NEVERWHERE

By Neil Gaiman

When you create yourself from scratch you need a model of some kind, something to aim towards or head away from - all the things you want to be or intentionally want not to be.

This is why I love book groups. My daughter and I are in a book group together, a collection of mothers and daughters from her school days and our lives today. In this group I am invited to read books I might otherwise pass by. And without the book group I might read the books, but wouldn’t have the same experience of them.

We just finished Neil Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE and discussing it in book group invited a satisfying mosaic of responses.

We began with a classic look at the book’s hero, Richard, and his journey to learn about what was important to him, to be challenged by Gaiman’s hallmark fanciful collection of bad guys and obstacles. But then we went a level further. We speculated on the archetypes of Richard’s friends Door, Hunter, and Anesthesia. (Names like those are packed with meaning, no?)

Then we went further to discuss the symbolism of his fantasy world in the London Underground, populated by characters who have slipped through the cracks of London Aboveground. Characters typically dismissed, shunned and rejected. We explored the possibility of slipping, as our hero Richard did, into a fantasy world of our own making, and whether, in the end the story was of the hero’s adventures in reality or his mental breakdown. And the speculation about where reality ends and fantasy begins.

And finally, I couldn’t help but bring up the possibility of London’s Underground serving as an archetype for our subconscious. For that dark and sometimes scary place within our psyche that we also dismiss and to which we exile all within ourselves we would rather not contend with. I enjoyed playing with the symbolism of a character named Door who opens the way for me, a character named Hunter who fights my dragons, and finally, one named Anesthesia who shields me from pain.

But pretty sure that’s not really what Neil Gaiman was going for with this story. I’m pretty sure he was simply crafting a fanciful story where even the bad guys are funny buffoons.

Or was he? Creating yourself from scratch? That crafty guy…..