Neverwhere

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Nov 8, 1999

I am going to take a little step away from the films here and talk about British TV series called Neverwhere, now available on video. We're not talking about American style series that go on and on, this series is nothing but a relatively cheaply made six-hour movie. Two people responsible for it are Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, writer and painter, two friends responsible for an enormous amount of amazing works of in literature and comic book world, books like Mr. Punch, The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish and a comic that brought them fame, The Sandman.

BBC wanted Gaiman to write about problem of homelessness in Britain and he did try, but shortly after understood that everything he would write would come out as a celebration of that particular way of life. He went on and created a story about the mystical underworld that exists below the every major city in the world.

Neverwhere is Gaiman's second solo writing project, first novel after Sandman. It can be best explained as his celebration of the life in the mind, life of magic influenced by every major British writer.

Richard Mayhew is a Scot, living in London with a suit and a tie job, with a fiancée that controls him, takes every joy out of being alive. On his way to dinner with his fiancée, he finds a girl covered in blood, in ragged clothes. Out of kindness of his heart, he picks her up and helps her, learns her name, Door, as we will learn later is named by her ability to open things, doors, penetrate through where it seems impossible and he is briefly exposed to the world the girl belongs to, its magic and danger. Tomorrow, when she left, he discovers that he has been erased from his life, he is invisible to other people, everyone has forgotten him, his landlord rents out his apartment from under him, his bank cards work no more.

He is left with the only choice, to find the girl he helped. He goes to Harrods, to the Floating Market of the London Below where its inhabitants exchange goods and information, wonderfully described setting of strange and ridiculous world of wonders, finds the girl and is propelled to an amazing journey through the London underworld. Having the perhaps most developed subway system in the world, London Underground, the tube looks like the world of its own, setting the logical place for Gaiman's world of magic. At Earl's Court, there is a real Earl inside a subway train, with his entourage, the menaces of the story are depicted in two sadistic brothers with different last names, hired by a mysterious person to harm Door and her companions, Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar,

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