Just as Neil Gaiman turned up on more events and panels at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con than anyone else, so too his works keep showing up in this column. I make no apologies for this: he is incredibly prolific and is surely the most important creative figure in current comics. His output ranges into other media, as well, and in this column I will examine some of his ventures into television and books without comics.
As in my previous column, I can’t deal properly with the themes in these stories unless I talk about their endings, so those who insist on spoiler warnings are hereby put on alert.
NEVERWHERE
It seems odd but very welcome that A&E Home Video has released Neil Gaiman’s 1996 fantasy miniseries for the BBC, Neverwhere, on DVD in the United States. I’m used to associating A&E Home Video with series that I’ve actually seen on the A&E television network. But as far as I know, Neverwhere has never been shown on United States television. In his commentary on the DVDs, Gaiman even talks about the fuzziness of the duped videotapes of Neverwhere that get sold on eB3ay, and how he prefers that look to the crystal clarity of the original version.
Those of us who don’t deal in pirated videos have been waiting a long time to see this series. It was years ago that I bought Gaiman’s Neverwhere novel, which was written after the series was shot, on a trip I made to London before the American edition of the book came out.
It’s interesting that though the series itself is simply titled Neverwhere, A&E is selling the DVD set under the title Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. Gaiman may not be a household name, but this signals A&E’s awareness of Gaiman’s growing fame, in niche markets, true, but big ones. The set includes a BBC interview with Gaiman about the series and a new commentary track, recorded by Gaiman earlier this year. The track is low on thematic analysis but full of anecdotes about the filming of the series, wittily and pleasantly recounted by Gaiman. More DVD commentary tracks should be this enjoyably comfortable to sit back and listen to.
By coincidence, on the same day I was watching some of the Neverwhere episodes, I also saw Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 film comedy What’s Up, Doc? on television. This movie, inspired by Howard Hawks’ 1932 screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, borrows from the earlier film the premise of a male protagonist with unrealized inner potential, who is stuck leading a humdrum life and is engaged to marry the wrong woman, a conventional sort who is (in Hawks) disapproving, or (in Bogdanovich) a nag. In the course of each film, the male protagonist is drawn by an alluring and decidedly unconventional woman into a series of misadventures, during which he shakes off his emotional repressions, proves capable in coping with danger, realizes that his new female guide through this seeming chaos is his proper mate, and parts with his original fianc¿e. It was a surprise to realize that Neverwhere shares this same starting point for its protagonist and follows a similar pattern, but in terms of fantasy adventure, not screwball comedy. Still, perhaps the resemblance between Neverwhere‘s basic plot and comedy is significant. Though death, madness and pain are all involved, Neverwhere is a considerably more optimistic work than much of Endless Nights. In his commentary, Gaiman repeatedly likens Neverwhere to Doctor Who. That seems right, and not just because both are British fantasies done for television on low budgets: Neverwhere is more sophisticated than Doctor Who, but it’s basically an intelligent light entertainment.
The title Neverwhere evokes the name of the enchanted realm of another British fantasy writer, Sir James Barrie’s Neverland, and Neverwhere‘s hero, Richard Mayhew, is something of an adult Lost Boy.
Neverwhere‘s protagonist, Richard Mayhew, has what appears to be the kind of dull office job that creative types abhor, and is engaged to Jessica, a woman who is indeed so wrong that it’s hard to see how they got to the point of planning to marry: she’s controlling, pompous, and utterly contemptuous of the poor and homeless. Hence, when Richard and Jessica come across what appears to be a wounded homeless woman lying on a London sidewalk, Jessica wants to abandon the unfortunate woman, while the kindhearted Richard insists on helping her. It turns out that the wounded woman is Door, a denizen of London Below, a realm whose existence is unsuspected by ordinary Londoners. She has the power to create and open doorways where none existed, and she ends up figuratively serving as Richard’s “door” from his everyday reality into hers.
