YHB is getting behind again on these Book Reports. Keeping up is difficult, and requires less reading and more blogging; if I spend enough time on these book reports, I won’t be able to do much more reading, and I’ll really catch up. Of course, I’m now reading a massive John Barth, not as a deliberate traffic calming device, but because I like John Barth. And my serious book is a short but dense academic treatise on spectacle and politics. So perhaps slower reading will solve the backlog on its own.
Anyway, one of the quicker reads was my third time through Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman’s, um, concurrent novelization of his teleplay? When I first read it, not knowing there was a film, I had the sense that he was thinking about it as a film. Something about it read like a movie. At the end, I read the note that indicated that it was, in fact, a movie. I’ve never been very clear whether Mr. Gaiman wrote the book during the filming, or before, or after; there are a few places where the scenes diverge, but the two are actually very close (although, as noted earlier, there is necessarily much more in and to a novel). I decided, on reflection, that I would probably like the movie better; having seen the movie, I decided I liked the book better. On reading it the third time through, I find I can barely remember the look of the movie or the voices of the actors (except for some reason the Angel Islington, if only because he didn’t marry the Vicar of Dibley, which goes to show). The book still has arresting visual images such as the Marquis’ corpse at the market that I find myself mentally framing as if they were shot on film, despite having actually seen them on film, and not remembering them.
OK, then. Alice falls into Wonderland and is an ordinary little girl in a fantastic world. Harry Potter discovers Hogwarts and immediately becomes powerful beyond imagining. Well, close to the borders of imagining, anyway. RichardRichardMayhewDick is more like Alice (or Dorothy) than Harry (or Ozma). The only extraordinary thing about him is his perseverance, his inability to stop. He has no special powers; both his really heroic acts come about because of his stubbornness, or his refusal to stop when continuing is clearly pointless. He doesn’t have the inhuman abilities of Door, or the Mssrs. Croup and Valdemar, or Lamia, or Hunter, or even the Marquis. He just doesn’t know when to stop.
It’s a thing I’ve found frustrating about the Harry Potter books, although Ms. Rowling has handled it reasonably well. I prefer Dorothy to Ozma, and I like Dick Francis books. Perhaps that’s why I like Stardust best of all Neil Gaiman’s novels; I hadn’t thought of it just now, but that has the most likeable (if dim) everyman.
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-Vardibidian.