Sunday Salon - Neverwhere , fantasy at its best

I read Neverwhere for Carl's Once Upon A Time 3 challenge (yes, I still have to do the wrap-up....). As is usual for me, I come upon authors late, and read their earlier books much later after other people often do. This has been the case with Neil Gaiman. Of all his novels, I believe American Gods was the first one I read by him! I'd read his short story collection Smoke and Mirrors while in England. They both almost made it onto my books of the year list, but not quite; American Gods was fascinating, but I felt somewhat removed from what happened to the character, and I still can't quite figure out why, since I enjoyed it very much. So when I read Neverwhere, after hearing for some time on our blogging world about how it's possibly one of his best written, I knew it was going to be good; except for the odd short story, I haven't read anything by him that I haven't really enjoyed. I wasn't prepared for how good Neverwhere is. It is possibly the best book he's written, or at least in a close tie with The Graveyard Book, which is one of those books that I keep turning over in my mind.

An aside here: the reason Smoke and Mirrors didn't make it on my list of favourite books for that year, is because by far the most effective story in it is in Neil's introduction, about the wedding gift - the letter - he gave his friends (or was going to give.) Very very creepy, but not an actual story! That one I can't get out of my head! Although I read it so long ago that I have to re-read it to see if Snow, Glass, Apples is as frightening as I remember....as a whole, short story collections don't make it onto my favourite reads for that year. I don't know why, it might have something to do with the unevenness - no short story collection is perfect, which is why Locus, the Nebula and World Fantasy awards have 'best novella' and 'best short story' categories........Although, I do here have to make a comment for Fragile Things, which I did read last year. In the confusion of being sick (I got strep throat in Nov) and going to England, I did finish Fragile Things, but it got left off my list of books read, and looking back now, it's not even on my list of favourite books of last year. Which is just wrong, because despite what I just wrote about short story collections, I think it's one of the best short story collections ever written! I'll have to create a special place for it, maybe one of those lists of 'books I've overlooked and don't know how this happened' kind......maybe a short story collection list......

Anyway, back to Neverwhere: On the post I wrote for Fantasy and Science Fiction Day three days ago, Nymeth left me a comment about Neverwhere that catches what I was attempting to say about why fantasy is relevant to our modern life. Nymeth wrote: ..."especially what you said about how fantasy creates myths for today. It reminded me of how I felt looking at the names of underground stations in London after reading Neverwhere. I know the stories are not real - and yet having them at the back of my mind makes my life a little better, a little richer, a little more mysterious. That's what myths do."

Nymeth is absolutely right. I'd just been to London at Christmas, so the Tube was fresh in my mind, as well as central London, where we spent most of our time visiting. I am in a way glad that I read Neverwhere after I was in London. Because I'm not sure I could have gone down into the Tube again. I'm pretty sure I'd be looking for doors and hidden staircases that no one else seemed to see....

Also, ever since the film An American Werewolf in London 20 years ago, I've never been able to be really comfortable in London's Tube. Plus, I hate being underground anyway. Even if it's a great way to get around London - and it is - I want fresh air and to know that at anytime, I can get away if I have to. Always now in the back of my mind is the memory of July 2005, and the bombings on the Tube . So, with all this already in my mind, already predisposed to think the Underground as fairly creepy, I opened Neverwhere.

Neverwhere is the story of Richard Mayhew and how one night, he rescues a girl who is bleeding and in distress. She turns out to be the only survivor of her family, who were massacred previously. She lives in the Underworld, where Richard follows her after he is threatened by the men who are her would-be assassins. How Richard finds her, and helps her, and what he discovers on his journey underground, makes for a fabulous imagining of what London's Underground world could be like.

