Reading Neil Gaiman on Airplanes, and Other Things That Make Sense

A Note For The Reader:

The following blog entry is somewhat unconventional in format. While the reader should rest assured it has many of the features commonly associated with the blogular tradition (double-spaced paragraphs, sans serif font, a lack of qualitative standards, etcetera), this blog entry is unusual in that it has a preface. The post itself was written by Samuel “Sammy” Leo. The author of the preface is Sammy “Samuel” Leo (no relation), altogether a blunter, coarser, and generally more vile specimen than his colleague. “Samuel” (not “Sammy”) is also known for being very liberal with the truth. Frankly, the preface should not exist, and in a better world it would not. But, as this is not a better world, read on.

--Samuel Sammy “Sam” Leo, Editor

Preface

I first met Neil Gaiman in 2011, when Terry Pratchett introduced the two of us by co-writing Good Omens. I’d met Terry through the adventures of Tiffany Aching, a young witch who walked through Fairyland and hit things with a frying pan. I trusted him to tell a good story. I didn’t know the curly-haired, leather jacket-wearing, vaguely junkie-looking man who stood on the inside of the back cover, grinning the grin of someone who’s taking a picture with Terry Pratchett, taller than Terry to a degree that was frankly disrespectful. I didn’t know him, and I didn’t trust him. I loved the book, but I assumed that because Terry Pratchett had written some of this book and not all of it, the quality must have been compromised. It is my great shame that for years, I thought of Neil Gaiman only as someone who had interrupted Terry Pratchett’s creative process.

Terry noticed this attitude and took me aside one day to have a quick word.

“Listen,” he said. “I understand that I’m your favorite author. How could I not be? I’m fecking fantastic. Before me, high fantasy was as self-aware as a turnip that drinks heavily at social occasions. But you must stop thrashing Neil like this. It upsets him. He has a very delicate character.”

I began to protest, but he shushed me. “Here,” he said, enfolding to my hand a green paperback called Neverwhere. “Trust me.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll give it a try. But you owe me.”

“No I bloody don’t,” said Terry. “I’m a figment of your own overactive imagination.” Anyway, I read Neverwhere, and you know what? The old bastard was right about his friend Neil. The bugger knows a thing or two. It must be something in the banana daiquiris.

--Sammy “Samuel” Leo, March 2019, Under Your Bed.

Reading Neil Gaiman on Airplanes, and Other Things That Make Sense

The Isle of Skye is a deeply strange and wonderful place.

I am on a bus, and I have been on a bus for a while. It’s me, a young Moldovan woman named Tanya who lent me her phone charger when my plug adapter refused to function, three or four teenagers who look like they’re gigging, and roughly nine hundred Scottish pensioners. People get up for to leave long before the bus has stopped, and the driver (who, it’s worth mentioning, is well on his way to a pension of his own) does not stop gently. Every ten minutes or so, someone requests a stop, gets up, gets flung to the floor, mutters “feck”, thanks the driver, and shoots off to the wild blue yonder.

The island is huge, rising up around me, and it looks like the raw firmament of worlds. High, arcing, craggy hills that are too small and too steep to be mountains, that could not possibly hold forests; rivers and waterfalls through old druidic structures; a row of seafront houses, bright pink and yellow, reflecting off the dark glass of the water as foothills filled with cottages and sheep rose behind them. As we drive it gets very dark. There is essentially no artificial light on the island, just the occasional lonely-looking hotel and the floor lights on the bus.

I am here because of Neil Gaiman. I would never have heard of Skye if not for the fact that reading his blog (journal.neilgaiman.com) was a great comfort to me in my more trying teenage years. When it seemed like daily life was without purpose, was nothing but a way of whiling the hours separating me and a depressingly inevitable death, Neil Gaiman was there, writing of missed planes and beloved children and bees and cats and dogs and death and truth and Amanda Palmer and scrotums (yes). It didn’t matter what he was writing about. The way he talked about things, the instinct that went into the structure of his sentences and paragraphs, somehow made everything better. For me, his online journals are in the same tradition as Mark Twain and William Gibson’s columns, or Tycho Brahe’s comic scripts: writing that makes everything it writes about good.

One day, scrolling through the archives, I found a tag for “Skye”, and I saw the pictures for the first time. It looked like the inside of my head, and I knew I had to go there.

This was when I was fifteen or sixteen. I was reading books like some people eat massive calzones: recklessly, breathlessly, finishing in three or four hours and immediately getting a headache afterwards. At this point I had read almost everything Neil had written and published, save a few one-off comics that were (and are) hard to track down. I loved his prose, the deceptively limpid word choices and subtle implications that formed perfect little worlds in my head, purple and violet and blue, fragile and perfect as eggshells. I had been saving American Gods, because I knew it was the longest and, according to some, the best book he’d ever written. A treat. One day I couldn’t wait anymore, and I checked it out of the library and started reading.

I wasn’t ready. I could tell from the first chapter that the people were too cynical, the prose too harsh for a boy who was trying to find sincere people and trust in the world’s kindness. There was too much darkness already in my mind to allow such an adult book in. American Gods was not yet for me. I decided to wait.

I don’t remember the exact day I linked the two Neil-quests of voyaging to Skye and reading his magnum opus; but somehow the idea formed that I would fly to the UK on my gap year, and I would spend the flight reading hard, pausing only to eat and use the bathroom. But it seemed like the ideal way to honor my favorite author. I make this voyage in the name of Gaiman...

In retrospect, it’s probably a good thing Neil stopped signing before I started reading him, or I would’ve found a way to meet him, and I would’ve made an even bigger fool of myself than when I met Art Spiegelman. I was way into these books.

Yesterday, I boarded FinnAir flight number 5438, nonstop to London Heathrow, and I did what I’d been waiting three years to do.

It’s a good book. It’s a very good book. Perhaps it is his best, because I don’t hear any of the kindly, rumpled Englishman who says “um” and dispenses good advice like some people spin gold out of straw. The story's takeover of his authorial voice is absolute in a way I haven't encountered elsewhere. The world of American Gods is brutal, explicit, largely unfriendly. Despite its setup as the most mythology-steeped Gaiman fantasy since Sandman, there is almost no magic in the words. The gods themselves lost the magic when they were brought to a country that had no time for them, and now all they have is power, and they don’t even have that most of the time. It’s a strangely dry book, especially compared to such emotional powerhouses asThe Ocean At The End Of The Lane and Fragile Things.

It’s not what I expected, and the great thing is, that’s okay. I’m no longer the sixteen-year-old who needs everything to be just so, or else no fun will be had. The book doesn’t have to be the Marvelous Adventures of Shadow Moon, God-In-Training (even though sometimes it is), and the airplane food doesn’t have to be good. All that matters is there is a trip, and an island, and a good book by a good author. The rest will take care of itself.

P.S. I go back and forth between Not Lonely At All and the Most Lonely Ever. That part of the trip isn’t fun. I hope it goes away.