‘Things but I’m
Neil Gaiman is having one of his books adapted by the National Theatre, another by Netflix. It’s a ‘weird, lovely place’ to be, he tells Dominic Maxwell.
NEIL GAIMAN is halfway through telling me about raging success and Twitter rage, inspiration and introversion, when his phone buzzes. He apologises, but takes it; he has an appointment straight after this interview in the offices of the National Theatre and an urgent American voice can soon be heard through his mobile, dishing out instructions.
Gaiman, a simultaneously youthful and grizzled 59, is here to do his bit for the stage version of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, his semiautobiographical novel from 2013. It is already a success, with tickets all but sold out. This, as we’ll find out, appears to be the way of things for a fantasy author who has sold more than 50 million books.
And, as he touches on briefly – although it’s quite rare for Gaiman to touch on anything too briefly, speaking as he does with the languid yet exploratory air of a lifelong storyteller – he has so much else going on too. He is working on a bigbudget Netflix version of The Sandman, the 75-part monthly comic with which he made his name in the early 90s. He spent the past few years writing and supervising the television version of his and Terry Pratchett’s 1990 novel Good Omens. Its success streaming on Amazon Prime since May has made it ‘‘a global phenomenon’’, he says. And if Amazon’s secrecy over its data means that you might not know it was that successful, he suspects it will have more of a buzz about it in Britain when it shows on BBC Two next year.
Pretty good, eh? Turns out that’s just for starters. Next year he has a new book for young children, Pirate Stew, illustrated by the former UK children’s laureate Chris Riddell, coming out. He has a deal with the Jim Henson Company, one of several projects that – he apologises again – he’s not supposed to talk about. He lives in Woodstock, New York, with his second wife, the American rock singer Amanda Palmer, and their four-yearold son, Ash, although she has been on tour recently and he has been working away from home so much that he has spent more time in hotels and Airbnbs. With this sort of lifestyle, you can’t help feeling that having urgent American voices in his ear is nothing new for Gaiman.
A while later he’s telling me about the origins of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a retelling of his childhood in West Sussex mixed with lurches into a parallel fantasy realm. The phone buzzes again. The voice on the phone is concerned he can’t make the brief journey across the Thames to Charing Cross station. Gaiman assures her he can. Is this the sort of mollycoddling you get when you’re a global brand? Not exactly, it turns out. Gaiman is going to see his friend Ruby Wax perform in Gravesend in Kent that night. Wax wants to be sure he makes it and is escorting him there. The urgent American voice is Wax’s. ‘‘I am being bossed around . . . amusingly,’’ Gaiman says with a smile.
If life at the top is always as jammed as this, you can see why he is thrilled by it and slightly suspicious of how much time it leaves him to write, let alone daydream. A couple of days before, Palmer got in hot water on Twitter for a) being overly keen to get a review or b) just plain harassing a commissioning editor on The Guardian’s arts pages, depending on how you look at it. The commissioning editor suggested that Palmer had crossed the line and had inspired some of her 1.1 million Twitter followers to follow suit.
Gaiman, who has 2.7 million followers, looked at