Gaiman has held back nothing in creating this underworld, 'London Below Ground'. There are references to myths and fairy tales, there are monsters, evil characters and heroes. All set in a world just a little below where we live. This is real fantasy. I particularly like that Gaiman holds nothing back - one character dies, that had me yelling out "no!" and crying, in a horrific scene that is among the worst nightmare voyages across a bridge that I have ever read. There is betrayal, some satisfying - what happens to the two assassins is particulary fun to read, if graphic! - and some astonishing. I want to go to that moving market, even if it is scary and nightmarish, it still looks fun! And I really want another story with Door. I think she is the best female character he has created so far, with the exception of Coraline. I liked Door. I didn't like Richard at the beginning - I really wanted him to get a spine, the way his fiancee pushed him around! - but by the end, I did. I understood his decision, even as it feels like a loss to the world. And it is.

The power of Neverwhere is that even though Richard becomes an outcast as we would describe it 'Above World', he really finds himself in the underworld. It is a very accurate retelling of the Hero's Journey as Campbell describes it in A Hero With A Thousand Faces, except the message Richard would bring back, about this alternate society below ground, is completely unaccepted and unacceptable to the real world. No one wants to know there is a whole society underground. So all the things Richard learns about himself, all the strengths and skills he acquires, the position he attains, can't be brought out into the real world. It is an unfinished journey for the world, but for Richard his journey is done, and in the end he has to choose where he lives.

Now when I think of London's Underground, as well as all the layers I previously mentioned colouring how I see it, I have Neverwhere transfiguring it. All the way through the book, as Nymeth says, I looked at the names of the Underground stations used in the book, and I remembered what they were really like when I last saw them, and then superimposed Neverwhere's version of the Tube. *shiver* This is what really good urban fantasy does. It reimagines our landscape, using fairy tales, myths, shadows, and 'what if's' to show the landscape in a different light. Pure magic.

This book is dark and frightening and as disgusting as you would imagine life without light far in the earth to be, and it is weirdly wonderful and true and eerie, like a dark carnival. I found myself liking life underground better - there was more honesty it seemed in the life and death situations and in the rules followed, than in London Above, where Richard finds success empty if it has no meaning.

This book also reminds me about the cost of making a journey for the soul. We either take the journey and discover something precious, or we don't take it, and life half a life, where nothing is very deep. If the journey is taken, something is always lost, or has to be given up, by the hero at the end, even if it is the lie that was the previous life, or love that didn't last, or the future only half dreamt of. I know which I prefer. Neverwhere is a powerful work of fantasy. Like Coraline, it brings you through to the other side safely. It's a very dark trip, but one well worth taking.

I've already lent the book to one of my friends to read. It's one of my favourite books of this year.

I do have to say though, I still prefer to see London by double-decker red bus!

Finished! OUT2 and A Midsummer Night's Dream

Hurray! OUT2 is completed!!! I finished A Midsummer's Night Dream just before midnight. Yes, it is now after midnight! I did it, my very first challenge completed! This is such a relief - I do sign up for the challenges intending to read all the books, and I want to read them all! So to finish a challenge means something to me.

It was a fun one too. I enjoyed so much reading fantasy, fantasy, and more fantasy. And not just any fantasy, but fairy tales and novels about fairies, magic, about the quest of the heroic self in literature and myth, and finally ending on sweet William Shakespeare. This is a wonderful challenge and I fully intend to do it again next year.

So, two reviews and I've reviewed everything in the challenge:
The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. I have put off reviewing this book because I don't have the words to describe how powerful it is to read. My copy (which is from 1954 and now falling apart) is bookmarked all the way through. I found so much that was rich with ideas about the myth of the heroic journey that was interesting and powerful. Campbell has taken a great many of the world's religions and myths from different cultures and analyzed them for the source and description of the heroic journey. He has mined fairy tales, folklore, primitive ( how I hate this word! 'first peoples', maybe?) people's myths - Native Indians, polynesians, Australian aborigines, Norse, Celtic, Indian, African, Chinese, Japanese. It is really an amazing book. And out of all these stories of transformation, because that is what is at the heart of the heroic quest (Campbell says), he has found the cycle of the heroic quest. The Call to Adventure begins the journey, Initiation is undergone, then the return to the world. The book takes this basic journey and divides the images it examines into two great cycles into which all fairy tales,myths, folktales and world religions - which he examines for the stories, the heroic quests embedded within the religions, not as a debate or question of the authenticity of the religion itself - but why we respond to it - into two main cycles, the monomyth cycle, which is the society the individual comes from and brings back the key of transformation back to, and the cosmogonic cycle, which the universal story of creation that world religions are created from. Many of the great stories of how the world was created are examined in this section, and it is fascinating to see how different some are to my western perspective, and how similar others are.

