Nightmares Should Be Heard, Not Seen

Okay, so I’m a year late on this one.

While hunting for something with which to ameliorate the tedium of jury duty, I discovered a) that the BBC had done a full radio dramatization of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and b) that it was available on iTunes. It was a joyful discovery on at least three counts.

First, it is beautiful in and of itself: as marvelous a cast as one could hope for (seriously, look at that cast), performing a well-paced and graceful adaptation by Dirk Maggs. In a list of worthy contenders, this may be my favorite James McAvoy performance. His Richard is at once ordinary and unique, frustrating and charming, flawed and glorious - in a word, real. And though he sets the bar very high, none of the others falls short.

Second, having road-tested it, I highly recommend it for jury duty (but be prepared to restrain the urge to laugh out loud).

Third, it met a need I had begun to despair of filling. While I am often wary when a book I love is put on film, I generally want to see the result. Even if the adaptation is profoundly unsatisfactory, it can send me back to the book with a new perspective, if only by making me articulate more clearly why a particular choice was wrong. And even in an unsatisfactory adaptation, one can find treasure. For all the faults of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit (or, “Are we there and back again yet?”), it has given us Martin Freeman’s Bilbo.

But while I knew that there was a miniseries of Neverwhere - and knew that, in fact, the miniseries was the story’s original form - I didn’t want to see it. I’d read mixed reviews, but the aversion was more fundamental. I felt, in some way, that film was not the right medium for this story.

London Below is a collection of fragments, conjured in glimpses. Having the whole picture would diminish both the terror and the wonder, and that’s not just because the picture might be inadequate or not conform to the one I had formed. Richard spends most of the story metaphorically (and often physically) in the dark, and that impression is made stronger when we, as the audience, have only sound to guide us. Take the Night’s Bridge sequence: no visual medium could so completely isolate us in the darkness, with the nightmares waiting on all sides.

But of course sound, too, has its limitations. Lost here, for example, is the brief and beautiful passage about de Carabas’ fear of sleep. And radio requires more words to explain the ending, thus losing the novel’s exquisite simplicity.

The whole question of adaptation - of translating to different media, and what’s gained and what’s lost - gets at the limits of subcreation. The story is always bigger than any of our attempts to tell it. Yes, some versions will be better than others, but I don’t always want to have to choose. Take, if you will, Gaiman’s passage introducing Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar:

“There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar’s eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelry; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike.”

Now, that passage only belongs in a book. It has no place in radio. What you get in radio are Anthony Head and David Schofield. Who are utterly perfect, every bit as laugh-out-loud funny and breath-catchingly horrible as you want them to be.

And that’s the problem: I want both. I am still savoring Gaiman’s prose AND I am still chuckling over Head’s reading of “The corpses-to-be have a point, Mr. Vandemar.” They are both part of the story, but they can’t coexist in any medium we could use to tell the story.

And for all I have said about the superiority of radio over film in this case, even radio and novel combined are still incomplete. There is at least one thing I want to see. At the very end, I want to see that open door.

The pain we get from beauty is always the pain of desire. Nothing we can create is ever perfect, and somehow, the closer it gets to perfection, the more aware we are of the gap that remains. That gap is as frightening (to me, at least) as the gap that nearly ensnares Richard.

I’m starting to think of Heaven as the place where we get the whole story - not just one telling of it. Until then, I guess we have to “Mind the gap.”