Walking the Wall

Driving home tonight in the fog down empty streets certainly made me think about Neil Gaiman’s book, Neverwhere, that I finished reading early this morning. There is something surreal about foggy, empty streets that makes you feel like you have fallen into a pocket full of time, just like London’s Underground world.

Door scratched her nose. “There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber,” she explained. There’s a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere–it doesn’t all get used up at once” (228).

I like one journal’s description of Neverwhere being “like adults stumbling through the pages of a bizarre children’s story;” this is a very accurate description–a sort of modern Alice in Wonderland. It’s a book about choices–good choices, bad choices, free choices and coerced choices. It’s about how we see the world, how we choose to see the world–about perception and reality. Beautiful written so that you feel nearly as disjointed as Richard feels having fallen down this particular rabbit hole. However, I’m not sure it tops American Gods for me and I’m thinking of swapping American Gods in for the final book in my class in the fall as it directly addresses the issues of a people who are losing their mythology–I’ll have to mull it over some more (Edit: I was reminded that I hadn’t chosen American Gods because it’s 21st century and not 20th!).

Still, I think one of my all time favorite Neil Gaiman works is his Marvel 1602 comic book, recreating the X-men as if they were born in the 16th century!