she and Richard stumble across a young, injured street person and Jessica sees no reason to involve herself in the injured woman's troubles. Richard, despite Jessica's protests, helps the girl, whose name is Door. Richard, involved with Door, fails to show up to an important dinner with Jessica and her boss and Jessica breaks off the engagement.
Trying to help Door get somewhere safe, Richard is introduced to Door's world, which is called London Below. It seems there is a vast other city, invisible to London Above, where people of strange appearance and strange abilities live out their lives in the sewers, subways and basements of London Above. Richard delivers Door safely but when he tries to go back to his normal life he finds that he has become unreal to it. He no longer exists and everyone who knew him has forgotten him. His credit cards are invalid, his bank account has vanished, his apartment has been rented and he is forced to retreat to London Below just to survive.
Tracking down Door, Richard is desperate to get his old life back. Once he finds her, he becomes involved in her problems which could cost him his life as Door is a marked woman, being hunted by two ruthless and very creepy killers, Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar. Door leads Richard on a perilous adventure through the filthy, gloomy byways of London Below as they flee the two deadly assassins and Richard struggles to get back to reality and London Above.

This book started out as a series on British TV. The landmarks and locales of London play an important part in the story and were probably a lot more meaningful to British viewers than they could be to a person who is not familiar with the sights and locales mentioned. For example, the angel Islington, which is an angel named Islington in the book which is probably a lot more charming and amusing if you know, which I did not when reading the book, that there used to be, long ago, an inn in Islington named the Angel and that there is no actual angel in Islington. So, yeah, those kind of details totally meant nothing to me, unfamiliar as I am with the streets of London and its surrounds.
But not only that, the whole depiction of the street people lifestyle just didn't appeal. Bit of a spoiler here: but when Richard gets his normal life back he finds himself bored and dissatisfied. I couldn't relate, better boredom that eating alley cats and wearing the same unwashed clothing for weeks at a time. Give me a hot shower, a soft bed, clean clothes and a good meal over excitement any day. I found the characters too grubby, too creepy and too elitist. Nevertheless, Gaiman presents a fascinating netherworld full of strangeness and strange people and it is a lot of fun to picture such dwelling places beneath the streets of our big cities, as the book makes clear that all the big cities of the world have their hidden counterpart just out of sight. So, though it had it problems for me, I still liked reading about Richard, Door and London Below.

New Words

Arbalests, mangonels, trebuchets, glaives and knobkerries: An arbalest is a crossbow; a mangonel is a catapult; a trebuchet is also a catapult; a glaive is a long-handled blade or a broadsword; and a knobkerry is a club. 'He made his own, out of whatever he could find, or take, or steal, parts of cars and rescued bits of machinery, which he turned into hooks and shivs, crossbows and arbalests, small mangonels and trebuchets for breaking walls, cudgels, glaives and knobkerries.'

Inhume: to bury; place in a grave or tomb. '"We should butcher the bitch. Annul, cancel, inhume, and amortize her."'

Grimoires: a grimoire is a book of instructions in the use of magic, especially summoning demons. 'But the shelves were filled with a host of other things: tennis rackets, hockey sticks, umbrellas, a spade, a notebook computer, a wooden leg, several mugs, dozens of shoes, pairs of binoculars, a small log, six glove puppets, a lava lamp, various CDs, records (LPs, 45s, and 78s), cassette tapes and eight-tracks, dice, toy cars, assorted pairs of dentures, watches, flashlights, four garden gnomes of assorted sizes (two fishing, one of them mooning, the last smoking a cigar), piles of newspapers, magazines, grimoires, three-legged stools, a box of cigars, a plastic nodding-head Alsatian, socks ... the room was a tiny empire of lost property.'

Fuliginous: pertaining to soot; sooty. 'At the apex of the bridge, another monk was waiting for them: Brother Fuliginous.' [Brother Fuliginous is one of the Black Friars.]

Kris: a double-edged, wavy-bladed knife or short sword designed primarily for thrusting. 'It was made of a bronze-colored metal; the blade was long, and it curved like a kris, sharp on one side, serrated on the other; there were faces carved into the side of the haft, which was green with verdigris, and decorated with strange designs and odd curlicues.'