This is a fascinating compendium of myths. There are illustrations, poems, dotting the pages, so we have a visual context. It is not a dry book by any means: "But if we are to grasp the full value of the materials, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream. Their figures originate from the same sources - the unconscious wells of fantasy......And their understood function is to serve as a powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom." Or: "The helpful crone and fairy godmother is a familiar feature of European fairy lore.....What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny."

This book has so full of myth and symbol that it will take several readings to absorb it all fully. It has helped me to understand myths and the role they play and why we need them, better. And that is the crux of this book: we need myths. We need fairy tales. this book explains why, what we get from them, and the dangers for a society when their myths lose meaning, as he says that our western society has been in for most of the 20th century. I think it explains why we need fantasy books and images now; some of our old myths that were cultural no longer resonate the same way because of cultural changes since the Industrial revolution, so we have to go back to the heroic quest and invent - if we can, or reclaim - myths and stories that come from deep in our souls. We need those stories to be told, or we die as a society.

I think this explains why the best fantasy is popular the world over, and why my fairy tales post (where i asked what everyones favorite fairy tale was) remains the most popular post (or the one with the most answers) so far: fairy tales live inside us, and they resonate long after we think we leave such things behind. Because, of course, we never do. The Hero With a Thousand Faces takes a look at why. I think it is a fascinating book, and i highly recommend it for anyone who wants to understand what makes fairy tales and myths work, and why we need them. So when someone scoffs at a dinner party, "why do you read fantasy?" our inner fantasy bookworm can reply coolly: "Tell me your dreams and I'll tell you where you are on your life's journey." At least after reading this book, you will have a good guess at where they fall on their heroic journey!

Now for A Midsummer's Night Dream. I had forgotten I'd read this for university until I began reading it. It suddenly flooded back to me, though I can't remember anything that we discussed back then, I recalled the story. It was a change to read this and not have to worry about taking notes, thinking about papers to discuss on Shakespeare's use of alliteration, verse, or the various couples, etc! It was so enjoyable to just read the play and let my imagination show me the forest scenes,which are so fun. Here is a quote that has some folklore in it (for the challenge):
Act 2, Scene 1:
line 33: Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call'd Robin Goodfellow. Are you not he
That frights the maidens of the villagery,
Skim milk, and sometimes labor in the quern,
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn,
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm,
MIslead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck."

This is the play that is the source of the immortal line : "The course of true love never did run smooth"(Act 1, scene 1, line 134)

Shakespeare also equates the fight between Tatiana and Oberon (the King and Queen of the fairy court) as the reason the spring has become wet and rainy and is ruining the crops: this links the fairy world with nature, with the countryside, and with the weather. Fairies are part of the world that we don't control, but which we are at the mercy at, and this play shows how easily people succumb to fairies: a little flower dust from certain plants is dusted on eyes, and suddenly characters are falling in love madly when they hated each other before! And the Queen of Fairies loves a man who is playing a donkey and becomes half a real one.....there is alot of sly humour in this play, digs at marriage, fidelity, the court, the law, and of course, true love. All the way through it, though there is Duke in the human world, it is the King and Queen of the fairies who have the real power, and the wisdom to recognize love that the Duke at first does not see.

Fun, and magical, and just the right way to end this challenge on the summer solstice. Happy longest day of the year, everyone! May a little good magic come into your life!

And, thank you, Carl for hosting this challenge.