In Joseph Campbell’s outline of the pattern of all stories of heroes’ journeys, the hero crosses from the world of his normal existence across a threshold into a literally or figuratively enchanted world, wherein his quest takes place. Door’s very name signifies her role as an opener of thresholds, and London Below is a literally enchanted realm, where magic does indeed exist.
Further, London Below is an example of specific kind of enchanted world, which I will dub the Secret World, a realm that exists near us, even around us, but whose existence is unsuspected by the vast majority of people. The Secret World concept can be found in The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Shadows, and Marvel’s Doctor Strange: in each case the heroes combat paranormal menaces to defend people – individuals, a family, a town, or even the world – from threats in or near the world in which they live, but of which most people remain ignorant.
London Below also strikes me as being like an urban, distinctly less beautiful version of the greenwood of Shakespeare’s plays. Here identities may shift, and transformations may occur. It is often a more primitive world, reminiscent of the past, where good and evil are more clearly defined, and where magic and other paranormal forces manifest themselves. L. Frank Baum’s Oz is just such a place, and Neverwhere explicitly alludes to The Wizard of Oz twice.
As the series points out, despite its name, London Below also encompasses rooftops, deserted buildings, even a retired battleship, and is “everywhere.” Nonetheless, as its very name signifies, London Below is primarily an underworld. In fact, much of the story takes place in London’s underground rail system, which Americans would call the subway, but which the British call the tube or, more properly, the London Underground. Hence Richard’s quest in Neverwhere entails a descent into the underworld and confrontations with figures of death (the deadly and amusing assassins Messrs. Croup and Vandermar, who to my mind steal the show, and the dreaded Beast of London, which, as Gaiman complains, was supposed to be played by a wild boar but ended up being incarnated by a rather inoffensive-looking bull).
This underworld even comes complete with a presiding angel in exile. I must say, though, that despite the neat effect of light reflecting from the angel’s costume, I find the angel to be a disappointment. Too often angels in fiction, as here, just seem to be humans with magic abilities. Surely angels, if they exist, are beings of a higher order than humanity, with minds and modes of thinking very different than ours.
London Below includes what is explicitly called a labyrinth, a literal means of picturing the seemingly chaotic twists and turns that a heroic quest may take. (Note that the cover of 1602 #2 likewise pictures a labyrinth. Since mythology’s most famous labyrinth housed the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, perhaps the Beast was well cast, after all.)
I did not spot any allusions to Lewis Carroll in Neverwhere, but, of course, Wonderland is also an underworld, and the looking glass serves as a “door” to another world. Just as Carroll used playing cards and chess pieces as inspirations for characters, so too Gaiman based characters in Neverwhere on a familiar set of preexisting names. Gaiman uses the amusing device of asserting that the colorful names of London Underground stations actually bear significance that is unknown to, or forgotten by, the upper world. Hence, there actually is an Earl and his court associated with the Earl’s Court station, and there are African-British friars based at the station named Blackfriars. (Neverwhere informs us that other cities, including New York, have their own underground communities, although few of the names of New York’s subway stations could spark such imaginative creations.)
I very much like one twist that Gaiman gives the motif of crossing the threshold into the enchanted world. In Neverwhere it seems that at least some of the homeless people on the streets of London are actually members of the London Below community. It is not simply insensitivity that keeps more prosperous Londoners from paying attention to these people, but some form of magic. Richard’s interest in helping the wounded Door apparently signifies that he belongs more to her world than his own. After his initial venture into London Below, Richard returns to the everyday world only to discover that the spell now affects him: people don’t remember or recognize him, or in most cases, even notice him. Having crossed the threshold without completing the quest (aiding Door in avenging her family’s death), Richard cannot now return to his normal life. He therefore returns to London Below and engages in the series of adventures in which his innate heroism emerges and is proven. Only then can he return to London Above and be recognized as a member of its community.
The principal pleasures of watching Neverwhere lie in watching Gaiman, the director, actors, designers and the rest create this other world before our eyes, with its colorful characters and its new perspective on London settings. In terms of creating the proverbial sense of wonder, it’s a success.
