|
|
|
Average Customer Review
Share your thoughts with other customers
|
|
|
The most helpful favourable review
The most helpful critical review
37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
Mind the Gap
Everybody traveling in London by Tube, is familiar with the loudspeaker's warning "Mind the Gap", that is the space between platform and train carriage. Reading Gaiman, "Gaps" takes on a much more complex meaning... People can fall through the cracks, literally, not only down onto the rails but much deeper, ending up in "London Below". Richard Mayhew, a young man with...
Published on 14 Dec 2004 by Friederike Knabe
|
› See more 5 star, 4 star reviews |
 |
5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Doesn't live up to the hype
I had such high hopes for this book. Neil Gaiman is one of those superstar authors and (although you should never judge a book by its cover) the blurb made it sound like the kind of thing I'd be into: mythical beings with a modern twist, an alternative London hidden beneath our own, good contemporary fantasy.
Neverwhere had all of those things, but I was...
Published 12 months ago by Chai
|
› See more 3 star, 2 star, 1 star reviews |
|
|
37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
Mind the Gap, 14 Dec 2004
Everybody traveling in London by Tube, is familiar with the loudspeaker's warning "Mind the Gap", that is the space between platform and train carriage. Reading Gaiman, "Gaps" takes on a much more complex meaning... People can fall through the cracks, literally, not only down onto the rails but much deeper, ending up in "London Below". Richard Mayhew, a young man with nothing much happening in his life, is an unlikely Samaritan. Still, when confronted with a choice he follows his charitable instinct and assists a wounded rag girl he finds lying in the street. To save her from her apparent killers he goes on a quest and from this moment his life turns into a rollercoaster of discovery and danger. "Neverwhere" is a brilliant yarn of life in the underbelly of the city, with shady human characters, speaking rats and special "guides". There is more than one reality for sure. In London Above, Richard and the rag girl, named appropriately "Door", can be seen but not recalled beyond the moment. The real-life maze of London underground tunnels, hidden passageways and dead ends provide the existent, yet twisted, backdrop to the story. Time and distances have no meaning. The names of tube stations acquire new relevance: the Earl resides at Earl's Court, the black Friar monks are in Blackfriars and Islington is an Angel. Following Door and her unusual companions, Richard discovers the limits of his endurance. He has to question his existence and reality. While his desire to get back to his normal life keeps him going, his chances to shake loose from the shadowy underworld increasingly appear to diminish... The novel, which expands on Gaiman's successful tv production, is a fascinating read, whether you know London or not (yet). His style is fluid and engaging, his characters are very much alive and moving the various layers of intrigue along at a good pace. [Friederike Knabe]
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
 
|
|
|
|
|
|
48 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
Warning: Buy British!!!, 20 Sep 2002
By A Customer
Neverwhere is a fantastic piece of modern fantasy and I suggest that everyone who likes London and the surreal read it. I give it 5 stars, usually, but... DO NOT BUY THE AMERICAN VERSION!!! This is a British book, and the American version has been sorely edited. And I'm not talking about the second prologue, either. All my favorite lines are missing from the Avon printing. Apperantly Americans couldn't handle funny lines in serious scenes... So he edited out much good humour. Look, it's less good. Buy British!
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
56 of 59 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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Gaiman's Great and Secret Show, 19 Sep 2002
Neil Gaiman is a favourite writer of mine and this is a good showcase for his talent for his dark and potent imagination. Magically he takes that famously surreal map of the London Underground and twists it into something far stranger that lies beneath and behind the real London - a place where the famous station names come alive. Here we have a real angel called Islington, a Earl who holds court on his own underground carriage and a group of religious recluses known as the Black Friars (to name but a few).As with all Gaiman's work, there is a great deal of dark themes in the book (The streets of London Below owe a lot to those areas of London above where the homeless live) and Gaiman makes sure this doesn't turn into a simple one joke idea. His characterisations are absolutely fantastic. Whilst Richard (the hero) is a fairly bland innocent abroad, he balances him against the sly, old Marquis de Carabas and the pantomime villany of Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar - a pair of vicious (and yet comic) characters who look to have shambled straight out of a Victorian nightmare. The story itself is taut, beautifully-written, thought-provoking and a pleasure to read. Not a long read but one I'm sure you will come back to time after time.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
29 of 31 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...
