Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
Mind the Gap..., 14 Jun 2006
Richard Mayhew has just been "a Good Samaritan" to a girl lying bleeding on a London pavement, and has thereby ruined his entire life. The girl, you see, a young lady by the name of Door, is an important person in the world of "London Below", and some very unpleasant people are trying to kill her. By hiding her, Richard becomes "one of the people who fell through the cracks", invisible to the inhabitants of the normal world - London Above -and easy prey for the terrifying creatures of London Below. Until he finds Door again, and is sucked into her quest to find the murderers of her family...
Gaiman has created an eerie otherworld in the sewers of London and the tunnels and stations of the Underground that is complete in every detail and so interwoven with the "real" world that its frightening. Never having been to London, I'm starting to be a bit scared of the Tube Stations: real shepards at Shepards Bush (ones you don't ever want to meet), an earl in Earl's Court, saxophone players who live both in the Above and the Below, Old Bailey and Hammersmith are people, Knightsbridge is a bad neighbourhood...
And at the end you are left with enough answers to satisfy as concerns the main plotline, but not all the answers you want. There is so much detail in London Below that there are thousands of things begging to be explored and examined: The system of fiefdoms which apparently rules Below, but which is never really explained, the importance of Door's family, the Seven Sisters, the story of the swashbuckling, sardonic Marquis de Carabas (books could be written about him, he is undoubtably my favourite character) and more; really the list could go on forever. But that is what makes it all so convincing: Gaiman wastes no time explaining anything, he just tells the story. The spooky atmosphere and fast pace ensure that the somewhat predictable plot never gets boring - you don't even realise it was predictable until you come to the big showdown. And the end is just perfect.
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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
Intuitive modern day fantasy at its best., 18 Feb 2006
This is an intelligently, darkly written modern fantasy at its best. The characters are vivid and the images are all charmingly un-hinged and eccentric. Gaiman creates "the other London" - a London existing underneath our mundane world. This is Tolkein, Kafka, C.S Lewis and Pratchett all spiralled and spun into one demented mixture (though not necessarily in that order). The main character Richard - an ordinary 30 something businessman - is inadvertently sucked into this other world by helping a young girl. His quest to "get back home" to the world above the underground throughout the entire novel only seems to heighten the dark characters and the fantastical nature of this bizarre, eccentrically charged world. The beautiful, yet quirky Door, Old Bailey, the irascible Marquis de Carabas, and the inhumane brutality of the villains Mr. Croup and Vandermar are all terrifyingly, yet wonderfully vivid and fantastical. This is how THE TEMPEST would have read had it been dreamt up by an intoxicated rock band from hell. Coming to Gaiman for the first time, I was slightly dubious as I skimmed over the dark cover of the novel for the first time in a book shop. I let it settle for a while on my coffee table as I got home. But when I eventually picked it up I was hooked from the first page onwards. Not only is it a suspense thriller, its also a beautifully written journey through fairy land, through insanity, and heaven and hell, through light and through darkness. I was unable to put it down even as the birds began to sing again in the dark of the twighlit hours of the morning - a fitting setting to the black, bohemian and slightly demented world of Under London, tinged with flashes of comic genius. I will never look at a tube station in the same way again. Truly worth a read. Highly recommended...
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
Fantastic!, 14 Feb 2006
This book is about another world that lives beneath the London that we know - London Under, which is an out of kilter, time warpish setting. The characters are amazing - Richard who falls through the crack of London Above, Old Bailey, the Black Friars, the Seven Sisters and Angel Islington. Gaiman has been amazingly clever by literally bringing tube stations to life and making them into real characters. The reader gets to learn about sealed off tube stations (that I never knew existed), and the true reason for 'minding the gap'- I will always give that a huge berth from now on - and will never be able to travel on the tube again without looking over my shoulder or looking out for ghost stations. I would call this a brilliant fantasy thriller that is full of humerous moments, along with quite toe-curling horrific scenes. Oh, and if, like me, when you finish the book you feel the need to know more about the sealed tube stations, there are several interesting sites to be found on google.
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