Hidden in Plain Sight
The View From the Cheap Seats Selected Nonfiction By Neil Gaiman William Morrow 544 pp; $33.50
I first discovered Neil Gaiman by way of Rolling Stone’s annual Hot Issue in early 1990: a blurb about The Sandman, which was then, only partway through its 75-issue run, already considered one of the essential works in the comic form. I had a recently renewed interest in superhero comics, but The Sandman was something entirely new — and at the same time, seemingly ageless: a chronicle of Morpheus, aka Dream, one of the Endless ( seven siblings including Death, Destruction, Delirium, Despair, Destiny and Desire).
In the quarter century since that discovery, Gaiman has become a literary icon, with novels like Anansi Boys and The Ocean At the End of the Lane instant bestsellers on release and, more crucially, perennial favourites among readers. His 2001 novel American Gods is being adapted for television, with regular updates from casting making headlines.
Gaiman also seems to be one of our more accessible writers. A longtime blogger, he is a powerful presence on Twitter, so widely followed that a mere tweet from Gaiman can crash a website with traffic. It is something of a circular question: do readers connect with Gaiman’s work because they feel they connected to him personally on social media, or do they connect with his online presence because of how powerfully they are connected to the work?
The great strength of Gaiman’s new book, The View From the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction, is how it plays with that dynamic — the interplay between the personal and the work. The book is a collection of speeches and essays, forewords and introductions and such, spanning more than two decades. While the pieces are disparate, the book has a strangely unified feel, guided by the unforced quality of Gaiman’s voice and the easy way the personal shines through, no matter the ostensible subject matter.
As a result we learn, in a fragmented way, about Gaiman’s life. His is a fractal- ized approach, with patterns and elements repeating themselves, shifting and unfolding over the course of the collection. The volume includes, for example, the 2004 speech Gaiman delivered at the Harvey Awards, “the original prototype” for his celebrated 2012 commencement address, Make Good Art ( also included in this collection).
While some would say it is unwise to draw too direct a line from the writer’s life and influences to their work, The View From the Cheap Seats makes it impossible to do otherwise. The Gaiman that emerges from his nonfiction is reflective, with a clear understanding of where his fiction comes from; tracing, for example, the roots of The Graveyard Book in the stories of Rudyard Kipling, and of Stardust in fairy tales, both traditional tales and stories by the like of Lord Dunsany and Hope Mirrlees.
It’s additionally pleasurable to find those connections Gaiman doesn’t quite make himself. While he writes, for example, about how GK Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill “hugely informed” the writing of Neverwhere, his essay on Chesterton’s Father Brown detective stories tantalized me with another clue. Written in 1991, while Gaiman was still writing The Sandman, the essay describes “the Chestertonian game of masks,” in which “the detective is the McGuffin, significant by his very insignificance.”
This is perhaps the best one- line description of Morpheus I have ever read.
Given his forthrightness elsewhere, should we assume Gaiman was unaware of the connection, or was he playing coy? We will likely never know, but I love the idea of Gaiman discovering, or revealing, a key aspect of one of his own creations through an exploration of another writer’s.
Despite the connections with his own fiction, The View From the Cheap Seats is more than a curio for Gaiman fans and fanatics. Gaiman is an enthusiast and a devotee, a writer who reads deeply and a reader who writes lovingly. While longtime fans will come away with a deeper understanding of both the man and his work, The View From the Cheap Seats will also serve as a perfect, if slightly askew, introduction to Gaiman and his world, and, more significantly, to an entire body of literature, filtered through his unique perspective.