Just Finished Reading Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere

The novel Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman, is a fantasy exercise into an alternate reality secretly coexisting with the conventional real world.  In this it bears a slight resemblance to the world of Harry Potter in that those on the "other side"...in Gaiman's case those dwellers of "London Below"...are aware of the conventional inhabitants (or "muggles", with Potter), but the reverse isn't necessarily true.  The protagonist, a young man named Richard Mayhew, painfully discovers  this.  He has moved to London and has a budding, successful career underway as a financial trader.  He is also newly engaged to Jessica, who besides being beautiful is a bit on the controlling side.  One day, they are walking down the street and they come across a teenage girl lying and bleeding.  Richard stops to care for her and Jessica leaves in an angry huff, hardly thinking about the girl and her plight.  This insensitivity on her part is later explained by the fact that those living "above" are incapable of holding on to thoughts or memories about those  dwelling "below"...and the injured girl, named Door (appropriately named, for she has a special knack for opening them), is one of the latter.  But Richard, by taking her in and caring for her, has himself inadvertently slipped through into London Below and cannot return to his former life...no one remembers or recognizes him anymore.  Returning to London Below, he becomes further drawn into the drama as Door flees from two sadistic hired murderers, Croup and Vandemar, and helps her try to discover who hired them to kill her family.  He meets up with what I call a "wild card" character in the Marquis de Carabas, a scoundrel who nevertheless seems to be fighting on the side of Door.  But is he really?

Neverwhere, besides creating an enchanting imaginary world of a complete, hidden society underneath London proper, examines the ideas of loyalty and betrayal...and how, on the one hand it is so easy to rationalize one's betrayal of another...and on the other hand, betrayal sometimes seems to be impossible to avoid, even with the best of intentions.  The character of Richard Mayhew reminded me a bit of another fantasy fiction hero, Bilbo Baggins of The Hobbit.  Like Bilbo, Richard is rather ordinary and believable, with his compassion for those who are suffering being a strong trait of his...

As is usually the case when I write about books I've read, I'll leave what happens to Richard, Door, the Marquis, and those two awfully bad dudes to you, the reader, should you decide on take on this book.  This story is a maze of plot twists and turns...just when you think that things are improving, you discover that they're getting worse instead (and vice versa)...it can almost get to be a little dizzying. But that's a positive feature of Neverwhere, as I see it...which, among its other qualities, is why I recommend Neil Gaiman's book, which I recently discovered was also adapted as a BBC-TV series in the late 1990s...