On Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere and Portal-Quest Fantasies

Por Augusto Melchior

Neil Gaiman is an english author who wrote several novels, short-stories, comic books, graphic novels and audio theatre. He’s best known for his comic book series The Sandman, as well as the novels The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Good Omens, American Gods and Coraline. Despite that, his very first novel to be published was Neverwhere, in a personal attempt to write a story similar to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and The Chronicles of Narnia series, as well as being a way to keep his sanity while parts of the original story got cut out of the BBC TV series of the same name. 

In Neverwhere, Gaiman tells the story of Richard Mayhew and his trials and tribulations in the so-called London Below. At the beginning of the story, Richard is a young businessman recently moved from Scotland and with a seemingly normal life ahead. One day, a very troubled day indeed, as he walks with his fiancée to dinner to meet her boss, he stops to help a young mysterious girl, who appeared seemingly out of nowhere, with strange colored eyes, odd clothes and a nasty cut on her arm. On the day after that, the girl, whose name is Door and has already recovered greatly, sends Richard to find the Marquis de Carabas, an old friend who will be able to help the girl escape from two infamous assassins. After the girl makes her way to the aforementioned London Below, Richard finds himself invisible to the world he knew, being forced to try to find Lady Door (the girl he had saved) and convince her to help him get back to his normal life.

Throughout the story, with a group made up mainly by Richard, de Carabas, Lady Door and the legendary bodyguard called Hunter, Mayhew must follow Door in a quest to find the angel Islington, supposedly the only one able to give the necessary aid to avenge the death of Door’s family and, then, find a way to put Richard, completely visible and definitely in normal conditions, back in London Above. 

To quote an excerpt from her own work, according to Farah Mendlesohn on the book Rhetorics of Fantasy “there are essentially four categories within the fantastic: the portal-quest, the immersive, the intrusive, and the liminal” fantasies, being the portal-quest fantasy identified by the presence of a fantastic world entered through a portal, just like what happens in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe book from The Chronicles of Narnia series. The objective of this short post is to point out the main aspects of the portal-quest fantasy that have found its way to the novel Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman. 

To begin with, it is easy to say that this novel is certainly a portal fantasy by the way the protagonist enters the fantasy world: despite the intrusive aspect that came from Door falling in front of Richard, apparently from out of nowhere, the main way in which the fantastic is manifested during the story is by the crossing of preexisting doors or the ones created by Lady Door herself (to be fair, Door didn’t fell in front of Richard from out of nowhere, she was down in the sewers running to save her life from Croup and Vandemar – the previously mentioned infamous assassins – and had to create a door for her to open and escape them). 

To exemplify how the protagonist finds his way to the fantastic realm, we can signalize, on the third chapter of the book, that after Richard finds himself invisible to the London Above and in search of something or someone able to help him, there appears a homeless man, named Iliaster, who guides him through the streets of London until he finds an innocent door which directly leaves Richard into the darkness, inside the homeplace of the Rat-Speakers, located somewhere in London Below (WAIT! Rat-Speakers? Is that a band? No! The Rat-Speakers are part of the fantastic world: they are people who used to live on the streets, but then are helped by rats and started working for them because rats doesn’t have thumbs – with that said, it is clear that by this point Richard has already truly entered the fantastic realm and is, indeed, in what could be called a portal-fantasy). 

Apart from that, there is still the “quest” aspect of the term “portal-QUEST fantasy”: Mendlesohn states that not all portal fantasies have to be quest fantasies, but the vast majority of them are. Neverwhere certainly is a portal-quest fantasy, bringing with it the characteristics associated with both portal and quest narratives. When we think about what motivates the protagonist during the story, similarly to what Bilbo Baggins do in The Hobbit, written by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1937, we can see that Richard Mayhew spends most of the time thinking that what he is going through is dangerous, crazy or insane, and that all that he needed was a simple cup of tea to drink while making what normal people (all of us from the world above) usually do, especially on sundays: sleep, watch TV, visit museums, etc.

As the story goes on, we as readers never get to fully comprehend or simply entirely meet the London Below, not only because it is as big as the real London, but because it is as big as the amount of things people tend to ignore: as a metaphor to marginalized people, forgotten ideas, the things from the past that people think didn’t happen or doesn’t have that much importance, Gaiman works diligently on the description of this fictional place. That one is another important trace of the portal-quest fantasy stories, since it is through the accumulation of detail that the author convinces the audience of his reliability and, therefore, the validity of the fantasy world he created, for secondary worlds can only be accepted through the insistence on a received truth embodied in elaboration. 

To summarize, it is clear that Gaiman’s novel presents the main aspects of a portal-quest fantasy clarified by Farah Mendlesohn on the Rhetorics of Fantasy, and in trying to create what could be seen as an adult version of the Wonderland visited by Alice in Carroll’s book, the creator of such fantasyland managed to generate a proper portal-quest fantasy, presenting a story of a man in a journey to get his life back to normal, despite facing the fact that a normal life-style is probably not what he really needed.