Neil Gaiman's Black and White World.

Oh, you suave devil.Ah, Neil Gaiman: child prodigy of the comics world, cuddly, artfully tousled millionaire, open relationship renegade and Registered Trademark owner of the intriguing Byronic jacket photo.

I’ve read one of his novels for adults (American Gods), two of his children’s books (Coraline, The Graveyard Book), one volume of The Sandman, some short stories, and the book he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett (Good Omens).

And here’s the thing, I didn’t really believe any of it.

By which I mean to say, I’m not sure how much he means it. Pick up any of his books, and you can tell right away that he loves genre and he knows his stuff. But in what I’ve read, there seems to be almost no interest in deconstructing or interrogating the ontological mechanism of the genre. All the energy goes into rearranging the interchangeable counters of character or trope to create dazzling new patterns, like a magician fascinated by his own sleight of hand.

This gets my goat a bit, because he purports to be dark, and yet he most of the time he seems to be dealing in the most anodyne black and white juxtapositions. There is far less interest in unravelling the complexity of life than the aesthetic effect of deploying the stereotypical figures. It is a pure, abstracted exercise in storytelling. 

Is this a bad thing? Certainly, my tone would imply I disapprove. But why is it bad to focus on this rearrangement of tropes and types? Aren’t those self-same tropes and types useful, the very basis of most storytelling? The answer is yes, of course they are. Moreover, anyone who’s read this blog knows I love the idea of heroes. I love the convenience with which they tap straight into our story centres, our anthropological craving for fireside tales. 

The problem is that nothing appears to be at stake. None of this stuff scares him.

Personally, I think something needs to be at stake every time you write something. I think you need to be a little scared every time you sit down before a blank screen or page because you don’t know what you’ll reveal, or, indeed, if anything will come out at all. If that isn’t happening, then logically you’re heading for a solipsistic cul-de-sac in which, to repurpose a bit of Yeats, the centre cannot hold.

This is my fear with Gaiman. This is why I put down Neverwhere after a few pages and one too many puns on the names of Tube stations: that sneaking suspicion that Gaiman is the authorial equivalent of Russell Brand, the pantomime goth, playing at shadows.