My problem with it is that the hero, Richard Mayhew, doesn’t match the grandeur of the concept. He just doesn’t strike me as the potential hero capable of performing the feats assigned to him. To me he never believably rises far above the character at the beginning, who, as noted, could just as easily have been the lead in a comedy. Perhaps the large role plated by Richard’s ally, the Marquis de Calabas, a more credibly capable and commanding figure, inadvertently attests to Richard’s drawbacks as the story’s protagonist. Why is Richard the one able to survive the Blackfriars’ ordeal, and to slay the dreaded moocow – I mean, the Beast – when so many before him have failed? The story requires that Richard’s adventures bring out his untapped potential, but never see what is so special about him. Moreover, Gaiman’s commentary insists that the continuing allure that London Below has for Richard is not because of the adorable Door. Still, their final scene together made me think that there should have been a romance between them: something felt missing from the story, and that was it.
I have another problem with Neverwhere, as well. According to Joseph Campbell’s heroic monomyth, the hero ultimately returns from the enchanted realm to the normal world from which he came, having gained something valuable from his experience. But perhaps Campbell is wrong, and this does not always happen. Luke Skywalker does not return to live on Tatooine at the end of Star Wars, or of the entire trilogy. In an interview on Turner Classic Movies about The Wizard of Oz, director John Waters disagreed with the ending: why would anyone prefer Kansas to Oz? And indeed, in a later Oz book, creator L. Frank Baum moved Dorothy and her uncle and aunt to Oz permanently. Why return to the place one had to escape from to find one’s true self? There is the saying that one can’t go home again: sometimes the hero should remain in the world wherein he fulfilled his true potential.
So, in the last episode of Neverwhere, Richard returns to London Above. Having completed his quest, Richard is once again recognized by friends and coworkers, and is better off than he was when he started. And yet he is dissatisfied, wants to return to London Below, and in the series’ final moments, succeeds in doing so. The series’ ending thus becomes another “here we go again” moment, as at the end of The Wolves in the Walls.
I see what Gaiman is trying to do with this ending, but it doesn’t work for me. What is really so appealing about London Below? It’s a world of adventure, certainly, where Richard has the opportunity to act heroically, unlike the workaday world. But is it a place to relax, to enjoy life, to meet people who don’t carry weapons, to create art? Even freed of three humanoid embodiments of evil and the Beast, it is a nasty, dismal place with plenty of other dangerous denizens. When, on leaving the darkness of London Below after the villains’ defeat, Richard reemerged into Trafalgar Square, filled, uncharacteristically, I admit, with light, I recalled my own happy memories associated with the place on my London trips. Gosh, what’s so wrong with this? The man who is tired of London Above is tired of life, to amend Dr. Johnson.
Maybe if there was ever a television sequel to Neverwhere or a movie version, I could get to see Gaiman’s rendition of my own favorite name of a London Underground station: Elephant and Castle. I can see why they didn’t have the budget to do this in the TV series (They couldn’t even get a proper Beast, after all). I wonder if the inhabitant of Elephant and Castle would end up looking like the title character in Barry Windsor-Smith’s classic visualization of the Conan story The Tower of the Elephant, eh? (Or maybe what we should see is an adaptation of Neverwhere or sequel done in comics form.)
THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS
Next up in this all-Gaiman column comes the The Wolves in the Walls, a delightfully inventive, literate and amusing book written by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean, and published by HarperCollins. This is different from the projects I’ve critiqued above: this is intended as a children’s book. And yet, it’s not all that different, since characteristic Neil Gaiman themes turn up here as well.
That solves the problem of how I, an adult without children of my own, can review a children’s book. I can’t really regain a child’s perspective. I do recall that images can have more power for children than for adults, who have grown more jaded, or more accustomed to dealing with the unpleasant. Hence I suspect that children may find Dave McKean’s human figures, looking like sculpted dolls, eerie and disturbing.
But I can describe how I think the book works thematically.
One of its themes, and a highly appropriate one for a children’s book, is that of a new generation asserting itself. It is the young heroine, Lucy, who hears the sounds coming from the walls, and realizes that there are wolves within. Wolves don’t have a good reputation in fairy tales and hence are good representatives of the dark, threatening Shadow forces.
