TV series: Humphreys, Dewi, dir., Gaiman, N., and Henry, L., Neverwhere, BBC, 1996. 

Multiple languages

Richard Mayhew is a young businessman recently moved to London where his job is almost as dull as his fiancé, a demanding and over-bearing social climber. One night he stumbles over a girl lying injured on the sidewalk. When he stops to help her, he inadvertently opens himself up to a second fantastical world – London Below, an underworld city that shadows the real London. Neverwhere involves a character descending into the Underworld, Odysseus-like, to see what lies beyond the everyday and to face his mortality. As the Marquis de Carabas explains to Richard, London Below is the Underside, the place full of people who fell through the cracks in the world. The more involved Richard becomes with the Below, the more he vanishes from the Above, suggesting the notion that one can only be dead OR alive, never both. The Below is filled with murderers, monsters, warriors and angels navigating lives that take them through the sewer canals and abandoned subways of underground London, known as the Neverwhere. The girl, Door, rescued by Richard is a person of great power, but also a fugitive with powerful enemies. While Richard would prefer to return to his mundane life, when this proves impossible, he reluctantly joins her quest to find those who killed her family and to destroy the evil force intent on destroying the whole of the Below. The two face a series of episodic trials, also in the tradition of the Iliad and the Odyssey, overcoming evil, but also their own natures to triumph. In effect, this makes Richard a classical hero with a modern twist. The forces of evil are incarnate in the Angel of Islington, though they also appear as the "shadow-self," which tempts Richard to remove himself from the quest. When Richard and Door finally triumph, he is able to return to his life Above, which now seems both inadequately adventurous and disturbingly shallow. Richard’s final choice is to make his way to the place where he felt the most himself, in the Below.

Neverwhere is Gaiman’s first novel (a novelisation of the television series he co-created for the BBC) and begins a series of novels with deep mythological underpinnings. Gaiman is interested in the growth and journey of the individual, particularly children and young adults through their interactions with the fantastical, mythological and paranormal. Neverwhere, set in and below London, uses ideas of the Underworld, the Odyssey, the shadow self and guardians such as the Minotaur and Cerberus, to create a separate mirror world that teaches Richard more about himself than London above was able to do. London Below allows Richard to see himself in a role he never would have been able to take on in the Above – hero, protector and pro-active protagonist. He is a modern Odysseus, facing a journey he did not want but learning more than he could have imagined. Gaiman mixes myth with his use of other traditions, such as fairytales and religious traditions. The Marquis de Carabas is a modern "puss in boots," a mercenary for hire who ends up becoming the revolutionary, a dandy who becomes a figure Christ-like in his sacrifice, martyrdom and resurrection. He also journeys to self-knowledge, changing from a man who required payment for services to the man who returns Richard to the Below for no fee. The Angel Islington is another religious reference, in this case, the fallen angel (or Satan/Lucifer) who is beguiling but nefarious. Lamia of The Velvets is a vampiric Succubus, a modern reflection of Lamia, Zeus’s mistress and child eater. Door is both Oracle to Richard, and traveller herself, taking part in a quest for both knowledge and revenge that introduces her to many archetypal characters and eventually reveals to her, her own role in the story – that of unifying, of the Below, and of Richard’s two versions of himself. The most obvious classical allusion in the text is that of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur (the Beast of London), which must be fought and defeated by Richard and Hunter. Only Richard survives this encounter.

Elber-Aviram, Hadas, “'The Past Is Below Us’: Urban Fantasy, Urban Archaeology, and the Recovery of Suppressed History.” The Institute of Archaeology 23 (2013). 

Kidder, Orion, “Fantastic philosophy”, Extrapolation 54 (2013): 326.

Onega, Susana “The Mythical Impulse in British Historiographic Metafiction”, European Journal of English Studies 1. 2 (1997): 184 –204. 

Romero-Jódar, Andrés, “Subversions of the Mythical Canon in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere”, Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica 31–32 (2006): 163–195.