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
8 of 8 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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
London is even more surreal below than it is above, 17 Feb 2004
Neil Gaiman's main character in this book is Richard Mayhew: a bright young man, a Scot living in London for the past 3 years, in securities, a pleasant personality and content to be dominated by his bossy and ambitious girlfriend, Jessica, who recognises his potential. His life is unexciting at this point and consists mainly of working, trailing around museums and art galleries after Jessica and doing as he's told. Then one night, in the midst of obeying Jessica, they encounter a girl - a young woman bleeding on the pavement. Richard's a good chap and goes to help her. Jessica is mortified at the idea of Richard making her late and dirtying his suit to help the poor muck encrusted girl. Richard disobediently picks her up and takes her home. Jessica dis-engages him. His adventure begins.The girl, Door is her name, is a denizen of London Below: a vast city and a different world, where time is different to London Above, there are extraordinary people with special magical skills, people who can talk to rats and birds, ancient, legendary individuals and societies, mythical creatures, an angel, demon-types, vampire-types, darkness with a will. The world is tribal, feudal and competitive. Rivalries can be deadly. The rivalries are put aside on market days. The floating market congeals in different locations. Nobody knows who decides where, but the news of a market is passed from person to person and hordes of buyers and sellers arrive at the appointed time and place. Richard is plunged into this world. He is no longer properly visible to the people of London Above, indicating that he has fallen through the cracks and is now part of London Below. Door is in terrible danger, pursued by the monsters that slaughtered her family. She doesn't know why. She has many friends and she's highly respected in the world below. Richard joins the small group assisting Door in her quest to discover the truth and avenge her family. Richard has to change, grow, focus, toughen up and generally adapt to this hard, dangerous and disturbingly interesting environment. It's a gripping and imaginative plot. Some of the characters are not very plausible but that didn't spoil my enjoyment of the story, once having committed myself to total suspension of disbelief. Anyone who likes fantasy will be likely to enjoy this.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
A Ride Into The Dark Fantastic, 3 Mar 2003
Neil Gaiman uses London as the backdrop of a tale about an average business man who has to escape from the underside, an alternate London made up of sewers, tube stations and doors that lead into strange and dangerous places. Gaiman adds believability to this strange tale by describing real London locations and even Harrods gets a mention. You really feel Gaiman loves talking about London, and you can picture the events in the novel unfold within the dark alley ways, damp sewers, and eerie tube stations of London.Gaiman's other strength is the way he introduces the grotesque yet majestic characters. You feel he really loves the characters he writes about and none of them are ignored as characters that appear briefly in the novel still remain in the readers mind. The novel is quite a dark novel but it is written with some wit especially when we see Richard Mayhew's view point as he struggles to come to terms with the new world he has entered and his dilemma of trying to escape, but inevitably secures emotional relationships with the characters he meets and at times there are many tender moments that touches the reader emotionally. The novel is a triumph of fantasy. It's the sort of novel that introduces strange sets of circumstances that makes the reader feel like the main character Richard lost and somewhat confused, but then with each page the puzzle is revealed, and it's how Gaiman leads the reader through this wonderful world that is the novels biggest achievement.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
TV never did this the justice it deserves., 19 Mar 2002
I don't know how many of you may remember the BBC T.V. series of Neverwhere (if you live in the States even more so). I still have a battered first edition knocking around on my shelf at home. Well read but happy.TV never quite did this justice, and the important thing I realised from re-reading this novel recently is that from doing so I now find very hard to picture it on TV at all. Neither can I picture it transferred as a graphic novel - the form Gaiman is most accreditted to. This is a work all of its own. London below is a brilliant, ironic, dark an foreboding place with fascinates with each new place and character we are shown. I find myself believing that it almost could exist, and Gaiman's use of local historical knowledge and re-working the tube map creates a giant world of which i am left wanting to see more after the book has been finished and returned to the shelf. For the snooty who think of Gaiman as a lesser writer for finding fame in graphic novels, I would strongly suggest you read this book. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. For those who don't have such strange heirs and graces read it also. I did and I've been smitten ever since.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
16 of 18 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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
|
|
Stardust by Neil Gaiman (Paperback - 19 Sep 2005)
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Amazon Home