Lucy knows something that her elders – her parents – refuse to acknowledge. Both her mother and father (a) deny that there are wolves in the walls, and (B) claim that if the wolves come out of the walls, “it’s all over.” This is, of course, a contradiction that the parents won’t admit to: they deny that the wolves exist,. but are frightened of them nonetheless. The parents are simultaneously in denial and repressing fear. And that fear may be irrational. Lucy wants to know what “it” is, but her parents will not explain. (“It” could symbolize any bad thing that parents will not tell a child about, even if the child senses that “it” exists.) The parents do not question the idea that if the wolves emerge from the walls, “it’s all over,” although Lucy, the member of a new generation, does.
Then again, not everyone in the new generation can see through the elders’ denials and fears. Lucy’s brother says his teacher also says “it’s all over” if the wolves emerge, and the brother does not question this. He just goes along with his elders’ conventional wisdom. The parents and brother all busily try to rationalize the sounds away: it’s mice, or rats, or bats, anything small and easily dealt with.
The wolves finally emerge from the walls when Lucy is asleep. This may suggest that they also represent unruly forces in the subconscious, the Id. That would suggest that the “it” that the parents fear may be a side of Lucy they do not comprehend: her growing independence, perhaps.
With the wolves loose, the other family members panic and flee from the house. Note that Lucy does not flee herself: she is carried off by her frightened father, and McKean portrays her looking and pointing back.
Willing to give in to their fears, the other family members want to move far away. Lucy, on the other hand, wants to recover her beloved pig puppet that was left behind. Is the puppet like a child to which she feels responsibility? Or perhaps like a vulnerable part of herself? That would cast Lucy in the role of a parent, while her actual parents are behaving childishly. By being separated from her home and the pig puppet, Lucy has been rendered incomplete.
In order to rescue the puppet, Lucy enters the wall of her bedroom, where the wolves once lurked. So she is taking over their role, becoming a Shadow figure herself in her subconscious (as represented by the bedroom, the place of dreaming), taking on aspects of the Shadow in order to defeat the greater Shadow.
From the walls she sees a wolf sleeping on her bed, and even wearing her socks. Not only has the wolf usurped her rightful position (and even her bed and clothes), but this suggests that the wolf may indeed represent some aspect of herself.
Lucy rescues and hugs the puppet. Returning to her family, she goes to sleep, cradling the puppet. If the puppet represents a benign aspect of herself, then she is again complete, and can now take action against the Shadow once she awakes, in a sense reborn.
Whereas the other members of her family have given up and plan to live somewhere else, it is Lucy who declares that they should reclaim their house. She has the vitality and drive the older generation (and their follower, her brother) lack. She persuades them to follow her example and enter the walls of the house.
From there Lucy and her family watch the wolves, these terrible Shadow figures, engaged in their dreadful evil: “The wolves were giving a party.” (This is why I instructed you to remember that the intruding revelers in the “Desire” story in Endless Nights, who were also defeated by a plucky female, were likened to wolves.) We are told that some of the wolves had donned the family’s “nicest clothes”; again, this not only designates the wolves as usurpers of the family’s roles, but suggests that they embody the family’s id, not just Lucy’s.
Now, the wolves’ rampage in The Wolves in the Walls is pretty silly compared to the actions of the wolfish strangers in the “Desire” story. One might have expected that, even in a children’s book, wolves, known for swallowing and impersonating grandmothers in one famous fairy tale, would perpetrate something worse than “singing and dancing and telling jokes.” You mean, like a raucous party of adults in a child’s home? One wolf is playing with Lucy’s brother’s videogames. Another wolf is playing her father’s tuba. Again, perhaps the wolves represent the family themselves, taken to excess. These wolves are lords of misrule.
Gaiman and McKean even give us the image of wolves with their mouths smeared with red. It looks like blood, but it turns out to be Lucy’s homemade jam.
