For the last year or so I have been making my way through Neil Gaiman’s library of works.
I have explored the hidden realm of Neverwhere, trekked through the fairy tale world of Stardust, sifted through the bewildering theological milieu of American Gods, gone through the door with Coraline, and am currently well on the way to finishing Anansi Boys. In the process, I’ve added another author to my list of favorites and a lot more books to my reading list.
Neil Gaiman has a wonderfully overactive imagination that concocts vivid fantasy worlds that are often just barely separated from our own; he frequently writes about and captures worlds that exist just beneath the visible surface of our own world, populated with fantastic, colorful characters that exist in the oblivion of ordinary people whose ordinary lives keep them too busy to notice. He also writes with a wonderfully dark, dry sense of humor that’s only ever possible or effective when attempted by a British person.
Gaiman’s fantasies are particularly engrossing because of what they reveal. They make us confront things that we’d rather not think about — shortcomings and insecurities both personal and societal, the ugly and lazy and selfish aspects of life and relationships. At the same time, he revels in the joys of living, loving, and learning, despite the difficulties present in all of those things. Although he is clearly not writing from a Christian perspective and some of his stories (or even merely elements in them) are critical of the Christian faith, there is much that we can glean from what he has to say.
The very excellent blog Filmwell has recently posted a two-part series by Jeffrey Overstreet that examines the movie adaptations of Coraline and MirrorMask — the ups and downs of both stories, the correlations between the two, how they relate to similar classic stories, and what we can take away from them. It’s an excellent series and worth checking out.
How I do love Neil Gaiman’s writing… let me count the ways.
I’ve come to a sad point now where I’ve read the majority of books he’s written and if I’m not careful, there won’t be anything left for me to enjoy. Have you started reading the Sandman series yet?
Gaiman is awesome. I got to see him last spring at a writing conference. He is brilliant in person, too, unlike some writers that are terribly in-eloquent as speakers (myself).
Stardust blew me away when I was a freshman in high school. I loved it from the beginning. Then I went on to read Neverwhere. I started to read the Sandman series, but then stopped. Even for a graphic novel, it is incredibly graphic, not only in violence (which is usually expected. Check out the Beowulf graphic novel–it’s pretty sweet), but also in sexuality. I’m pretty sure I threw up a little in my mouth. And I went to public school
As always, you have to take everything you read, non-Christian and Christian, with a grain of salt. Gaiman is an excellent writer who crafts unbelievably believable worlds, but he is also an immoral, fallen person like the rest of us. Sometimes it comes through in his writings.