Phew! After two world wars and the Holocaust – not to mention one of the angriest men to get on a playing field – I was happy to find lighter reading: two novels of fantasy. Both have enormous popular and critical followings, and both bridge the popular and literary genres. They like killing off characters who sometimes aren’t nearly as dead as they appear to be - sometimes. They have something else in common.
Television and film are not the only areas happy to trade on past glories, remaking classics and relabelling old material and presenting it to us as new. They are all after money and a market and the easiest way to sell something is to sell something the buyer already knows and likes and wants more of. And it’s a lot easier than thinking of something new.
However, literature is not immune from this concept. For a while there, it looked as if we were under attack from the League of Living Dead Writers. Virginia Andrews would not lie down, Alistair McLean kept publishing, and Desmond Bagley apparently took his typewriter to the grave, sending his agents new manuscripts. Closer inspection of the covers of these would reveal other authors “from an idea by” or “based on the characters of”. To be honest, I’m not sure how many ideas Virginia Andrews had before she died but they seemed to be awfully similar. And these were all genre writers and one could argue how distinctive they were in the first place. Still, one is tempted to brand all this as somewhat cynical.
Douglas Adams however seems a different case. A beloved writer, almost to the point of cult worship in some cases, he had a distinctive voice and worldview. It would seem almost blasphemous to attempt to write more of his material, yet it was his widow Jane Belsen who let Eoin Colfer do just that. In 2009, he released ...and another thing, the sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy.
Adams’ last book Mostly Harmless was in his own estimation a bitter and dark book, written during a bitter and dark period of his life. He killed off everyone of his beloved characters. And he often said he wanted to write a sixth book, but his early death circumvented that. So on the 30th anniversary of the publication of his first novel, Colfer’s addition was published, as a commemoration and celebration. There is no attempt to fool us even briefly that this is Adam’s work. The title and the author’s name are the largest print on the cover by far. The series and Adam’s name appear at the top of the dust jacket. It is Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series, writing a story using Douglas’ characters.
This was a big risk for the Belsen and Colfer. If it failed, they would look at best ridiculous, at worst greedy and cynical. Happily, it does not fail. (I’ve no idea how well it sold.) It comes across as a solid Adams book, laugh out loud in parts, but perhaps lacking those moments that Adams could do. Like his hero Lewis Carroll, Adams would include throw-away jokes or stories that would suddenly suggest enormous ideas about life, the universe, and well, everything. But it’s great to be back with Dentarthurdent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Breeblebox, and Trillian. To add a cherry to the cake, the god Thor appears, but sadly, Marvin the Paranoid Android does not. The book has an open ending with Arthur seeing familiar yellow ship appear in the sky. This is of course where we came in, and I suspect this is where we say goodbye – for the last time.
Neil Gaiman is far from dead – I hope. But he is also a man who likes to recycle and revisit old stories and old characters, his own as well as myth, legend and fairy tale, and fashion something new from it. His novel Neverwhere is based on the TV series he wrote for the BBC, which was televised in 1996, the same year the book was published. I have not seen the series, but I am assured the book contains much that was cut from the series for time, budget and other considerations. I often find that stories are best encountered in the format the creator first envisioned for it ie the novel is better than the movie, unless the movie came first in which case the novel is dire. Gaiman seems to have been writing the novel and series concurrently so each is the original version – a situation that seems appropriate to the author.
Neverwhere is story of a man who falls through an act of kindness into London Below, a mysterious world with odd parallels and enormous differences to the city above. There are black friars under Blackfriars, an Earl and a Raven in their respective courts, an angel named Islington, and more. We meet some of these characters, others we only hear of, but it is a world that is magical, frightening, both alluring and forbidding. And our hero, with a dream of being killed by a great beast, may or may not survive to return to his safe life in London Above.
I love Gaiman’s writing, and this book lived up to my expectations. I read it in hours. It doesn’t have the scope of his later novel, American Gods, but has the imaginative dazzle of Gaiman’s best work. It’s also had another life as a graphic novel, adapted by another writer. I preferred the book. None of the pictures from the TV or the comic have lived up to the ones in my head. I guess that’s why we keep returning to words, words, words.
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