I suspect that Gaiman and McKean are making the wolves look silly and funny, specifically in order to undercut their ability to terrify. By treating them humorously, Gaiman and McKean reduce the wolves, initially presented as unspeakably fearsome, to something that the readers and Lucy can feel superior to.
Lucy is the first to rebel against the wolves, picking up a chair leg as a weapon. The other three family members speak the same words of exasperation with the wolves, in unison, following her lead.
The family have taken over the role the wolves once had: they have become the wolves’ Shadow. When the family burst out of the walls, the wolves echo the parents’ and brother’s earlier behavior. The wolves cry out that “It’s all over,” panic and flee the house. The family, for their part, seem to be imitating the wolves: “whooping and singing people songs,” and perhaps acting livelier than they once did. The wolves are scapegoats, permanently expelled from the house: they intend to flee to far off places, as Lucy’s family once did, but the wolves have no Lucy to urge them to stay. If the wolves represented disturbing forces in the family’s subconscious, then those forces have been dealt with permanently.
But I wonder if the story works entirely as Gaiman and McKean presumably intended. McKean makes the wolves look rather funny and appealing. The wolves may have made a mess of the house, but they seemed livelier and a lot more fun than Lucy’s family did. Isn’t fun preferable to stodginess?
The book’s ending likewise may be more ambiguous than its creators may have intended. Like Neverwhere, it ends on a note of “here we go again.” Now Lucy hears elephants in the walls. What are we to make of this? Joseph Campbell contended that one must go on figurative quests all one’s life, continually remaking oneself, lest one become stagnant. So moving from coping with wolves to coping with elephants is rising to the next phase in one’s development. The ending might also suggest that Lucy is trapped in an ironic cycle, and that she will never reach a point of lasting success and peace. But perhaps Gaiman intends this to be a positive cycle: the fun is about to start again, since by now the readers surely have no doubt that Lucy will triumph once more. So the end is the equivalent of getting back onto the roller coaster again for another fun ride.
1602 #3
Finally, I’m continuing to keep up with Gaiman’s ongoing Marvel limited series, 1602, having now read the third issue. I am pleased to see that I was right on target about Magneto, and not pleased to see I was equally right about Gaiman’s conception of Nick Fury, who in issue 3 considers torture as a viable option.
One of our readers has suggested that Virginia Dare is Snowbird. That would certainly account for her blonde-white hair and ability to turn into white animals. But Snowbird, whom John Byrne created for the Canadian superhero team Alpha Flight, is the daughter of an Eskimo goddess and can only transform herself into animals native to Canada. What would she be doing as far south as Virginia? We are told that Virginia Dare can turn into a horse, but horses are not native to Canada. Moreover, every other recognizable classic Marvel character in this series so far is someone who appeared in the 1960s, and was written by Stan Lee. Why would Snowbird be the only exception to the rule?
Meanwhile, there are plenty of small pleasures to be taken in the third issue. There is the scene between the Grand Inquisitor and Brother Tomas, in which the two men threaten one another in quiet, understated, and at first indirect ways, so different from the usual banal ranting of comic book villains. There’s the delightful moment in which the Black Widow is charmed that Matt Murdock thinks her the most dangerous woman alive. Gaiman finds refreshingly different ways for familiar characters to express themselves, as in the Watcher’s opening speech, or Angel’s simple declaration that Javier’s/Xavier’s refuge enables him simply to be himself. I especially like the scene of Javier in prayer. It contrasts him with the hypocritical Grand Inquisitor, but also provides insight into Xavier’s overall role in the X-Men. Even in “normal” continuity, Xavier’s vision makes him a prophet and a preacher who has gathered around him a flock of believers, seeking to bring about a better world. Xavier is a secular saint for the cause of mutant rights.
One might think that in the course of these two long column that I’ve covered all the Neil Gaiman projects that came out recently. But there are, of course, more issues of 1602 to come. And he’s got a story in Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s new Little Lit anthology too, itself the subject of a future column. Gaiman writes about the Master of Dreams and yet the man clearly never sleeps.
–Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
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